The White Tiger

  One evening I went to the market and bought two dozen of the cheapest idols of Hanuman and Ram I could find and brought them back and packed them into the room. So both of us now had the same number of gods in the room; and we drowned out each other’s prayers in the morning while bowing before our respective deities.

  The Nepali was hand in hand with Ram Persad. One day he burst into my room and put a big plastic bucket down on the floor with a thud.

  “Do you like dogs, village boy?” he asked with a big smile.

  There were two white Pomeranians in the house—Cuddles and Puddles. The rich expect their dogs to be treated like humans, you see—they expect their dogs to be pampered, and walked, and petted, and even washed! And guess who had to do the washing? I got down on my knees and began scrubbing the dogs, and then lathering them, and foaming them, and then washing them down, and taking a blow dryer and drying their skin. Then I took them around the compound on a chain while the king of Nepal sat in a corner and shouted, “Don’t pull the chain so hard! They’re worth more than you are!”

  By the time I was done with Puddles and Cuddles, I walked back, sniffing my hands—the only thing that can take the smell of dog skin off a servant’s hands is the smell of his master’s skin.

  Mr. Ashok was standing outside my room.

  I ran up to him and bowed low. He went into the room; I followed, still crouched over. He bent low to make his way through the doorway—the doorway was built for undernourished servants, not for a tall, well-fed master like him. He looked at the ceiling dubiously.

  “How awful,” he said.

  Until then I had never noticed how the paint on the ceiling was peeling off in large flakes, and how there were spiderwebs in every corner. I had been so happy in this room until now.

  “Why is there such a smell? Open the windows.”

  He sat down on Ram Persad’s bed and poked it with his fingertips. It felt hard. I immediately stopped being jealous of Ram Persad.

  (And so I saw the room with his eyes; smelled it with his nose; poked it with his fingers—I had already begun to digest my master!)

  He looked in my direction, but avoided my gaze, as if he were guilty about something.

  “You and Ram Persad will both get a better room to sleep in. And separate beds. And some privacy.”

  “Please don’t do that, sir. This place is like a palace for us.”

  That made him feel better. He looked at me.

  “You’re from Laxmangarh, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I was born in Laxmangarh. But I haven’t seen it since. Were you born there too?”

  “Yes, sir. Born and raised there.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Before I could answer, he said, “It must be so nice.”

  “Like paradise, sir.”

  He looked me up and down, from head to toe, the way I had been looking at him ever since I had come to the house.

  His eyes seemed full of wonder: how could two such contrasting specimens of humanity be produced by the same soil, sunlight, and water?

  “Well, I want to go there today,” he said, getting up from the bed. “I want to see my birthplace. You’ll drive me.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Going home! And in my uniform, driving the Stork’s car, chatting up his son and daughter-in-law!

  I was ready to fall at his feet and kiss them!

  The Stork had wanted to come along with us, and that would really make it a grand entry for me into the village—but at the last minute he decided to stay back. In the end, it was just Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam whom I was taking in the Honda City, out into the countryside, toward Laxmangarh.

  It was the first time I was driving the two of them—Ram Persad had had the privilege until now. I still wasn’t used to the Honda City, which is a moody car with a mind of its own, as I’ve said. I just prayed to the gods—all of them—not to let me make a mistake.

  They said nothing for half an hour. Sometimes you can feel as a driver when there is tension in the car; it raises the temperature inside. The woman inside the car was very angry.

  “Why are we going to this place in the middle of nowhere, Ashoky?” Her voice, breaking the silence at last.

  “It’s my ancestral village, Pinky. Wouldn’t you like to see it? I was born there—but Father sent me away as a boy. There was some trouble with the Communist guerrillas then. I thought we could—”

  “Have you decided on a return date?” she asked suddenly. “I mean to New York.”

  “No. Not yet. We’ll get one soon.”

  He was silent for a minute; my ears were really wide open now. If they went back to America—would they no longer need a second driver in the home?

  She said nothing; but I swear, I could hear teeth gritting.

  Mr. Ashok had no clue, though—he began humming a film song, until she said, “What a fucking joke.”

  “What was that?”

  “You lied about returning to America, didn’t you, Ashok—you’re never going back, are you?”

  “There’s a driver in the car, Pinky—I’ll explain everything later.”

  “Oh, what does he matter! He’s only the driver. And you’re just changing the topic again!”

  A lovely fragrance filled the car—and I knew that she must have moved about and adjusted her clothes.

  “Why do we even need a driver? Why can’t you drive, like you used to?”

  “Pinky, that was New York—you can’t drive in India, just look at this traffic. No one follows any rules—people run across the road like crazy—look—look at that—”

  A tractor was coming down the road at full speed, belching out a nice thick plume of black diesel from its exhaust pipe.

  “It’s on the wrong side of the road! The driver of that tractor hasn’t even noticed!”

  I hadn’t noticed either. Well, I suppose you are meant to drive on the left side of the road, but until then I had never known anyone to get agitated over this rule.

  “And just look at the diesel it’s spewing out. If I drive here, Pinky, I’ll go completely mad.”

  We drove along a river, and then the tar road came to an end and I took them along a bumpy track, and then through a small marketplace with three more or less identical shops, selling more or less identical items of kerosene, incense, and rice. Everyone stared at us. Some children began running alongside the car. Mr. Ashok waved at them, and tried to get Pinky Madam to do the same.

  The children disappeared; we had crossed a line they could not follow us beyond. We were in the landlords’ quarter.

  The caretaker was waiting at the gate of the Stork’s mansion; he opened the door of the car even before I had brought it to a full stop, and touched Mr. Ashok’s feet.

  “Little prince, you’re here at last! You’re here at last!”

  The Wild Boar came to have lunch with Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam—he was their uncle, after all. As soon as I saw him enter the mansion for lunch, I went to the kitchen and told the caretaker, “I love Mr. Ashok so much you must let me serve him lunch!” The cook agreed—and I got to take my first good look at the Wild Boar in years. He was older than I remembered, and more bent over, but his teeth were exactly the same: sharp and blackened and with two distinctive hooked ones curving up by the side. They ate in the dining room—a magnificent place, with high ceilings, heavy, old-fashioned furniture all around, and a huge chandelier.

  “It’s a lovely old mansion,” Mr. Ashok said. “Everything’s gorgeous in here.”

  “Except the chandelier—it’s a bit tacky,” she said.

  “Your father loves chandeliers,” the Wild Boar said. “He wanted to put one up in the bathroom here, did you know that? I’m serious!”

  When the caretaker brought out the dishes and put them on the table, Mr. Ashok looked at them and said, “Don’t you have anything vegetarian? I don’t eat meat.”

  “I’ve never heard of a landlord who was vegetarian,” the Wild Boar sa
id. “It’s not natural. You need meat to toughen you up.” He opened his lips and showed his curved teeth.

  “I don’t believe in killing animals needlessly. I knew vegetarians in America, and I think they’re right.”

  “What crazy ideas do you boys pick up?” the old man said. “You’re a landlord. It’s the Brahmins who are vegetarian, not us.”

  After lunch I washed the dishes; I helped the caretaker make tea. My master was taken care of; now it was time to see my family. I went out the mansion by the back door.

  Well, they had beaten me to it. My family had all come to the mansion, and they were around the Honda City, staring at it with pride, though too frightened to touch it.

  Kishan raised his hand. I hadn’t seen him since he left Dhanbad and came back home to work in the fields—that was three months ago. I bent down and touched his feet, and held on to them for seconds longer than needed, because I knew the moment I let go he would bugger me badly—I hadn’t sent any money home for the past two months.

  “Oh, so now he remembers his family at last!” he said, shaking me off his feet. “Has he thought about us at all?”

  “Forgive me, brother.”

  “You’ve not sent any money for months. You forgot our arrangement.”

  “Forgive me, forgive me.”

  But they weren’t really angry. For the first time I can remember, I got more attention than the water buffalo. Most lavish in her fussing, naturally, was sly old Kusum, who kept grinning at me and rubbing her forearms.

  “Oh, how I used to stuff your mouth with sweets as a child,” she said, trying to squeeze my cheeks. She was too frightened of my uniform to try and touch me anywhere else.

  They almost carried me on their backs to the old house, I tell you. The neighbors were waiting there to see my uniform.

  I was shown the children that had been born in the family since I had left, and forced to kiss them on the forehead. My aunt Laila had had two children when I was gone. Cousin Pappu’s wife, Leela, had had a child. The family was larger. The needs were more. I was chastised by all for not sending money each month.

  Kusum beat her head with her fist; she wailed into the neighbors’ house. “My grandson has a job, and he still forces me to work. This is the fate of an old woman in this world.”

  “Marry him off!” the neighbors yelled. “That’s the only way to tame the wild ones like him!”

  “Yes,” Kusum said. “Yes, that’s a good idea.” She grinned, and rubbed her forearms. “A very good idea.”

  Kishan had a lot of news for me—and since this was the Darkness, all of it was bad news. The Great Socialist was as corrupt as ever. The fighting between the Naxal terrorists and the landlords was getting bloodier. Small people like us were getting caught in between. There were private armies on both sides, going around to shoot and torture people suspected of sympathizing with the other.

  “Life has become hell here,” he said. “But we’re so happy you’re out of this mess—you’ve got a uniform, and a good master.”

  Kishan had changed. He was thinner, and darker—his neck tendons were sticking out in high relief above the deep clavicles. He had become, all of a sudden, my father.

  I saw Kusum grinning and rubbing her forearms and talking of my marriage. She served me lunch herself. As she ladled the curry onto my plate—she had made chicken, just for me—she said, “We’ll fix up the wedding for later this year, okay? We’ve already found someone for you—a nice plump duck. The moment she has her menstrual cycle, she can come here.”

  There was red, curried bone and flesh in front of me—and it seemed to me that they had served me flesh from Kishan’s own body on that plate.

  “Granny,” I said, looking at the large piece of red, curried meat, “give me some more time. I’m not ready to be married.”

  Her jaw dropped. “What do you mean, not yet? You’ll do what we want.” She smiled. “Now eat it, dear. I made chicken just for you.”

  I said, “No.”

  “Eat it.”

  She pushed the plate closer to me.

  Everyone in the household stopped to look at our tussle.

  Granny squinted. “What are you, a Brahmin? Eat, eat.”

  “No!” I pushed the plate so hard it went flying to a corner and hit the wall and spilled the red curry on the floor. “I said, I’m not marrying!”

  She was too stunned even to yell. Kishan got up and tried to stop me as I left, but I pushed him to the side—he fell down hard—and I just walked out of the house.

  The children ran along with me outside, little dirty brats born to one aunt or the other whose names I did not want to know, whose hair I did not want to touch. Gradually they got the message and went back.

  I left behind the temple, the market, the hogs, and the sewage. Then I was alone at the pond—the Black Fort on the hill up in front of me.

  Near the water’s edge I sat down, gnashing my teeth.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Kishan’s body. They were eating him alive in there! They would do the same thing to him that they did to Father—scoop him out from the inside and leave him weak and helpless, until he got tuberculosis and died on the floor of a government hospital, waiting for some doctor to see him, spitting blood on this wall and that!

  There was a splashing noise. The water buffalo in the pond lifted its water-lily-covered head—it peeked at me. A crane stood watching me on one leg.

  I walked until the water came up to my neck, and then swam—past lotuses and water lilies, past the water buffalo, past tadpoles and fish and giant boulders fallen from the fort.

  Up on the broken ramparts, the monkeys gathered to look at me: I had started climbing up the hill.

  You are familiar already with my love of poetry—and especially of the works of the four Muslim poets acknowledged to be the greatest of all time. Now, Iqbal, who is one of the four, has written this remarkable poem in which he imagines that he is the Devil, standing up for his rights at a moment when God tries to bully him. The Devil, according to the Muslims, was once God’s sidekick, until he fought with Him and went freelance, and ever since, there has been a war of brains between God and the Devil. This is what Iqbal writes about. The exact words of the poem I can’t remember, but it goes something like this.

  God says: I am powerful. I am huge. Become my servant again.

  Devil says: Ha!

  When I remember Iqbal’s Devil, as I do often, lying here under my chandelier, I think of a little black figure in a wet khaki uniform who is climbing up the entranceway to a black fort.

  There he stands now, one foot on the ramparts of the Black Fort, surrounded by a group of amazed monkeys.

  Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, and its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, a billion such people. And God asks this little man:

  Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand? Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?

  And then I see this small black man in the wet khaki uniform start to shake, as if he has gone mad with anger, before delivering to the Almighty a gesture of thanks for having created the world this particular way, instead of all the other ways it could have been created.

  I see the little man in the khaki uniform spitting at God again and again, as I watch the black blades of the midget fan slice the light from the chandelier again and again.

  Half an hour later, when I came down the hill, I went straight to the Stork’s mansion. Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam were waiting for me by the Honda City.

  “Where the hell have you been, driver?” she yelled. “We’ve been waiting.”

  “Sorry, madam,” I said, grinning to her. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Have a heart, Pinky. He was seeing his family. You know how close they are to their families in the Darkness.”

  Kusum, Luttu Auntie, and all the other women were gathered by the side of the road as we drove out. They gaped at me?
??stunned that I wasn’t coming to apologize: I saw Kusum clench her gnarled fist at me.

  I put my foot down on the accelerator and drove right past all of them.

  We went through the market square—I took a look at the tea shop: the human spiders were at work at the tables, the rickshaws were arranged in a line at the back, and the cyclist with the poster for the daily pornographic film on the other side of the river had just begun his rounds.

  I drove through the greenery, through the bushes and the trees and the water buffaloes lazing in muddy ponds; past the creepers and the bushes; past the paddy fields; past the coconut palms; past the bananas; past the neems and the banyans; past the wild grass with the faces of the water buffaloes peeping through. A small, half-naked boy was riding a buffalo by the side of the road; when he saw us, he pumped his fists and shouted in joy—and I wanted to shout back at him: Yes, I feel that way too! I’m never going back there!

  “Can you talk now, Ashoky? Can you answer my question?”

  “All right. Look, when I came back, I really thought it was going to be for two months, Pinky. But…things have changed so much in India. There are so many more things I could do here than in New York now.”

  “Ashoky, that’s bullshit.”

  “No, it’s not. Really, it’s not. The way things are changing in India now, this place is going to be like America in ten years. Plus, I like it better here. We’ve got people to take care of us here—our drivers, our watchmen, our masseurs. Where in New York will you find someone to bring you tea and sweet biscuits while you’re still lying in bed, the way Ram Bahadur does for us? You know, he’s been in my family for thirty years—we call him a servant, but he’s part of the family. Dad found this Nepali wandering about Dhanbad one day with a gun in his hand and said—”

  He stopped talking all at once.

  “Did you see that, Pinky?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see what the driver did?”

  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?”