The White Tiger: A Novel Page 3

  The Buffalo was greediest of the lot. He had eaten up the rickshaws and the roads. So if you ran a rickshaw, or used the road, you had to pay him his feed—one-third of whatever you earned, no less.

  All four of the Animals lived in high-walled mansions just outside Laxmangarh—the landlords’ quarters. They had their own temples inside the mansions, and their own wells and ponds, and did not need to come out into the village except to feed. Once upon a time, the children of the four Animals went around town in their own cars; Kusum remembered those days. But after the Buffalo’s son had been kidnapped by the Naxals—perhaps you’ve heard about them, Mr. Jiabao, since they’re Communists, just like you, and go around shooting rich people on principle—the four Animals had sent their sons and daughters away, to Dhanbad or to Delhi.

  Their children were gone, but the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on. So the rest of the village left Laxmangarh for food. Each year, all the men in the village waited in a big group outside the tea shop. When the buses came, they got on—packing the inside, hanging from the railings, climbing onto the roofs—and went to Gaya; there they went to the station and rushed into the trains—packing the inside, hanging from the railings, climbing onto the roofs—and went to Delhi, Calcutta, and Dhanbad to find work.

  A month before the rains, the men came back from Dhanbad and Delhi and Calcutta, leaner, darker, angrier, but with money in their pockets. The women were waiting for them. They hid behind the door, and as soon as the men walked in, they pounced, like wildcats on a slab of flesh. There was fighting and wailing and shrieking. My uncles would resist, and managed to keep some of their money, but my father got peeled and skinned every time. “I survived the city, but I couldn’t survive the women in my home,” he would say, sunk into a corner of the room. The women would feed him after they fed the buffalo.

  I would come to him, and play around with him, by climbing his back, and passing my palm over his forehead—over his eyes—over his nose—and down to his neck, to the little depression at the pit of his neck. I would let my finger linger there—it still is my favorite part of the human body.

  A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

  My uncles also did backbreaking work, but they did what everyone else did. Each year, as soon as it began raining, they would go out to the fields with blackened sickles, begging one landlord or the other for some work. Then they cast seed, cut weeds, and harvested corn and paddy. My father could have worked with them; he could have worked with the landlords’ mud, but he chose not to.

  He chose to fight it.

  Now, since I doubt that you have rickshaw-pullers in China—or in any other civilized nation on earth—you will have to see one for yourself. Rickshaws are not allowed inside the posh parts of Delhi, where foreigners might see them and gape. Insist on going to Old Delhi, or Nizamuddin—there you’ll see the road full of them—thin, sticklike men, leaning forward from the seat of a bicycle, as they pedal along a carriage bearing a pyramid of middle-class flesh—some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.

  And when you see these stick-men, think of my father.

  Rickshaw-puller he may have been—a human beast of burden—but my father was a man with a plan.

  I was his plan.

  One day he lost his temper at home and began yelling at the women. This was the day they told him that I had not been going to class. He did something he had never dared do before—he yelled at Kusum:

  “How many times have I told you: Munna must read and write!”

  Kusum was startled, but only for a moment. She yelled back:

  “This fellow came running back from school—don’t blame me! He’s a coward, and he eats too much. Put him to work in the tea shop and let him make some money.”

  My aunts and cousin-sisters gathered around her. I crawled behind my father’s back as they told him the story of my cowardice.

  Now, you may find it incredible that a boy in a village would be frightened of a lizard. Rats, snakes, monkeys, and mongooses don’t bother me at all. On the contrary—I love animals. But lizards…each time I see one, no matter how tiny, it’s as if I turn into a girl. My blood freezes.

  There was a giant cupboard in my classroom, whose door was always slightly ajar—no one knew what it was there for. One morning, the door creaked open, and a lizard jumped out.

  It was light green in color, like a half-ripe guava. Its tongue flicked in and out of its mouth. It was at least two feet long.

  The other boys barely noticed. Until someone saw my face. They gathered in a circle around me.

  Two of them pinned my hands behind my back and held my head still. Someone caught the thing in his hands, and began walking toward me with slow, exaggerated steps. Making no noise—only flicking its red tongue in and out of its mouth—the lizard came closer and closer to my face. The laughter grew louder. I couldn’t make a noise. The teacher was snoring at his desk behind me. The lizard’s face came right up to my face; and then it opened its light green mouth, and then I fainted for the second time in my life.

  I had not gone back to school since that day.

  My father did not laugh when he heard the story. He took a deep breath; I felt his chest expanding against me.

  “You let Kishan drop out of school, but I told you this fellow had to stay in school. His mother told me he’d be the one who made it through school. His mother said—”

  “Oh, to hell with his mother!” Kusum shouted. “She was a crazy one, and she’s dead, and thank goodness. Now listen to me: let the boy go to the tea shop like Kishan, that’s what I say.”

  The next day my father came with me to my school, for the first and last time. It was dawn; the place was empty. We pushed the door open. A dim blue light filled the classroom. Now, our schoolteacher was a big paan-and-spit man—and his expectorate made a sort of low, red wallpaper on three walls around us. When he went to sleep, which he usually did by noon, we stole paan from his pockets; distributed it amongst ourselves and chewed on it; and then, imitating his spitting style—hands on hips, back arched slightly—took turns spitting at the three dirty walls.

  A faded mural of the Lord Buddha surrounded by deer and squirrels decorated the fourth wall—it was the only wall that the teacher spared. The giant lizard the color of a half-ripe guava was sitting in front of this wall, pretending to be one of the animals at the feet of the Lord Buddha.

  It turned its head to us; I saw its eyes shine.

  “Is this the monster?”

  The lizard turned its head this way and that, looking for an exit. Then it began banging the wall. It was no different from me; it was terrified.

  “Don’t kill it, Daddy—just throw it out the window, please?”

  The teacher was lying in one corner of the room, reeking of booze, snoring soundly. Near him was the pot of toddy he had emptied the previous night—my father picked it up.

  The lizard ran, and he ran behind it, swinging the pot of toddy at it.

  “Don’t kill it, Daddy—please!”

  But he wouldn’t listen. He kicked the cupboard, and the lizard darted out, and he chased it again, smashing everything in his way, and yelling, “Heeyaa! Heeyaa!” He pounded it with the pot of toddy until the pot broke. He smashed its neck with his fist. He stamped on its head.

  The air became acrid: a stench of crushed flesh. He picked the dead lizard up and flung it out the door.

  My father sat panting against the mural of the Lord Buddha surrounded by the gentle animals.


  When he caught his breath, he said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine—at least one—should live like a man.”

  What it meant to live like a man was a mystery. I thought it meant being like Vijay, the bus conductor. The bus stopped for half an hour at Laxmangarh, and the passengers got off, and the conductor got down to have a cup of tea. Now, he was a man all of us who worked in that tea shop looked up to. We admired his bus-company-issue khaki uniform, his silver whistle and the red cord from which it hung down from his pocket. Everything about him said: he had made it in life.

  Vijay’s family were pigherds, which meant they were the lowest of the low, yet he had made it up in life. Somehow he had befriended a politician. People said he had let the politician dip his beak in his backside. Whatever he had to do, he had done: he was the first entrepreneur I knew of. Now he had a job, and a silver whistle, and when he blew it—just as the bus was leaving—all the boys in the village went crazy and ran after the bus, and banged on its sides, and begged to be taken along too. I wanted to be like Vijay—with a uniform, a paycheck, a shiny whistle with a piercing sound, and people looking at me with eyes that said, How important he looks.

  Two a.m. already, Mr. Premier. I’ll have to stop for tonight fairly soon. Let me put my finger on the laptop screen, and see if there is any other useful information here.

  Leaving out a few inessential details…

  …in the Dhaula Kuan area of New Delhi, on the night of September 2, near the ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel…

  Now, this hotel, the Sheraton, is the finest in Delhi—I’ve never been inside, but my ex-boss, Mr. Ashok, used to do all his late-night drinking there. There’s a restaurant in the basement that’s supposed to be very good. You should visit it if you get the chance.

  The missing man was employed as driver of a Honda City vehicle at the time of the alleged incident. In this regard a case, FIR No. 438/05, P. S. Dhaula Kuan, Delhi, has been registered. He is also believed to be in possession of a bag filled with a certain quantity of cash.

  Red bag, they should have said. Without the color, the information is all but useless, isn’t it? No wonder I was never spotted.

  Certain quantity of cash. Open any newspaper in this country, and it’s always this crap: “A certain interested party has been spreading rumors,” or “A certain religious community doesn’t believe in contraception.” I hate that.

  Seven hundred thousand rupees.

  That was how much cash was stuffed into the red bag. And trust me, the police knew it too. How much this is in Chinese money, I don’t know, Mr. Jiabao. But it buys ten silver Macintosh laptops from Singapore.

  There’s no mention of my school in the poster, sir—that’s a real shame. You always ought to talk about a man’s education when describing him. They should have said something like, The suspect was educated in a school with two-foot-long lizards the color of half-ripe guavas hiding in its cupboards…

  If the Indian village is a paradise, then the school is a paradise within a paradise.

  There was supposed to be free food at my school—a government program gave every boy three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at lunchtime. But we never ever saw rotis, or yellow daal, or pickles, and everyone knew why: the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money.

  The teacher had a legitimate excuse to steal the money—he said he hadn’t been paid his salary in six months. He was going to undertake a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages—he was going to do nothing in class until his paycheck arrived in the mail. Yet he was terrified of losing his job, because though the pay of any government job in India is poor, the incidental advantages are numerous. Once, a truck came into the school with uniforms that the government had sent for us; we never saw them, but a week later they turned up for sale in the neighboring village.

  No one blamed the schoolteacher for doing this. You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet. Every man in the village knew that he would have done the same in his position. Some were even proud of him, for having got away with it so cleanly.

  One morning a man wearing the finest suit I had seen in my life, a blue safari suit that looked even more impressive than a bus conductor’s uniform, came walking down the road that led to my school. We gathered at the door to stare at his suit. He had a cane in his hand, which he began swishing when he saw us at the door. We rushed back into the class and sat down with our books.

  This was a surprise inspection.

  The man in the blue safari suit—the inspector—pointed his cane at holes in the wall, or the red discolorations, while the teacher cowered by his side and said, “Sorry sir, sorry sir.”

  “There is no duster in this class; there are no chairs; there are no uniforms for the boys. How much money have you stolen from the school funds, you sister-fucker?”

  The inspector wrote four sentences on the board and pointed his cane at a boy:

  “Read.”

  One boy after the other stood up and blinked at the wall.

  “Try Balram, sir,” the teacher said. “He’s the smartest of the lot. He reads well.”

  So I stood up, and read, “We live in a glorious land. The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land. The River Ganga gives life to our plants and our animals and our people. We are grateful to God that we were born in this land.”

  “Good,” the inspector said. “And who was the Lord Buddha?”

  “An enlightened man.”

  “An enlightened god.”

  (Oops! Thirty-six million and five—!)

  The inspector made me write my name on the blackboard; then he showed me his wristwatch and asked me to read the time. He took out his wallet, removed a small photo, and asked me, “Who is this man, who is the most important man in all our lives?”

  The photo was of a plump man with spiky white hair and chubby cheeks, wearing thick earrings of gold; the face glowed with intelligence and kindness.

  “He’s the Great Socialist.”

  “Good. And what is the Great Socialist’s message for little children?”

  I had seen the answer on the wall outside the temple: a policeman had written it one day in red paint.

  “Any boy in any village can grow up to become the prime minister of India. That is his message to little children all over this land.”

  The inspector pointed his cane straight at me. “You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation?”

  I thought about it and said:

  “The white tiger.”

  “That’s what you are, in this jungle.”

  Before he left, the inspector said, “I’ll write to Patna asking them to send you a scholarship. You need to go to a real school—somewhere far away from here. You need a real uniform, and a real education.”

  He had a parting gift for me—a book. I remember the title very well: Lessons for Young Boys from the Life of Mahatma Gandhi.

  So that’s how I became the White Tiger. There will be a fourth and a fifth name too, but that’s late in the story.

  Now, being praised by the school inspector in front of my teacher and fellow students, being called a “White Tiger,” being given a book, and being promised a scholarship: all this constituted good news, and the one infallible law of life in the Darkness is that good news becomes bad news—and soon.

  My cousin-sister Reena got hitched off to a boy in the next village. Because we were the girl’s family, we were screwed. We had to give the boy a new bicycle, and cash, and a silver bracelet, and arrange for a big wedding—which we did. Mr. Premier, you probably know how we Indians enjoy our weddings—I gather that these days people come from other countries to get married Indian-style. Oh, we could have taught those foreigners a thing or two, I tell you! Film songs blasting out from a black tape recorder, and drinking and dancing all night! I got sm
ashed, and so did Kishan, and so did everyone in the family, and for all I know, they probably poured hooch into the water buffalo’s trough.

  Two or three days passed. I was in my classroom, sitting at the back, with the black slate and chalk that my father had brought me from one of his trips to Dhanbad, working on the alphabet on my own. The boys were chatting or fighting. The teacher had passed out.

  Kishan was standing in the doorway of the classroom. He gestured with his fingers.

  “What is it, Kishan? Are we going somewhere?”

  Still he said nothing.

  “Should I bring my book along? And my chalk?”

  “Why not?” he said. And then, with his hand on my head, he led me out.

  The family had taken a big loan from the Stork so they could have a lavish wedding and a lavish dowry for my cousin-sister. Now the Stork had called in his loan. He wanted all the members of the family working for him and he had seen me in school, or his collector had. So they had to hand me over too.

  I was taken to the tea shop. Kishan folded his hands and bowed to the shopkeeper. I bowed to the shopkeeper too.

  “Who’s this?” The shopkeeper squinted at me.

  He was sitting under a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and I knew already that I was going to be in big trouble.

  “My brother,” Kishan said. “He’s come to join me.”

  Then Kishan dragged the oven out from the tea shop and told me to sit down. I sat down next to him. He brought a gunnysack; inside was a huge pile of coals. He took out a coal, smashed it on a brick, and then poured the black chunks into the oven.

  “Harder,” he said, when I hit the coal against the brick. “Harder, harder.”

  Finally I got it right—I broke the coal against the brick. He got up and said, “Now break every last coal in this bag like that.”

  A little later, two boys came around from school to watch me. Then two more boys came; then two more. I heard giggling.