The White Tiger

  “Yes, sir.”

  The two men slapped him on the back; he bowed, and opened the doors for them himself. If he was kissing arse like this, they had to be politicians.

  The two men got in. My heart began to pound. The man on the right was my childhood hero—Vijay, the pigherd’s son turned bus conductor turned politician from Laxmangarh. He had changed uniforms again: now he was wearing the polished suit and tie of a modern Indian businessman.

  He ordered me to drive toward Ashoka Road; he turned to his companion and said, “The sister-fucker finally gave me his car.”

  The other man grunted. He lowered the window and spat. “He knows he has to show us some respect now, doesn’t he?”

  Vijay chortled. He raised his voice. “Do you have anything to drink in the car, son?”

  I turned around: fat nuggets of gold were studded into his rotting black molars.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  I opened the glove compartment and handed him the bottle.

  “It’s good stuff. Johnnie Walker Black. Son, do you have glasses too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ice?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s all right. Let’s drink it neat. Son, pour us a drink.”

  I did so, while keeping the Honda City going with my left hand. They took the glasses and drank the whiskey like it was lemon juice.

  “If he doesn’t have it ready, let me know. I’ll send some boys over to have a word with him.”

  “No, don’t worry. His father always paid up in the end. This kid has been to America and has his head full of shit. But he’ll pay up too, in the end.”

  “How much?”

  “Seven. I was going to settle for five, but the sister-fucker himself offered six—he’s a bit soft in the head—and then I said seven, and he said okay. I told him if he didn’t pay, we’d screw him and his father and his brother and the whole coal-pilfering and tax-evading racket they have. So he began to sweat, and I know he’ll pay up.”

  “Are you sure? I’d love to send some boys over. I just love to see a rich man roughed up. It’s better than an erection.”

  “There will be others. This one isn’t worth the trouble. He said he’ll bring it on Monday. We’re going to do it at the Sheraton. There’s a nice restaurant down in the basement. Quiet place.”

  “Good. He can buy us dinner as well.”

  “Goes without saying. They have lovely kebabs there.”

  One of the two men gargled the scotch in his mouth, gulped it in, burped, and sucked his teeth.

  “You know what the best part of this election is?”

  “What?”

  “The way we’ve spread down south. We’ve got a foothold in Bangalore too. And you know that’s where the future is.”

  “The south? Bullshit.”

  “Why not? One in every three new office buildings in India is being built in Bangalore. It is the future.”

  “Fuck all that. I don’t believe a word. The south is full of Tamils. You know who the Tamils are? Negroes. We’re the sons of the Aryans who came to India. We made them our slaves. And now they give us lectures. Negroes.”

  “Son”—Vijay leaned forward with his glass—“another drink for me.”

  I poured them out the rest of the bottle that night.

  At around three in the morning, I drove the City back to the apartment block in Gurgaon. My heart was beating so fast, I didn’t want to leave the car at once. I wiped it down and washed it three times over. The bottle was lying on the floor of the car. Johnnie Walker Black—even an empty one is worth money on the black market. I picked it up and went toward the servants’ dormitory.

  For a Johnnie Walker Black, Vitiligo-Lips wouldn’t mind being woken up.

  I walked rotating the bottle with my wrist, feeling its weight. Even empty, it wasn’t so light.

  I noticed that my feet were slowing down, and the bottle was rotating faster and faster.

  I was looking for the key for years…

  The smashing of the bottle echoed through the hollow of the parking lot—the sound must have reached the lobby and ricocheted through all the floors of the building, even to the thirteenth floor.

  I waited for a few minutes, expecting someone to come running down.

  No one. I was safe.

  I held what was left of the bottle up to the light. Long and cruel and clawlike jags.

  Perfect.

  With my foot I gathered the broken pieces of the bottle, which lay all around me, into a pile. I wiped the blood off my hand, found a broom, and swept the area clean. Then I got down on my knees and looked around for any pieces I had failed to pick up; the parking lot echoed with the line of a poem that was being recited over and over:

  But the door was always open.

  Dharam was sleeping on the floor; cockroaches were crawling about his head. I shook him awake and said, “Lie inside the mosquito net.” He got in sleepily; I lay on the floor, braving the cockroaches. There was still some blood on my palm: three small red drops had formed on my flesh, like a row of ladybirds on a leaf. Sucking my palm like a boy, I went to sleep.

  Mr. Ashok did not want me to drive him anywhere on Sunday morning. I washed the dishes in the kitchen, wiped the fridge, and said, “I’d like to take the morning off, sir.”

  “Why?” he asked, lowering the newspaper. “You’ve never asked for a whole morning off before. Where are you off to?”

  And you have never before asked me where I was going when I left the house. What has Ms. Uma done to you?

  “I want to spend some time with the boy, sir. At the zoo. I thought he would like to see all those animals.”

  He smiled. “You’re a good family man, Balram. Go, have fun with the boy.” He went back to reading his newspaper—but I caught a gleam of cunning in his eye as he went over the English print of the newspaper.

  As we walked out of Buckingham Towers B Block, I told Dharam to wait for me, then went back and watched the entrance to the building. Half an hour passed, and then Mr. Ashok was down at the lobby. A small dark man—of the servant class—had come to see him. Mr. Ashok and he talked for a while, and then the small man bowed and left. They looked like two men who had just concluded a deal.

  I went back to where Dharam was waiting. “Let’s go!”

  He and I took the bus to the Old Fort, which is where the National Zoo is. I kept my hand on Dharam’s head the whole time—he must have thought it was out of affection, but it was only to stop my hand from trembling—it had been shaking all morning like a lizard’s tail that has fallen off.

  The first strike would be mine. Everything was in place now, nothing could go wrong—but like I told you, I am not a brave man.

  The bus was crowded, and the two of us had to stand for the entire journey. We both sweated like pigs. I had forgotten what a bus trip in summer was like. When we stopped at a red light, a Mercedes-Benz pulled up alongside the bus. Behind his upraised window, cool in his egg, the chauffeur grinned at us, exposing red teeth.

  There was a long line at the ticket counter of the zoo. There were lots of families wanting to go into the zoo, and that I could understand. What puzzled me, though, was the sight of so many young men and women going into the zoo, hand in hand: giggling, pinching each other, and making eyes, as if the zoo were a romantic place. That made no sense to me.

  Now, Mr. Premier, every day thousands of foreigners fly into my country for enlightenment. They go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to Bodh Gaya. They get into weird poses of yoga, smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they’re getting enlightened.

  Ha!

  If it is enlightenment you have come to India for, you people, forget the Ganga—forget the ashrams—go straight to the National Zoo in the heart of New Delhi.

  Dharam and I saw the golden-beaked storks sitting on palm trees in the middle of an artificial lake. They swooped down over the green water of the lake, and showed us traces of pi
nk on their wings. In the background, you could see the broken walls of the Old Fort.

  Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

  I made sure Dharam appreciated the gorgeous rise and fall of the fort’s outline—the way its loopholes filled up with blue sky—the way the old stones glittered in the light.

  We walked for half an hour, from cage to cage. The lion and the lioness were apart from each other and not talking, like a true city couple. The hippo was lying in a giant pond full of mud; Dharam wanted to do what others were doing—throw a stone at the hippo to stir it up—but I told him that would be a cruel thing. Hippos lie in mud and do nothing—that’s their nature.

  Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.

  I told Dharam it was time to leave, but he made faces and pleaded. “Five minutes, Uncle.”

  “All right, five minutes.”

  We came to an enclosure with tall bamboo bars, and there—seen in the interstices of the bars, as it paced back and forth in a straight line—was a tiger.

  Not any kind of tiger.

  The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle.

  I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again—from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.

  He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this—that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.

  Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped moving. It turned its face to my face. The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my master’s eyes have met mine so often in the mirror of the car.

  All at once, the tiger vanished.

  A tingling went from the base of my spine into my groin. My knees began to shake; I felt light. Someone near me shrieked. “His eyes are rolling! He’s going to faint!” I tried to shout back at her: “It’s not true: I’m not fainting!” I tried to show them all I was fine, but my feet were slipping. The ground beneath me was shaking. Something was digging its way toward me, and then claws tore out of mud and dug into my flesh and pulled me down into the dark earth.

  My last thought, before everything went dark, was that now I understood those pinches and raptures—now I understood why lovers come to the zoo.

  That evening, Dharam and I sat on the floor in my room, and I spread a blue letter before him. I put a pen in his hands.

  “I’m going to see how good a letter-writer you are, Dharam. I want you to write to Granny and tell her what happened today at the zoo.”

  He wrote it down in his slow, beautiful hand. He told her about the hippos, and the chimpanzees, and the swamp deer.

  “Tell her about the tiger.”

  He hesitated, then wrote: We saw a white tiger in a cage.

  “Tell her everything.”

  He looked at me, and wrote: Uncle Balram fainted in front of the white tiger in the cage.

  “Better still—I’ll dictate; write it down.”

  He wrote it all down for ten minutes, writing so fast that his pen got black and oozy with overflowing ink—he stopped to wipe the nib against his hair, and went back to the writing. In the end he read out what he had written:

  I called out to the people around me, and we carried Uncle to a banyan tree. Someone poured water on his face. The good people slapped Uncle hard and made him wake up. They turned to me and said, “Your uncle is raving—he’s saying goodbye to his grandmother. He must think he’s going to die.” Uncle’s eyes were open now. “Are you all right, Uncle?” I asked. He took my hand and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I asked, “Sorry for what?” And he said, “I can’t live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny. I’m so sorry.” We took the bus back to Gurgaon and had lunch at the tea shop. It was very hot, and we sweated a lot. And that was all that happened today.

  “Write whatever you want after that to her, and post it tomorrow, as soon as I leave in the car—but not before. Understand?”

  It was raining all morning, a light, persistent kind of rain. I heard the rain, though I could not see it. I went to the Honda City, placed the incense stick inside, wiped the seats, wiped the stickers, and punched the ogre in the mouth. I threw a bundle near the driver’s seat. I shut all the doors and locked them.

  Then, taking two steps back from the Honda City, I bowed low to it with folded palms.

  I went to see what Dharam was doing. He was looking lonely, so I made a paper boat for him, and we sailed it in the gutter outside the apartment block.

  After lunch, I called Dharam into my room.

  I put my hands on his shoulders; slowly I turned him around so he faced away from me. I dropped a rupee coin on the ground.

  “Bend down and pick that up.”

  He did so, and I watched. Dharam combed his hair just like Mr. Ashok did—with a part down the middle; when you stood up over him, there was a clear white line down his scalp, leading up to the spot on the crown where the strands of a man’s hairline radiate from.

  “Stand up straight.”

  I turned him around a full circle. I dropped the rupee again.

  “Pick it up one more time.”

  I watched the spot.

  Telling him to sit in a corner of the room and keep watch over me, I went inside my mosquito net, folded my legs, closed my eyes, touched my palms to my knees, and breathed in.

  I don’t know how long I sat like the Buddha, but it lasted until one of the servants shouted out that I was wanted at the front door. I opened my eyes—Dharam was sitting in a corner of the room, watching me.

  “Come here,” I said—I gave him a hug, and put ten rupees into his pocket. He’d need that.

  “Balram, you’re late! The bell is ringing like crazy!”

  I walked to the car, inserted the key, and turned the engine on. Mr. Ashok was standing at the entrance with an umbrella and a cell phone. He was talking on the phone as he got into the car and slammed the door.

  “I still can’t believe it. The people of this country had a chance to put an efficient ruling party back in power, and instead they have voted in the most outrageous bunch of thugs. We don’t deserve—” He put the phone aside for a moment and said, “First to the city, Balram—I’ll tell you where”—and then resumed the phone talk.

  The roads were greasy with mud and water. I drove slowly.

  “…parliamentary democracy, Father. We will never catch up with China for this single reason.”

  First stop was in the city—at one of the usual banks. He took the red bag and went in, and I saw him inside the glass booth, pressing the buttons of the cash machine. When he came back, I could feel that the weight of the bag on the backseat had increased. We went from bank to bank, and the weight of the red bag grew. I felt its pressure increase on my lower back—as if I were taking Mr. Ashok and his bag not in a car, but the way my father would take a customer and his bag—in a rickshaw.

  Seven hundred thousand rupees.

  It was enough for a house. A motorbike. And a small shop. A new life.

  My seven hundred thousand rupees.

  “Now to the Sheraton, Balram.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I turned the key—started the car, changed gear. We moved.

  “Play some Sting, Balram. Not too loud.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I put the CD on. The voice of Sting came on. The car picked up speed. In a little while, we passed the famous bronze statue of Gandhi leading his followers from darkness to the light.

  Now the road emptied. The rain was coming down lightly. If we kept going this w
ay, we would come to the hotel—the grandest of all in the capital of my country, the place where visiting heads of state, like yourself, always stay. But Delhi is a city where civilization can appear and disappear within five minutes. On either side of us right now there was just wilderness and rubbish.

  In the rearview mirror I saw him paying attention to nothing but his cell phone. A blue glow from the phone lit up his face. Without looking up, he asked me, “What’s wrong, Balram? Why has the car stopped?”

  I touched the magnetic stickers of the goddess Kali for luck, then opened the glove compartment. There it was—the broken bottle, with its claws of glass.

  “There’s something off with the wheel, sir. Just give me a couple of minutes.”

  Before I could even touch it, I swear, the door of the car opened. I was out in the drizzle.

  There was soggy black mud everywhere. Picking my way over mud and rainwater, I squatted near the left rear wheel, which was hidden from the road by the body of the car. There was a large clump of bushes to one side—and a stretch of wasteland beyond.

  You’ve never seen the road this empty. You’d swear it’s been arranged just for you.

  The only light inside the car was the blue glow from his cell phone. I rapped against his glass with a finger. He turned to me without lowering the window.

  I mouthed out the words, “There’s a problem, sir.”

  He did not lower the window; he did not step out. He was playing with his cell phone: punching the buttons and grinning. He must be sending a message to Ms. Uma.

  Pressed to the wet glass, my lips made a grin.

  He released the phone. I made a fist and thumped on his glass. He lowered the window with a look of displeasure. Sting’s soft voice came through the window.

  “What is it, Balram?”

  “Sir, will you step out, there is a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  His body just wouldn’t budge! It knew—the body knew—though the mind was too stupid to figure it out.

  “The wheel, sir. I’ll need your help. It’s stuck in the mud.”

  Just then headlights flashed on me: a car was coming down the road. My heart skipped a beat. But it just drove right past us, splashing muddy water at my feet.