The White Tiger: A Novel Page 4

  “What is the creature that comes along only once in a generation?” one boy asked loudly.

  “The coal breaker,” another replied.

  And then all of them began to laugh.

  “Ignore them,” Kishan said. “They’ll go away on their own.”

  He looked at me.

  “You’re angry with me for taking you out of school, aren’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  “You hate the idea of having to break coals, don’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  He took the largest piece of coal in his hand and squeezed it. “Imagine that each coal is my skull: they will get much easier to break.”

  He’d been taken out of school too. That happened after my cousin-sister Meera’s wedding. That had been a big affair too.

  Working in a tea shop. Smashing coals. Wiping tables. Bad news for me, you say?

  To break the law of his land—to turn bad news into good news—is the entrepreneur’s prerogative.

  Tomorrow, Mr. Jiabao, starting again at midnight I’ll tell you how I gave myself a better education at the tea shop than I could have got at any school. Right now, though, it’s time for me to stop staring at this chandelier and get to work. It is almost three in the morning. This is when Bangalore comes to life. The American workday is coming to an end, and mine is beginning in earnest. I have to be alert as all the call-center girls and boys are leaving their offices for their homes. This is when I must be near the phone.

  I don’t keep a cell phone, for obvious reasons—they corrode a man’s brains, shrink his balls, and dry up his semen, as all of us know—so I have to stay in the office. In case there is a crisis.

  I am the man people call when they have a crisis!

  Let’s see quickly if there’s anything else…

  …any person having any information or clue about this missing man may kindly inform at CBI Web site (http://cbi.nic.in) e-mail ID (diccbi@cbi.nic.in), Fax No. 011-23011334, T No. 011-23014046 (Direct) 011-23015229 and 23015218 Extn. 210 and to the under-signed at the following address or telephone number or numbers given below.

  DP 3687/05

  SHO—Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi

  Tel: 28653200, 27641000

  Set into the text of the notice, a photograph: blurred, blackened, and smudged by the antique printing press of some police office, and barely recognizable even when it was on the wall of the train station, but now, transferred onto the computer screen, reduced to pixels, just an abstract idea of a man’s face: a small creature with large, popped-out eyes and a stubby mustache. He could be half the men in India.

  Mr. Premier, I leave you for tonight with a comment on the shortcomings of police work in India. Now, a busload of men in khaki—it was a sensational case, after all—must have gone to Laxmangarh when investigating my disappearance. They would have questioned the shopkeepers, bullied the rickshaw puller, and woken up the schoolteacher. Did he steal as a child? Did he sleep with whores? They would have smashed up a grocery shop or two, and forced out “confessions” from one or two people.

  Yet I bet you they missed the most important clue of all, which was right in front of them:

  I am talking of the Black Fort, of course.

  I begged Kusum many times to take me to the top of the hill, and through the entranceway, and into the fort. But she said I was a coward, I would die of fright if I went up there: an enormous lizard, the biggest in the whole world, lived in the fort.

  So I could only watch. The long loopholes in its wall turned into lines of burning pink at sunrise and burning gold at sunset; the blue sky shone through the slits in the stone, while the moon shone on the jagged ramparts, and the monkeys ran wild along the walls, shrieking and attacking each other, as if they were the spirits of the dead warriors reincarnated, refighting their final battles.

  I wanted to go up there too.

  Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world—the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten—has written a poem where he says this about slaves:

  They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

  That’s the truest thing anyone ever said.

  A great poet, this fellow Iqbal—even if he was a Muslim.

  (By the way, Mr. Premier: Have you noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.)

  Even as a boy I could see what was beautiful in the world: I was destined not to stay a slave.

  One day Kusum found out about me and the fort. She followed me all the way from our home to the pond with the stones, and saw what I was doing. That night she told my father, “He just stood there gaping at the fort—just the way his mother used to. He is going to come to nothing good in life, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  When I was maybe thirteen I decided to go up to the fort on my own. I waded into the pond, got to the other side, and climbed up the hill; just as I was on the verge of going in, a black thing materialized in the entranceway. I spun around and ran back down the hill, too frightened even to cry.

  It was only a cow. I could see this from a distance, but I was too shaken up to go back.

  I tried many more times, yet I was such a coward that each time I tried to go up, I lost my nerve and came back.

  At the age of twenty-four, when I was living in Dhanbad and working in Mr. Ashok’s service as a chauffeur, I returned to Laxmangarh when my master and his wife went there on an excursion. It was a very important trip for me, and one I hope to describe in greater detail when time permits. For now, all I want to tell you is this: While Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam were relaxing, having eaten lunch, I had nothing to do, so I decided to try again. I swam through the pond, walked up the hill, went into the doorway, and entered the Black Fort for the first time. There wasn’t much around—just some broken walls and a bunch of frightened monkeys watching me from a distance. Putting my foot on the wall, I looked down on the village from there. My little Laxmangarh. I saw the temple tower, the market, the glistening line of sewage, the landlords’ mansions—and my own house, with that dark little cloud outside—the water buffalo. It looked like the most beautiful sight on earth.

  I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction of my village—and then I did something too disgusting to describe to you.

  Well, actually, I spat. Again and again. And then, whistling and humming, I went back down the hill.

  Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.

  The Second Night

  For the Desk of:

  His Excellency Wen Jiabao

  Now probably fast asleep in the

  Premier’s Office

  In China

  From the Desk of:

  His Midnight Educator

  On matters entrepreneurial:

  “The White Tiger”

  Mr. Premier.

  So.

  What does my laughter sound like?

  What do my armpits smell like?

  And when I grin, is it true—as you no doubt imagine by now—that my lips widen into a devil’s rictus?

  Oh, I could go on and on about myself, sir. I could gloat that I am not just any murderer, but one who killed his own employer (who is a kind of second father), and also contributed to the probable death of all his family members. A virtual mass murderer.

  But I don’t want to go on and on about myself. You should hear some of these Bangalore entrepreneurs—my start-up has got this contract with American Express, my start-up runs the software in this hospital in London, blah blah. I hate that whole fucking Bangalore attitude, I tell you.

  (But if you absolutely must find out more about me, just log on to my Web site: www.whitetiger-technologydrivers.com. That’s right! That’s the URL of my start-up!)

&nb
sp; So I’m sick of talking about myself, sir. Tonight, I want to talk about the other important man in my story.

  My ex.

  Mr. Ashok’s face reappears now in my mind’s eye as it used to every day when I was in his service—reflected in my rearview mirror. It was such a handsome face that sometimes I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Picture a six-foot-tall fellow, broad-shouldered, with a landlord’s powerful, punishing forearms; yet always gentle (almost always—except for that time he punched Pinky Madam in the face) and kind to those around him, even his servants and driver.

  Now another face appears, to the side of his, in memory’s mirror. Pinky Madam—his wife. Every bit as good-looking as her husband; just as the image of the goddess in the Birla Hindu Temple in New Delhi is as fair as the god to whom she is married. She would sit in the back, and the two of them would talk, and I would drive them wherever they wanted, as faithfully as the servant-god Hanuman carried about his master and mistress, Ram and Sita.

  Thinking of Mr. Ashok is making me sentimental. I hope I’ve got some paper napkins here somewhere.

  Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

  Now, even though I killed him, you won’t find me saying one bad thing about him. I protected his good name when I was his servant, and now that I am (in a sense) his master, I won’t stop protecting his good name. I owe him so much. He and Pinky Madam would sit in the back of the car, chatting about life, about India, about America—mixing Hindi and English together—and by eavesdropping on them, I learned a lot about life, India, and America—and a bit of English too. (Perhaps a bit more than I’ve let on so far—!) Many of my best ideas are, in fact, borrowed from my ex-employer or his brother or someone else whom I was driving about. (I confess, Mr. Premier: I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener.) True, eventually Mr. Ashok and I had a disagreement or two about an English term—income tax—and things began to sour between us, but that messy stuff comes later on in the story. Right now we’re still on best of terms: we’ve just met, far from Delhi, in the city called Dhanbad.

  I came to Dhanbad after my father’s death. He had been ill for some time, but there is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections. When he began spitting blood that morning, Kishan and I took him by boat across the river. We kept washing his mouth with water from the river, but the water was so polluted that it made him spit more blood.

  There was a rickshaw-puller on the other side of the river who recognized my father; he took the three of us for free to the government hospital.

  There were three black goats sitting on the steps to the large, faded white building; the stench of goat feces wafted out from the open door. The glass in most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring out at us from one cracked window.

  A sign on the gate said:

  LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL

  PROUDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT SOCIALIST

  A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES

  Kishan and I carried our father in, stamping on the goat turds which had spread like a constellation of black stars on the ground. There was no doctor in the hospital. The ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital’s rooms were wide open; the beds had metal springs sticking out of them, and the cat began snarling at us the moment we stepped into the room.

  “It’s not safe in the rooms—that cat has tasted blood.”

  A couple of Muslim men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him and his friend. Kishan and I lowered Father onto the newspaper sheets. We waited there.

  Two little girls came and sat down behind us; both of them had yellow eyes.

  “Jaundice. She gave it to me.”

  “I did not. You gave it to me. And now we’ll both die!”

  An old man with a cotton patch on one eye came and sat down behind the girls.

  The Muslim men kept adding newspapers to the ground, and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds, and delirious mouths kept growing.

  “Why isn’t there a doctor here, uncle?” I asked. “This is the only hospital on either side of the river.”

  “See, it’s like this,” the older Muslim man said. “There’s a government medical superintendent who’s meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he’s having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.”

  “That much!” I said, my mouth opened wide.

  “Why not? There’s good money in public service! Now, imagine that I’m a doctor. I beg and borrow the money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I take an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital.” He raised his feet onto an imaginary table. “Next, I call all the junior government doctors, whom I’m supposed to supervise, into my office. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, ‘Dr. Ram Pandey.’”

  He pointed a finger at me; I assumed my role in the play.

  I saluted him: “Yes, sir!”

  He held out his palm to me.

  “Now, you—Dr. Ram Pandey—will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this.” He made a tick on the imaginary ledger. “You can keep the rest of your government salary and go work in some private hospital for the rest of the week. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you’ve been there. You’ve treated my wounded leg. You’ve healed that girl’s jaundice.”

  “Ah,” the patients said. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they?

  When Kishan put some food into Father’s mouth, he spat it out with blood. His lean black body began to convulse, spewing blood this way and that. The girls with the yellow eyes began to wail. The other patients moved away from my father.

  “He’s got tuberculosis, hasn’t he?” the older Muslim man asked, as he swatted the flies away from the wound in his leg.

  “We don’t know, sir. He’s been coughing for a while, but we didn’t know what it was.”

  “Oh, it’s TB. I’ve seen it before in rickshaw-pullers. They get weak from their work. Well, maybe the doctor will turn up in the evening.”

  He did not. Around six o’clock that day, as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported, my father was permanently cured of his tuberculosis. The ward boys made us clean up after Father before we could remove the body. A goat came in and sniffed as we were mopping the blood off the floor. The ward boys petted her and fed her a plump carrot as we mopped our father’s infected blood off the floor.

  Kishan’s marriage took place a month after the cremation.

  It was one of the good marriages. We had the boy, and we screwed the girl’s family hard. I remember exactly what we got in dowry from the girl’s side, and thinking about it even now makes my mouth fill up with water: five thousand rupees cash, all crisp new unsoiled notes fresh from the bank, plus a Hero bicycle, plus a thick gold necklace for Kishan.

  After the wedding, Kusum Granny took the five thousand rupees and the Hero cycle and the thick gold necklace; Kishan got two weeks to dip his beak into his wife, and then he was packed off to Dhanbad. My cousin Dilip and I came along with him. We three found work in a tea shop in Dhanbad—the owner had heard good things about Kishan’s work at the te
a shop in Laxmangarh.

  Luckily for us, he hadn’t heard anything about me.

  Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop—men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still “boys.” But that is your fate if you do your job well—with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

  I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity—and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.

  Instead of wiping out spots from tables and crushing coals for the oven, I used my time at the tea shop in Laxmangarh to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. I decided that this was how I would keep my education going forward—that’s the one good thing I’ll say for myself. I’ve always been a big believer in education—especially my own.

  The owner of the shop sat up at the front, below the big photo of Gandhi, stirring a slow-boiling broth of sugar syrup. He knew what I was up to! Whenever he saw me loafing around a table or pretending to be doing a spot of wiping just so I could hear more of a conversation, he would shout, “You thug!” then jump down from his seat, chase me around the tea shop with the ladle he had been using to stir the sugar, and whack me on the head with it. The burning syrup singed me wherever the ladle touched, and left a series of spots on my ears which people sometimes mistake for vitiligo or another skin disease; a network of pink by which you can still identify me, although the police, predictably, missed it.

  Eventually I got sent home. No one else in Laxmangarh would hire me after that, even as a field hand. So it was mostly for my sake that Kishan and Dilip had come to Dhanbad—to give me a chance to start my career as a human spider afresh.

  In his journey from village to city, from Laxmangarh to Delhi, the entrepreneur’s path crosses any number of provincial towns that have the pollution and noise and traffic of a big city—without any hint of the true city’s sense of history, planning, and grandeur. Half-baked cities, built for half-baked men.