The White Tiger

  And even if you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing.

  How so? I looked at the creature in the mirror.

  See—Mr. Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country—you!

  “What is it, Balram? Did you say something?”

  I tapped the mirror. My mustache rose into view again, and the eyes disappeared, and it was only my own face staring at me now.

  “This fellow in front of me is driving rashly, sir. I was just grumbling.”

  “Keep your cool, Balram. You’re a good driver, don’t let the bad ones get to you.”

  The city knew my secret. One morning, the President’s House was covered in smog and blotted out from the road; it seemed as though there were no government in Delhi that day. And the dense pollution that was hiding the prime minister and all his ministers and bureaucrats said to me:

  They won’t see a thing you do. I’ll make sure of that.

  I drove past the red wall of Parliament House. A guard with a gun was watching me from a lookout post on the red wall—he put his gun down the moment he saw me.

  Why would I stop you? I’d do the same, if I could.

  At night a woman walked with a cellophane bag; my headlights shone into the bag and turned the cellophane transparent. I saw four large dark fruits inside the bag—and each dark fruit said, You’ve already done it. In your heart you’ve already taken it. Then the headlights passed; the cellophane turned opaque; the four dark fruits vanished.

  Even the road—the smooth, polished road of Delhi that is the finest in all of India—knew my secret.

  One day at a traffic signal, the driver of the car next to me lowered the window and spat out: he had been chewing paan, and a vivid red puddle of expectorate splashed on the hot midday road and festered there like a living thing, spreading and sizzling. A second later, he spat again—and now there was a second puddle on the road. I stared at the two puddles of red, spreading spit—and then:

  The left-hand puddle of spit seemed to say:

  But the right-hand puddle of spit seemed to say:

  Your father wanted you to be an honest man.

  Your father wanted you to be a man.

  Mr. Ashok does not hit you or spit on you, like people did to your father.

  Mr. Ashok made you take the blame when his wife killed that child on the road.

  Mr. Ashok pays you well, 4,000 rupees a month. He has been raising your salary without your even asking.

  This is a pittance. You live in a city. What do you save? Nothing.

  Remember what the Buffalo did to his servant’s family. Mr. Ashok will ask his father to do the same to your family once you run away.

  The very fact that Mr. Ashok threatens your family makes your blood boil!

  I turned my face away from the red puddles. I looked at the red bag sitting in the center of my rearview mirror, like the exposed heart of the Honda City.

  That day I dropped Mr. Ashok off at the Imperial Hotel, and he said, “I’ll be back in twenty minutes, Balram.”

  Instead of parking the car, I drove to the train station, which is in Pahar Ganj, not far from the hotel.

  People were lying on the floor of the station. Dogs were sniffing at the garbage. The air was moldy. So this is what it will be like, I thought.

  The destinations of all the trains were up on a blackboard.

  Benaras

  Jammu

  Amritsar

  Mumbai

  Ranchi

  What would be my destination, if I were to come here with a red bag in my hand?

  As if in answer, shining wheels and bright lights began flashing in the darkness.

  Now, if you visit any train station in India, you will see, as you stand waiting for your train, a row of bizarre-looking machines with red lightbulbs, kaleidoscopic wheels, and whirling yellow circles. These are your-fortune-and-weight-for-one-rupee machines that stand on every rail platform in the country.

  They work like this. You put your bags down to the side. You stand on them. Then you insert a one-rupee coin into the slot.

  The machine comes to life; levers start to move inside, things go clankety-clank, and the lights flash like crazy. Then there is a loud noise, and a small stiff chit of cardboard colored either green or yellow will pop out of the machine. The lights and noise calm down. On this chit will be written your fortune, and your weight in kilograms.

  Two kinds of people use these machines: the children of the rich, or the fully grown adults of the poorer class, who remain all their lives children.

  I stood gazing at the machines, like a man without a mind. Six glowing machines were shining at me: lightbulbs of green and yellow and kaleidoscopes of gold and black that were turning around and around.

  I got up on one of the machines. I sacrificed a rupee—it gobbled the coin, made noise, gave off more lights, and released a chit.

  LUNNA SCALES CO.

  NEW DELHI 110 055

  YOUR WEIGHT

  59

  “Respect for the law is the first command of the gods.”

  I let the fortune-telling chit fall on the floor and I laughed.

  Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man’s freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop.

  The sirens of the coop were ringing—its wheels turning—its red lights flashing! A rooster was escaping from the coop! A hand was thrust out—I was picked up by the neck and shoved back into the coop.

  I picked the chit up and reread it.

  My heart began to sweat. I sat down on the floor.

  Think, Balram. Think of what the Buffalo did to his servant’s family.

  Above me I heard wings thrashing. Pigeons were sitting on the roof beams all around the station; two of them had flown from a beam and began wheeling directly over my head, as if in slow motion—pulled into their breasts, I saw two sets of red claws.

  Not far from me I saw a woman lying on the floor, with nice full breasts inside a tight blouse. She was snoring. I could see a one-rupee note stuffed into her cleavage, its lettering and color visible through the weave of her bright green blouse. She had no luggage. That was all she had in the world. One rupee. And yet look at her—snoring blissfully, without a care in the world.

  Why couldn’t things be so simple for me?

  A low growling noise made me turn. A black dog was turning in circles behind me. A pink patch of skin—an open wound—glistened on its left butt; and the dog had twisted on itself in an attempt to gnaw at the wound. The wound was just out of reach of its teeth, but the dog was going crazy from pain—trying to attack the wound with its slavering mouth, it kept moving in mad, precise, pointless circles.

  I looked at the sleeping woman—at her heaving breasts. Behind me the growling went on and on.

  That Sunday, I took Mr. Ashok’s permission, saying I wanted to go to a temple, and went into the city. I took a bus down to Qutub, and from there a jeep-taxi down to G.B. Road.

  This, Mr. Premier, is the famous “red-light district” (as they say in English) of Delhi.

  An hour here would clear all the evil thoughts out of my head. When you retain semen in your lower body, it leads to evil movements in the fluids of your upper body. In the Darkness we know this to be a fact.

  It was just five o’clock and still light, but the women were waiting for me, as they wait for all men, at all times of the day.

  Now, I’ve been to these streets before—as I’ve confessed to you—but this time was different. I heard them above me—the women—jeering and taunting from the grilled windows of the brothels—but this time I couldn’t bear to look up at them.

  A paan-maker sat on a wooden stall outside the gaudy blue door of a brothel, using a knife to spread spices on moist
leaves that he had picked out of a bowl of water, which is the first step in the preparation of paan; in the small square space below his stall sat another man, boiling milk in a vessel over the hissing blue flame of a gas stove.

  “What’s the matter with you? Look at the women.”

  The pimp, a small man with a big nose covered in red warts, had caught me by the wrist.

  “You look like you can afford a foreign girl. Take a Nepali girl. Aren’t they beauties? Look up at them, son!”

  He took my chin—maybe he thought I was a shy virgin, out on my first expedition here—and forced me to look up.

  The Nepalis up there, behind the barred window, were really good-looking: very light-skinned and with those Chinese eyes that just drive us Indian men mad. I shook the pimp’s hand off my face.

  “Take any one! Take all! Aren’t you man enough, son?”

  Normally this would have been enough for me to burst into the brothel, hollering for blood.

  But sometimes what is most animal in a man may be the best thing in him. From my waist down, nothing stirred. They’re like parrots in a cage. It’ll be one animal fucking another animal.

  “Chew paan—it will help if you’re having trouble getting it up!” the seller of paan shouted from his stand. He held up a fresh, wet paan leaf, and shook it so the droplets splashed on my face.

  “Drink hot milk—it helps too!” shouted the small, shrunken man below him who was boiling the milk.

  I watched the milk. It seethed, and spilled down the sides of the stainless steel vessel; the small, shrunken man smiled—he provoked the boiling milk with a spoon—it became frothier and frothier, hissing with outrage.

  I charged into the paan-seller, pushing him off his perch, scattering his leaves, and spilling his water. I kicked the midget in his face. Screams broke out from above. The pimps rushed at me; shoving and kicking for dear life, I ran out of that street.

  Now, G.B. Road is in Old Delhi, about which I should say something. Remember, Mr. Premier, that Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries—two Indias. The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr. Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place, Old Delhi, is the other end. Full of things the modern world forgot all about—rickshaws, old stone buildings, the Muslims. On a Sunday, though, there is something more: if you keep pushing through the crowd that is always there, go past the men cleaning the other men’s ears by poking rusty metal rods into them, past the men selling small fish trapped in green bottles full of brine, past the cheap shoe market and the cheap shirt market, you will come to the great secondhand book market of Darya Ganj.

  You may have heard of this market, sir, since it is one of the wonders of the world. Tens of thousands of dirty, rotting, blackened books on every subject—Technology, Medicine, Sexual Pleasure, Philosophy, Education, and Foreign Countries—heaped upon the pavement from Delhi Gate onwards all the way until you get to the market in front of the Red Fort. Some books are so old they crumble when you touch them; some have silverfish feasting on them—some look like they were retrieved from a flood, or from a fire. Most shops on the pavement are shuttered down; but the restaurants are still open, and the smell of fried food mingles with the smell of rotting paper. Rusting exhaust fans turn slowly in the ventilators of the restaurants like the wings of giant moths.

  I went amid the books and sucked in the air: it was like oxygen after the stench of the brothel.

  There was a thick crowd of book buyers fighting over the books with the sellers, and I pretended to be one of the buyers. I leapt into the books, picking them up, reading them like this, flip, flip, flip, until a bookseller shouted, “You going to buy it or read it for free?”

  “It’s no good,” I would say, and put the book down and go to the next bookseller, and pick up something he had, and flip flip flip. Never paying anyone a single rupee, flipping through books for free, I kept looting bookseller after bookseller all evening long!

  Some books were in Urdu, the language of the Muslims—which is all just scratches and dots, as if some crow dipped its feet in black ink and pressed them to the page. I was going through one such book when a bookseller said, “Can you read Urdu?”

  He was an old Muslim, with a pitch-black face that was bedewed with sweat, like a begonia leaf after the rains, and a long white beard.

  I said: “Can you read Urdu?”

  He opened the book, cleared his throat, and read, “‘You were looking for the key for years.’ Understood that?” He looked at me, wide furrows on his black forehead.

  “Yes, Muslim uncle.”

  “Shut up, you liar. And listen.”

  He cleared his throat again.

  “‘You were looking for the key for years/But the door was always open!’”

  He closed the book. “That’s called poetry. Now get lost.”

  “Please, Muslim uncle,” I begged. “I’m just a rickshaw-puller’s son from the Darkness. Tell me all about poetry. Who wrote the poem?”

  He shook his head, but I kept flattering him, telling him how fine his beard was, how fair his skin was (ha!), how it was obvious from his nose and forehead that he wasn’t some pigherd who had converted but a true-blue Muslim who had flown here on a magic carpet all the way from Mecca, and he grunted with satisfaction. He read me another poem, and another one—and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won’t be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That’s why, one day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself. Now, the four greatest of these wise poets were Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, and another fellow whose name I was told but have forgotten.

  (Who was that fourth poet? It drives me crazy that I can’t recall his name. If you know it, send me an e-mail.)

  “Muslim uncle, I have another question for you.”

  “What do I look like? Your schoolteacher? Don’t keep asking me questions.”

  “The last one, I promise. Tell me, Muslim uncle, can a man make himself vanish with poetry?”

  “What do you mean—like vanish through black magic?” He looked at me. “Yes, that can be done. There are books for that. You want to buy one?”

  “No, not vanish like that. I meant can he…can he…”

  The bookseller had narrowed his eyes. The sweat beads had grown larger on his huge black forehead.

  I smiled at him. “Forget I asked that, Muslim uncle.”

  And then I warned myself never to talk to this old man again. He knew too much already.

  My eyes were burning from squinting at books. I should have been heading back toward Delhi Gate to catch a bus. There was a foul taste of book in my mouth—as if I had inhaled so much particulated old paper from the air. Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.

  But instead of going back to the bus, I wandered farther into Old Delhi. I had no idea where I was going. Everything grew quiet the moment I left the main road. I saw some men sitting on a charpoy smoking, others lying on the ground and sleeping; eagles flew above the houses. Then the wind blew an enormous gust of buffalo into my face.

  Everyone knows there is a butchers’ quarter somewhere in Old Delhi, but not many have seen it. It is one of the wonders of the old city—a row of open sheds, and big buffaloes standing in each shed with their butts toward you, and their tails swatting flies away like windshield wipers, and t
heir feet deep in immense pyramids of shit. I stood there, inhaling the smell of their bodies—it had been so long since I had smelled buffalo! The horrible city air was driven out of my lungs.

  A rattling noise of wooden wheels. I saw a buffalo coming down the road, pulling a large cart behind it. There was no human sitting on this cart with a whip; the buffalo just knew on its own where to go. And it was coming down the road. I stood to the side, and as it passed me, I saw that this cart was full of the faces of dead buffaloes; faces, I say—but I should say skulls, stripped even of the skin, except for the little black bit of skin at the tip of the nose from which the nostril hairs still stuck out, like last defiant bits of the personality of the dead buffalo. The rest of the faces were gone. Even the eyes had been gouged out.

  And the living buffalo walked on, without a master, drawing its load of death to the place where it knew it had to go.

  I walked along with that poor animal for a while, staring at the dead, stripped faces of the buffaloes. And then the strangest thing happened, Your Excellency—I swear the buffalo that was pulling the cart turned its face to me, and said in a voice not unlike my father’s:

  “Your brother Kishan was beaten to death. Happy?”

  It was like experiencing a nightmare in the minutes before you wake up; you know it’s a dream, but you can’t wake up just yet.

  “Your aunt Luttu was raped and then beaten to death. Happy? Your grandmother Kusum was kicked to death. Happy?”

  The buffalo glared at me.

  “Shame!” it said, and then it took a big step forward and the cart passed by, full of dead skinned faces, which seemed to me at that moment the faces of my own family.

  The next morning, Mr. Ashok came down to the car, smiling, and with the red bag in his hand. He slammed the door.

  I looked at the ogre and swallowed hard.

  “Sir…”

  “What is it, Balram?”

  “Sir, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.” And I took my fingers off the ignition key. I swear, I was ready to make a full confession right there…had he said the right word…had he touched my shoulder the right way.