The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

  "And do you think the child…" He couldn't say the word.

  "There was no sound at all, sir. No sound at all. And the body didn't move even a bit."

  "God, Balram, what will we do now-what will we-" He slapped his hand to his thigh. "What are these children doing, walking about Delhi at one in the morning, with no one to look after them?"

  When he had said this, his eyes lit up.

  "Oh, she was one of those people."

  "Who live under the flyovers and bridges, sir. That's my guess too."

  "In that case, will anyone miss her…?"

  "I don't think so, sir. You know how those people in the Darkness are: they have eight, nine, ten children-sometimes they don't know the names of their own children. Her parents-if they're even here in Delhi, if they even know where she is tonight-won't go to the police."

  He put a hand on my shoulder, the way he had been touching Pinky Madam's shoulder earlier in the night.

  Then he put a finger on his lips.

  I nodded. "Of course, sir. Now sleep well-it's been a difficult night for you and Pinky Madam."

  I removed the maharaja tunic, and then I went to sleep. I was tired as hell-but on my lips there was the big, contented smile that comes to one who has done his duty by his master even in the most difficult of moments.

  The next morning, I wiped the seats of the car as usual-I wiped the stickers with the face of the goddess-I wiped the ogre-and then I lit up the incense stick and put it inside so that the seats would smell nice and holy. I washed the wheels one more time, to make sure there was not a spot of blood I had missed in the night.

  Then I went back to my room and waited. In the evening one of the other drivers brought a message that I was wanted in the lobby-without the car. The Mongoose was waiting for me up there. I don't know how he got to Delhi this fast-he must have rented a car and driven all night. He gave me a big smile and patted me on the shoulder. We went up to the apartment in the elevator.

  He sat down on the table, and said, "Sit, sit, make yourself comfortable, Balram. You're part of the family."

  My heart filled up with pride. I crouched on the floor, happy as a dog, and waited for him to say it again. He smoked a cigarette. I had never before seen him do that. He looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  "Now, it's important that you stay here in Buckingham Towers B Block and not go anywhere else-not even to A Block-for a few days. And not say a word to anyone about what happened."

  "Yes, sir."

  He looked at me for a while, smoking. Then he said again, "You're part of the family, Balram."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now go downstairs to the servants' quarters and wait there."

  "Yes, sir."

  An hour passed, and then I got called upstairs again.

  This time there was a man in a black coat sitting at the dinner table next to the Mongoose. He was looking over a printed piece of paper and reading it silently with his lips, which were stained red with paan. Mr. Ashok was on the phone in his room; I heard his voice through the closed door. The door to Pinky Madam's room was closed too. The whole house had been handed over to the Mongoose.

  "Sit down, Balram. Make yourself comfortable."

  "Yes, sir."

  I squatted and made myself uncomfortable again.

  "Would you like some paan, Balram?" the Mongoose asked.

  "No, sir."

  He smiled. "Don't be shy, Balram. You chew paan, don't you?" He turned to the man in the black coat. "Give him something to chew, please."

  The man in the black coat reached into his pocket and held out a small green paan. I stuck my palm out. He dropped it into my palm without touching me.

  "Put it in your mouth, Balram. It's for you."

  "Yes, sir. It's very good. Chewy. Thank you."

  "Let's go over all this slowly and clearly, okay?" the man in the black suit said. The red juice almost dripped out of his mouth as he spoke.

  "All right."

  "The judge has been taken care of. If your man does what he is to do, we'll have nothing to worry about."

  "My man will do what he is to do, no worries about that. He's part of the family. He's a good boy."

  "Good, good."

  The man in the black coat looked at me and held out a piece of paper.

  "Can you read, fellow?"

  "Yes, sir." I took the paper from his hand and read:

  TO WHOMSOEVER IT MAY CONCERN,

  I, BALRAM HALWAI, SON OF VIKRAM HALWAI, OF LAXMANGARH VILLAGE IN THE DISTRICT OF GAYA, DO MAKE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT OF MY OWN FREE WILL AND INTENTION:

  THAT I DROVE THE CAR THAT HIT AN UNIDENTIFIED PERSON, OR PERSONS, OR PERSON AND OBJECTS, ON THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 23RD THIS YEAR. THAT I THEN PANICKED AND REFUSED TO FULFILL MY OBLIGATIONS TO THE INJURED PARTY OR PARTIES BY TAKING THEM TO THE NEAREST HOSPITAL EMERGENCY WARD. THAT THERE WERE NO OTHER OCCUPANTS OF THE CAR AT THE TIME OF THE ACCIDENT. THAT I WAS ALONE IN THE CAR, AND ALONE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THAT HAPPENED.

  I SWEAR BY ALMIGHTY GOD THAT I MAKE THIS STATEMENT UNDER NO DURESS AND UNDER INSTRUCTION FROM NO ONE.

  SIGNATURE OR THUMBPRINT:

  (BALRAM HALWAI)

  STATEMENT MADE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE FOLLOWING WITNESSES.

  KUSUM HALWAI, OF LAXMANGARH VILLAGE,

  GAYA DISTRICT

  CHAMANDAS VARMA, ADVOCATE, DELHI HIGH

  COURT

  Smiling affectionately at me, the Mongoose said, "We've already told your family about it. Your granny, what's her name?"

  "…"

  "I didn't hear that."

  "…m."

  "Yes, that's it. Kusum. I drove down to Laxmangarh-it's a bad road, isn't it?-and explained everything to her personally. She's quite a woman."

  He rubbed his forearms and made a big grin, so I knew he was telling the truth.

  "She says she's so proud of you for doing this. She's agreed to be a witness to the confession as well. That's her thumbprint on the page, Balram. Just below the spot where you're going to sign."

  "If he's illiterate, he can press his thumb," the man in the black coat said. "Like this." He pressed his thumb against the air.

  "He's literate. His grandmother told me he was the first in the family to read and write. She said you always were a smart boy, Balram."

  I looked at the paper, pretending to read it again, and it began to shake in my hands.

  What I am describing to you here is what happens to drivers in Delhi every day, sir. You don't believe me-you think I'm making all this up, Mr. Jiabao?

  When you're in Delhi, repeat the story I've told you to some good, solid middle-class man of the city. Tell him you heard this wild, extravagant, impossible story from some driver about being framed for a murder his master committed on the road. And watch as your good, solid middle-class friend's face blanches. Watch how he swallows hard-how he turns away to the window-watch how he changes the topic at once.

  The jails of Delhi are full of drivers who are there behind bars because they are taking the blame for their good, solid middle-class masters. We have left the villages, but the masters still own us, body, soul, and arse.

  Yes, that's right: we all live in the world's greatest democracy.

  What a fucking joke.

  Doesn't the driver's family protest? Far from it. They would actually go about bragging. Their boy Balram had taken the fall, gone to Tihar Jail for his employer. He was loyal as a dog. He was the perfect servant.

  The judges? Wouldn't they see through this obviously forced confession? But they are in the racket too. They take their bribe, they ignore the discrepancies in the case. And life goes on.

  For everyone but the driver.

  That is all for tonight, Mr. Premier. It's not yet three a.m., but I've got to end here, sir. Even to think about this again makes me so angry I might just go out and cut the throat of some rich man right now.

  The Fifth Night

  Mr. Jiabao.

  Sir.

  When you get here, you'
ll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us.

  Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop.

  Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench-the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.

  The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

  Watch the roads in the evenings in Delhi; sooner or later you will see a man on a cycle-rickshaw, pedaling down the road, with a giant bed, or a table, tied to the cart that is attached to his cycle. Every day furniture is delivered to people's homes by this man-the deliveryman. A bed costs five thousand rupees, maybe six thousand. Add the chairs, and a coffee table, and it's ten or fifteen thousand. A man comes on a cycle-cart, bringing you this bed, table, and chairs, a poor man who may make five hundred rupees a month. He unloads all this furniture for you, and you give him the money in cash-a fat wad of cash the size of a brick. He puts it into his pocket, or into his shirt, or into his underwear, and cycles back to his boss and hands it over without touching a single rupee of it! A year's salary, two years' salary, in his hands, and he never takes a rupee of it.

  Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?

  Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you?

  No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.

  The Rooster Coop doesn't always work with minuscule sums of money. Don't test your chauffeur with a rupee coin or two-he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won't touch a penny. Try it: leave a black bag with a million dollars in a Mumbai taxi. The taxi driver will call the police and return the money by the day's end. I guarantee it. (Whether the police will give it to you or not is another story, sir!) Masters trust their servants with diamonds in this country! It's true. Every evening on the train out of Surat, where they run the world's biggest diamond-cutting and-polishing business, the servants of diamond merchants are carrying suitcases full of cut diamonds that they have to give to someone in Mumbai. Why doesn't that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He's no Gandhi, he's human, he's you and me. But he's in the Rooster Coop. The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

  The Great Indian Rooster Coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr. Jiabao. Or you wouldn't need the Communist Party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I've heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.

  That's because we have the coop.

  Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent-as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way-to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

  You'll have to come here and see it for yourself to believe it. Every day millions wake up at dawn-stand in dirty, crowded buses-get off at their masters' posh houses-and then clean the floors, wash the dishes, weed the garden, feed their children, press their feet-all for a pittance. I will never envy the rich of America or England, Mr. Jiabao: they have no servants there. They cannot even begin to understand what a good life is.

  Now, a thinking man like you, Mr. Premier, must ask two questions.

  Why does the Rooster Coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively?

  Secondly, can a man break out of the coop? What if one day, for instance, a driver took his employer's money and ran? What would his life be like?

  I will answer both for you, sir.

  The answer to the first question is that the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice, the subject of no doubt considerable space in the pamphlet that the prime minister will hand over to you, the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.

  The answer to the second question is that only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed-hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters-can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.

  It would, in fact, take a White Tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir.

  * * *

  To go back to my story.

  There is a sign in the National Zoo in New Delhi, near the cage with the white tiger, which says: Imagine yourself in the cage.

  When I saw that sign, I thought, I can do that-I can do that with no trouble at all.

  For a whole day I was down there in my dingy room, my legs pulled up to my chest, sitting inside that mosquito net, too frightened to leave the room. No one asked me to drive the car. No one came down to see me.

  My life had been written away. I was to go to jail for a killing I had not done. I was in terror, and yet not once did the thought of running away cross my mind. Not once did the thought, I'll tell the judge the truth, cross my mind. I was trapped in the Rooster Coop.

  What would jail be like? That was all I could think about. What kinds of strategies would I follow to escape the big, hairy, dirty men I would find in there?

  I remembered a story from Murder Weekly in which a man sent to jail pretended to have AIDS so that no one would bugger him. Where was that copy of the magazine-if only I had it with me now, I could copy his exact words, his exact gestures! But if I said I had AIDS, would they assume I was a professional bugger-and bugger me even more?

  I was trapped. Through the perforations of my net, I sat staring at the impressions of the anonymous hand that had applied the white plaster to the walls of the room.

  "Country-Mouse!"

  Vitiligo-Lips had come to the threshold of my room.

  "Your boss is ringing the bell like crazy."

  I put my head on the pillow.

  He came into the room and pressed his black face and pink lips against the net. "Country-Mouse, are you ill? Is it typhoid? Cholera? Dengue?"

  I shook my head. "I'm fine."

  "Good to hear that."

  With a big smile of his diseased lips, he left.

  I went up like a man to his hanging-up the stairs, and into the apartment building, and then up the elevator to the thirteenth floor.

  The Mongoose opened the door. There was no smile on his face this time-not a hint of what he had planned for me.

  "You took your time coming. Father is here. He wants to have a word with you."

  My heart raced. The Stork was here! He would save me! He wasn't useless, like his two sons. He was an old-fashioned master. He knew he had to protect his servants.

  He was on the sofa, with his pale legs stretched o
ut. As soon as he saw me his face broke open in a big smile, and I thought, He's smiling because he's saved me! But the old landlord wasn't thinking of me at all. Oh, no, he was thinking of things far more important than my life. He pointed to those two important things.

  "Aah, Balram, my feet really need a good massage. It was a long trip by train."

  My hand shook as it turned on the hot-water faucet in the bathroom. The water hit the bottom of the bucket and splashed all over my legs, and when I looked down I saw that they were almost rattling. A trickle of urine was running down them.

  A minute later, a big smile on my face, I came to where the Stork was sitting and placed the bucket of hot water near him.

  "Put your feet in, sir."

  "Oh," he said, and closed his eyes; his lips parted and he began to make little moans, sir, and the sound of those moans drove me to press his feet harder and harder; my body began rocking as I did so and my head knocked the sides of his knees.

  The Mongoose and Mr. Ashok were sitting in front of a TV screen, playing a computer game together.

  The door to the bedroom opened, and Pinky Madam came out. She had no makeup on, and her face was a mess-black skin under her eyes, lines on her forehead. The moment she saw me, she got excited.

  "Have you people told the driver?"

  The Stork said nothing. Mr. Ashok and the Mongoose kept playing the game. "Has no one told him? What a fucking joke! He's the one who was going to go to jail!"

  Mr. Ashok said, "I suppose we should tell him." He looked at his brother, who kept his eyes on the TV screen.

  The Mongoose said, "Fine."

  Mr. Ashok turned to me.

  "We have a contact in the police-he's told us that no one has reported seeing the accident. So your help won't be needed, Balram."

  I felt such tremendous relief that I moved my hands abruptly, and the bucket of warm water spilled over, and then I scrambled to put the bucket upright. The Stork opened his eyes, smacked me on the head with his hand, and then closed his eyes.

  Pinky Madam watched; her face changed. She ran into her room and slammed the door. (Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao, that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with a conscience?)