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The White Tiger
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008
Aravind Adiga
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eBook - ePub
The White Tiger
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008
Aravind Adiga
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About This Book
***NOMINATED FOR AN ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY*** ***NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX PRODUCTION STARING PRIYANKA CHOPRA AND PRODUCED BY AVA DUVERNAY*** 'As angry, smart and dark as Parasite.' Standard
'The anti-Slumdog Millionaire' Hollywood Reporter
___________ Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his foetus, but you know his corpse. Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur... murderer. Balram was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi at the wheel of a Honda. Amid cockroaches, call-centres, thirty-six-million gods, slums, shopping malls, and crippling traffic jams, Balram comes to see how the Tiger might slip the bars of his cage.
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The Sixth Night
The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they?
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?
Losing weight and looking like the poor.
Every evening, the compound around Buckingham Towers B Block becomes an exercise ground. Plump, paunchy men and even plumper, paunchier women, with big circles of sweat below their arms, are doing their evening ‘walking’.
See, with all these late-night parties, all that drinking and munching, the rich tend to get fat in Delhi. So they walk to lose weight.
Now, where should a human being walk? In the outdoors – by a river, inside a park, around a forest.
However, displaying their usual genius for town planning, the rich of Delhi had built this part of Gurgaon with no parks, lawns, or playgrounds – it was just buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and more buildings. There was a pavement outside, but that was for the poor to live on. So if you wanted to do some ‘walking’. it had to be done around the concrete compound of your own building.
Now, while they walked around the apartment block, the fatsoes made their thin servants – most of them drivers – stand at various spots on that circle with bottles of mineral water and fresh towels in their hands. Each time they completed a circuit around the building, they stopped next to their man, grabbed the bottle – gulp – grabbed the towel – wipe, wipe – then it was off on round two.
Vitiligo-Lips was standing in one corner of the compound, with his bottle and his master’s sweaty towel. Every few minutes, he turned to me with a twinkle in his eyes – his boss, the steel man, who was bald until two weeks ago, now sported a head of thick black hair – an expensive toupee job he had gone all the way to England for. This toupee was the main subject of discussion in the monkey-circle these days – the other drivers had offered Vitiligo-Lips ten rupees to resort to the old tricks of braking unexpectedly, or taking the car full speed over a pothole, to knock off his master’s toupee at least once.
The secrets of their masters were spilled and dissected every evening by the monkey-circle – though if any of them made the divorce a topic of discussion, he knew he would have to deal with me. On Mr Ashok’s privacy I allowed no one to infringe.
I was standing just a few feet from Vitiligo-Lips, with my master’s bottle of mineral water in my hand and his sweat-stained towel on my shoulder.
Mr Ashok was about to complete his circle – I could smell his sweat coming towards me. This was round number three for him. He took the bottle, drained it, wiped his face with his towel, and draped it back on my shoulder.
‘I’m done, Balram. Bring the towel and bottle up, okay?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, and watched him go into the apartment block. He took a walk once or twice a week, but it clearly wasn’t enough to counter his nights of debauchery – I saw a big, wet paunch pressing against his white T-shirt. How repulsive he was, these days.
I signalled to Vitiligo-Lips before going down to the car park.
Ten minutes later, I smelled the steel man’s sweat and heard footsteps. Vitiligo-Lips had come down. I called him over to the Honda City – it was the only place in the world I felt fully safe any more.
‘What is it, Country-Mouse? Want another magazine?’
‘Not that. Something else.’
I got down on my haunches; I squatted by one of the tyres of the City. I scraped the grooves of the tyre with a fingernail. He squatted too.
I showed him the strand of golden hair – I kept it tied around my wrist, like a locket. He brought my wrist to his nose – he rubbed the strand between his fingers, sniffed it, and let my wrist down.
‘No problem.’ He winked. ‘I told you your master would get lonely.’
‘Don’t talk about him!’ I seized his neck. He shook me off.
‘Are you crazy? You tried to choke me!’
I scraped the grooves of the tyre again. ‘How much will it cost?’
‘High-class or low-class? Virgin or non-virgin? All depends.’
‘I don’t care. She just has to have golden hair – like in the shampoo advertisements.’
‘Cheapest is ten, twelve thousand.’
‘That’s too much. He won’t pay more than four thousand seven hundred.’
‘Six thousand five hundred, Country-Mouse. That’s the minimum. White skin has to be respected.’
‘All right.’
‘When does he want it, Country-Mouse?’
‘I’ll tell you. It’ll be soon. And another thing – I want to know another thing.’
I put my face on the tyre and breathed in the smell of the rubber. For strength.
‘How many ways are there for a driver to cheat his master?’
*
Mr Jiabao, I am aware that it is a common feature of those Cellophane-wrapped business books to feature small ‘sidebars’. At this stage of the story, to relieve you of tedium, I would like to insert my own ‘sidebar’ into the narrative of the modern entrepreneur’s growth and development.
*
HOW DOES THE ENTERPRISING DRIVER
EARN A LITTLE EXTRA CASH?
EARN A LITTLE EXTRA CASH?
1. When his master is not around, he can siphon petrol from the car, with a funnel. Then sell the petrol.
2. When his master orders him to make a repair to the car, he can go to a corrupt mechanic; the mechanic will inflate the price of the repair, and the driver will receive a cut. This is a list of a few entrepreneurial mechanics who help entrepreneurial drivers:
– Lucky Mechanics, in Lado Serai, near the Qutub
– R.V. Repairs, in Greater Kailash Part Two
– Nilofar Mechanics, in DLF Phase One, in Gurgaon.
3. He should study his master’s habits, and then ask himself: ‘Is my master careless? If so, what are the ways in which I can benefit from his carelessness?’ For instance, if his master leaves empty English liquor bottles lying around in the car, he can sell the whisky bottles to the bootleggers. Johnnie Walker Black brings the best resale value.
4. As he gains in experience and confidence and is ready to try something riskier, he can turn his master’s car into a freelance taxi. The stretch of the road from Gurgaon to Delhi is excellent for this; lots of Romeos come to see their girlfriends who work in the call centres. Once the entrepreneurial driver is sure that his master is not going to notice the absence of the car – and that none of his master’s friends are likely to be on the road at this time – he can spend his free time cruising around, picking up and dropping off paying customers.
*
At night I lay in my mosquito net, the lightbulb on in my room, and watched the dark roaches crawling on top of the net, their antennae quivering and trembling, like bits of my own nerves: and I lay in bed, too agitated even to reach out and crush them. A cockroach flew down and landed right above my head.
You should have asked them for money when they made you sign that thing. Enough money to sleep with twenty white-skinned girls. It flew away. Another landed on the same spot.
Twenty?
A hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred, a thousand, ten thousand golden-haired whores. And even that would still not have been enough. That would not start to be enough.
Over the next two weeks, I did things I am still ashamed to admit. I cheated my employer. I siphoned his petrol; I took his car to a corrupt mechanic who billed him for work that was not necessary; and three times, while driving back to Buckingham B, I picked up a paying customer.
The strangest thing was that each time I looked at the cash I had made by cheating him, instead of guilt, what did I feel?
Rage.
The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me.
To go back to the analogy I used when describing Indian politics to you earlier, I was growing a belly at last.
Then one Sunday afternoon, when Mr Ashok had said he wouldn’t need me again that day, I gulped two big glasses of whisky for courage, then went to the servants’ dormitory. Vitiligo-Lips was sitting beneath the poster of a film actress – each time his master ‘hammered’ an actress, he put her poster up on the wall – playing cards with the other drivers.
‘Well, you can say what you want, but I know that these jokers aren’t going to win re-election.’
He looked up and saw me.
‘Well, look who’s here. It’s the yoga guru, paying us a rare visit. Welcome, honoured sir.’
They showed me their teeth. I showed them my teeth.
‘We were discussing the elections, Country-Mouse. You know, it’s not like the Darkness here. The elections aren’t rigged. Are you going to vote this time?’
I summoned him with a finger.
He shook his head. ‘Later, Country-Mouse, I’m having too much fun discussing the elections.’
I waved the brown envelope in the air. He put his cards down at once.
I insisted that we walk down to the car park; he counted the money there, in the shadow of the Honda City.
‘Good, Country-Mouse. It’s all here. And where is your master? Will you drive him there?’
‘I am my own master.’
He didn’t get it for a minute. Then his jaw dropped – he rushed forward – he hugged me. ‘Country-Mouse!’ He hugged me again. ‘My man!’
He was from the Darkness too – and you feel proud when you see one of your own kind showing some ambition in life.
He drove me in the Qualis – his master’s Qualis – to the hotel, explaining on the way that he ran an informal ‘taxi’ service when the boss wasn’t around.
This hotel was in South Extension, Part Two – one of the best shopping areas in Delhi. Vitiligo-Lips locked his Qualis, smiled reassuringly, and walked with me up to the reception desk. A man in a white shirt and black bow tie was running his finger down the entries in a long ledger; leaving his finger on the book, he looked at me as Vitiligo-Lips explained things into his ear.
The manager shook his head. ‘A golden-haired woman – for him?’
He put his hands on the counter and leaned over so he could see me from the toes up.
‘For him?’
Vitiligo-Lips smiled. ‘Look here, the rich of Delhi have had all the golden-haired women they want; who knows what they’ll want next? Green-haired women from the moon. Now it’s going to be the working class that lines up for the white women. This fellow is the future of your business, I tell you – treat him well.’
The manager seemed uncertain for a moment; then he slammed the ledger shut and showed me an open palm. ‘Give me five hundred rupees ex...