The White Tiger: A Novel Read online

  My heart skipped a beat. I had no idea what I had just done. Mr. Ashok leaned forward and said, “Driver, you just touched your finger to your eye, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Didn’t you see, Pinky—we just drove past a temple”—Mr. Ashok pointed to the tall, conical structure with the black intertwining snakes painted down the sides that we had left behind—“so the driver…”

  He touched me on the shoulder.

  “What is your name?”

  “Balram.”

  “So Balram here touched his eye as a mark of respect. The villagers are so religious in the Darkness.”

  That seemed to have impressed the two of them, so I put my finger to my eye a moment later, again.

  “What’s that for, driver? I don’t see any temples around.”

  “Er…we drove past a sacred tree, sir. I was offering my respects.”

  “Did you hear that? They worship nature. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed by, and turned to me for a reaction of piety—which I gave them, of course, and with growing elaborateness: first just touching my eye, then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my nipples.

  They were convinced I was the most religious servant on earth. (Take that, Ram Persad!)

  Our way back into Dhanbad was blocked. There was a truck parked on the road. It was full of men with red headbands shouting slogans.

  “Rise against the rich! Support the Great Socialist. Keep the landlords out!”

  Soon another set of trucks drove by: the men in them wore green headbands and shouted at the men in the other truck. A fight was about to break out.

  “What’s going on?” Pinky Madam asked in an alarmed tone of voice.

  “Relax,” he said. “It’s election time, that’s all.”

  Now, to explain to you what was going on with all this shouting from the trucks, I will have to tell you all about democracy—something that you Chinese, I am aware, are not very familiar with. But that will have to wait for tomorrow, Your Excellency.

  It’s 2:44 a.m.

  The hour of degenerates, drug addicts—and Bangalore-based entrepreneurs.

  The Fourth Morning

  For the Desk of…

  But we don’t really need these formalities anymore, do we, Mr. Jiabao?

  We know each other by now. Plus we don’t have the time for formalities, I’m afraid.

  It’ll be a short session today, Mr. Premier—I was listening to a program on the radio about this man called Castro who threw the rich out of his country and freed his people. I love listening to programs about Great Men—and before I knew it, it had turned to two a.m.! I wanted to hear more about this Castro, but for your sake, I’ve turned the radio off. I’ll resume the story exactly where we left off.

  O, democracy!

  Now, Mr. Premier, the little take-home pamphlet that you will be given by the prime minister will no doubt contain a very large section on the splendor of democracy in India—the awe-inspiring spectacle of one billion people casting their votes to determine their own future, in full freedom of franchise, and so on and so forth.

  I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don’t have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that’s why we Indians are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.

  If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!

  I’ve got no problem with democracy, Mr. Jiabao. Far from it, I owe democracy a lot—even my birthday, in fact. This was back in the days when I was smashing coals and wiping tables at the tea shop in Laxmangarh. There was a clapping from the direction of the portrait of Gandhi—the old tea shop owner began shouting that all his workers had to leave whatever they were doing and march to the school.

  A man in a government uniform sat at the teacher’s desk in the schoolroom, with a long book and a black pen, and he was asking everyone two questions.

  “Name.”

  “Balram Halwai.”

  “Age.”

  “No age.”

  “No date of birth?”

  “No, sir, my parents didn’t make note of it.”

  He looked at me and said, “I think you’re eighteen. I think you turned eighteen today. You just forgot, didn’t you?”

  I bowed to him. “That’s correct, sir. I forgot. It was my birthday today.”

  “Good boy.”

  And then he wrote that down in his book and told me to go away. So I got a birthday from the government.

  I had to be eighteen. All of us in the tea shop had to be eighteen, the legal age to vote. There was an election coming up, and the tea shop owner had already sold us. He had sold our fingerprints—the inky fingerprints which the illiterate person makes on the ballot paper to indicate his vote. I had overheard this from a customer. This was supposed to be a close election; he had got a good price for each one of us from the Great Socialist’s party.

  Now, the Great Socialist had been the boss of the Darkness for a decade at the time of this election. His party’s symbol, a pair of hands breaking through handcuffs—symbolizing the poor shaking off the rich—was imprinted in black stencils on the walls of every government office in the Darkness. Some of the customers at the tea shop said the Great Socialist started off as a good man. He had come to clean things up, but the mud of Mother Ganga had sucked him in. Others said he was dirty from the start, but he had just fooled everyone and only now did we see him for what he was. Whatever the case was, no one seemed able to vote him out of power. He had ruled the Darkness, winning election after election, but now his rule was weakening.

  You see, a total of ninety-three criminal cases—for murder, rape, grand larceny, gun-running, pimping, and many other such minor offenses—are pending against the Great Socialist and his ministers at the present moment. Not easy to get convictions when the judges are judging in Darkness, yet three convictions have been delivered, and three of the ministers are currently in jail but continue to be ministers. The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.

  Now that the date for the elections had been set, and declared on radio, election fever had started spreading again. These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in. The Great Socialist’s enemies seemed to be stronger this election than at the last one. They had made pamphlets, and went about on buses and trucks with microphones, and announced they were going to topple him over and drag the River Ganga and everyone who lived on its banks out of the Darkness and into the Light.

  At the tea shop, the gossip grew furious. People sipped their tea and discussed the same things again and again.

  Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

  One morning I saw a policeman writing a slogan on the wall outside the temple with a red paintbrush:

  DO YOU WANT GOOD ROADS, CLEAN WATER, GOOD

  HOSPITALS? THEN VOTE OUT THE GREAT SOCIALIST!

  For years there was a deal between the landlords and the Great Socialist—everyone in the village knew about this—but this year something had gone wrong with the deal, so the four Animals had joined together and started a party of their own.

  And below the slogan the policeman wrote:

  ALL INDIA SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE FRONT


  (LENINIST FACTION)

  Which was the name of the landlords’ party.

  In the weeks before the elections, trucks bumped up and down the dirty street of Laxmangarh, full of young men holding microphones: “Stand up to the rich!”

  Vijay, the bus conductor, was always on one of these trucks. He had quit his old job and joined politics now. That was the thing about Vijay; each time you saw him he had done better for himself. He was a born politician. He wore a red headband to show that he was one of the Great Socialist’s supporters, and made speeches every morning in front of the tea shop. The landlords brought in trucks full of their own supporters in retaliation. And from these trucks men shouted out, “Roads! Water! Hospitals! Vote out the Great Socialist!”

  A week before the elections, both sides stopped sending out their trucks. I heard what had happened while cleaning up a table.

  The Animals’ bluff had worked. The Great Socialist had agreed to cut a deal with them.

  Vijay bowed down and touched the feet of the Stork at a big rally in front of the tea shop. It seemed that all differences had been patched, and the Stork had been named the president of the Laxmangarh branch of the Great Socialist’s party. Vijay was to be his deputy.

  Now the rallies were done. The priest celebrated a special pooja to pray for the Great Socialist’s victory; mutton biryani was distributed on paper plates in front of the temple; and in the evening, there was free hooch for all.

  Lots of dust and policemen came into the village next morning. One officer read out voting instructions in the marketplace.

  Whatever was being done, was being done for our own good. The Great Socialist’s enemies would try and steal the election from us, the poor, and take the power away from us, the poor, and put those shackles back on our hands that he, the Great Socialist, had so lovingly taken off our hands. Did we understand? And then, in a cloud of dust, the police drove off.

  “It’s the way it always is,” my father told me that night. “I’ve seen twelve elections—five general, five state, two local—and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves—isn’t that something?”

  On the day of the election, one man went mad.

  This happens every time, at every election in the Darkness.

  One of my father’s colleagues, a small dark-skinned man whom no one had taken any notice of until now, was surrounded by a mob of rickshaw-pullers, including my father. They were trying to dissuade him, but only halfheartedly.

  They had seen this thing happening before. They wouldn’t be able to stop this man now.

  Every now and then, even in a place like Laxmangarh, a ray of sunlight will break through. All these posters and speeches and slogans on the wall, maybe they get into a man’s head. He declares himself a citizen of the democracy of India and he wants to cast his vote. That was where this rickshaw-puller had got to. He declared himself free of the Darkness: he had made his Benaras that day.

  He began walking straight to the voting booth at the school. “I’m supposed to stand up to the rich, aren’t I?” he shouted. “Isn’t that what they keep telling us?”

  When he got there, the Great Socialist’s supporters had already put up the tally of votes outside on a blackboard: they had counted 2,341 votes in that booth. Everyone had voted for the Great Socialist. Vijay the bus conductor was up on a ladder, hammering into the wall a banner with the Great Socialist’s symbol (the hands breaking their shackles). The slogan on the banner said:

  CONGRATULATIONS TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST ON HIS

  UNANIMOUS VICTORY FROM LAXMANGARH!

  Vijay dropped the hammer, the nails, and the banner when he saw the rickshaw-puller.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Voting,” he shouted back. “Isn’t it the election today?”

  I cannot confirm what happened next, even though I was only a few feet behind him. A big crowd had gathered to watch him from a distance, but when the policeman charged at us, we turned and ran in a stampede. So I never saw what they did to that brave, mad man.

  I heard about it the next day, while pretending to scratch a dirty spot out of a tabletop. Vijay and a policeman had knocked the rickshaw-puller down, and they had begun beating him; they hit him with their sticks, and when he thrashed at them they kicked him. They took turns. Vijay hit him and the policeman stamped on his face and then Vijay did it again. And after a while the body of the rickshaw-puller stopped wriggling and fighting back, but they kept stamping on him, until he had been stamped back into the earth.

  If I may go back for a moment to that WANTED poster, Your Excellency. Being called a murderer: fine, I have no objection to that. It’s a fact: I am a sinner, a fallen human. But to be called a murderer by the police!

  What a fucking joke.

  Here’s a little souvenir of your Indian visit to keep with you. Balram Halwai is a vanished man, a fugitive, someone whose whereabouts are unknown to the police, right?

  Ha!

  The police know exactly where to find me. They will find me dutifully voting on election day at the voting booth in the school compound in Laxmangarh in Gaya District, as I have done in every general, state, and local election since I turned eighteen.

  I am India’s most faithful voter, and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth.

  Now, though the elections were due soon in Dhanbad, life went on as ever within the high walls of the Stork’s house. He sighed as his legs were pressed in warm water; games of cricket and badminton went on around him; and I washed and cleaned the two Pomeranian dogs faithfully.

  Then one day a familiar face turned up at the gate. Vijay, the bus conductor from Laxmangarh. My childhood hero had a new uniform this time. He was dressed all in white, and wore a white Nehru cap on his head, and had rings of solid gold on eight of his fingers!

  Public service had been good to him.

  I waited by the gate and watched. The Stork himself came out to see Vijay, and bowed down before him, a landlord bowing before a pigherd’s son! The marvels of democracy!

  Two days later, the Great Socialist came to the house.

  The entire household was abuzz because of the visit. Mr. Ashok stood at the gate, waiting with a garland of jasmine flowers. His brother and his father were by his side.

  A car came to the gate, its door opened, and then the face I had seen on a million election posters since I was a boy emerged—I saw the puffy cheeks, the spiky white hair, the thick gold earrings.

  Vijay was wearing his red headband today, and holding up the flag with the breaking-shackles symbol. He shouted, “Long live the Great Socialist!”

  The great man folded his palms and bowed all around him. He had one of those either/or faces that all great Indian politicians have. This face says that it is now at peace—and you can be at peace too if you follow the owner of that face. But the same face can also say, with a little twitch of its features, that it has known the opposite of peace: and it can make this other fate yours too, if it so wishes.

  Mr. Ashok put the garland on the great man’s thick, bull-like neck.

  “My son,” the Stork said. “Returned from America recently.”

  The Great Socialist squeezed Mr. Ashok’s cheeks. “Good. We need more boys to come back and build India into a superpower.”

  And then they went into the house, and all the doors and windows were closed. After a while, the Great Socialist came out into the courtyard, followed by the old man, the Mongoose, and Mr. Ashok.

  I was trying to overhear them, and so pretended to be sweeping the ground, while inching closer and closer to them. I had swept myself right into hearing distance when the Great Socialist tapped me on the back.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asked.

  Then he said, “Your employers are trying to bugger me, Balram. What do you say to this?”

  Mr. Ashok looked stunned. The Stork simpered.

  “A million and a half is a lot
, sir. We’ll be happy to come to a settlement with you.”

  The Great Socialist waved his hands as if dismissing that plea.

  “Bullshit. You’ve got a good scam going here—taking coal for free from the government mines. You’ve got it going because I let it happen. You were just some little village landlord when I found you—I brought you here—I made you what you are today: and by God, you cross me, and you’ll go back there into that village. I said a million and a fucking half, and I mean a million and…”

  He had to stop—he had been chewing paan, and now his mouth had filled up with red spittle, which was beginning to dribble out. He turned to me and made the shape of a bowl with his hands. I rushed to the Honda City to get the spittoon.

  When I came back with the spittoon, he coolly turned to the Mongoose and said, “Son, won’t you hold the spittoon for me?”

  The Mongoose refused to move, so the Great Socialist took the spittoon from my hands and held it out.

  “Take it, son.”

  The Mongoose took it.

  Then the Great Socialist spat into the spittoon, three times.

  The Mongoose’s hands trembled; his face turned black with shame.

  “Thank you for that, son,” the Great Socialist said, wiping his lips. He turned to me and tickled his forehead. “Where was I, now?”

  There you have it. That was the positive side of the Great Socialist. He humiliated all our masters—that’s why we kept voting him back in.

  That night, on the pretext again of sweeping the courtyard, I got close to the Stork and his sons; they were sitting on a bench, holding glasses of golden liquor and talking. Mukesh Sir had just finished; the old man shook his head.

  “We can’t do that, Mukesh. We need him.”

  “I’m telling you, Father. We don’t anymore. We can go straight to Delhi. We know people there now.”

  “I agree with Mukesh, Father. We shouldn’t let him treat us like this anymore—like we’re his slaves.”

  “Quiet, Ashok. Let Mukesh and me discuss this.”

  I swept the courtyard twice over, and listened. Then I began tightening Pinky Madam’s sagging badminton net, so I could stay near them.