The White Tiger

The Seventh Night

Can you hear that, Mr. Jiabao? I'll turn it up for you.

The health minister today announced a plan to eliminate malaria in Bangalore by the end of the year. He has instructed all city officials to work without holiday until malaria is a thing of the past. Forty-five million rupees will be allocated to malaria eradication.

In other news, the chief minister of the state today announced a plan to eliminate malnutrition in Bangalore in six months. He declared that there would be not one hungry child in the city by the end of the year. All officials are to work single-mindedly toward this goal, he declared. Five hundred million rupees will be allocated for malnutrition eradication.

In other news, the finance minister declared that this year's budget will include special incentives to turn our villages into high-technology paradises…

This is the kind of news they feed us on All India Radio, night after night: and tomorrow at dawn it'll be in the papers too. People just swallow this crap. Night after night, morning after morning. Amazing, isn't it?

But enough of the radio. It's turned off. Now let me look up to my chandelier for inspiration.

Wen!

Old friend!

Tonight we bring this glorious tale to a conclusion. As I was doing my yoga this morning-that's right, I wake up at eleven in the morning every day and go straight into an hour of yoga-I began reflecting on the progress of my story, and realized that I'm almost done. All that remains to be told is how I changed from a hunted criminal into a solid pillar of Bangalorean society.

Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga-may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools-that's my suggestion.

But back to the story, now.

First, I want to explain one thing about a fugitive's life. Being a man on the run isn't all about fear-a fugitive is entitled to his share of fun too.

That evening as I was sweeping up the pieces of the Johnnie Walker bottle in the parking lot, I worked out a plan for how I would get to Bangalore. It wouldn't be on a direct train-no. Someone might see me, and then the police would know where I had gone. Instead, I would transfer myself from train to train, zigzagging my way down to Bangalore.

Although my schedule was shot to pieces when I went to get Dharam-he was sleeping in the net, and I woke him up and said we were going on a holiday to the South, and dragged him out-and it was hard to keep my red bag in one hand and Dharam in the other hand (for the train station is a dangerous place for a little boy, you know-lots of shady characters around), still I began to move in this zigzag way south from Delhi.

On the third day of traveling like this, red bag in hand, I was at Hyderabad, waiting in line at the station tea shop to buy a cup of tea before my train left. (Dharam was guarding the seat in the compartment.) There was a gecko just above the tea shop, and I was looking at it with concern, hoping it would move before it was my turn to get tea.

The gecko turned to the left-it ran over a large piece of paper posted on the wall-it stood still for a moment, like that, then darted to the side.

That large piece of paper on the wall was a police poster-my police poster. It had already arrived here. I looked at it with a smile of pride.

A smile that lasted just a second. For some bizarre reason-you'll see how sloppily things get done in India -my poster had been stapled to another poster, of two guys from Kashmir -two terrorists wanted for bombing something or the other.

You'd almost think, looking at the posters, that I was a terrorist too. How annoying.

I realized that I was being watched. A fellow with his hands behind his back was looking at the poster, and at me, most intently. I began to tremble. I edged away from the poster, but I was too late. The moment he saw me leaving, he ran up to me, caught my wrist, and stared at my face.

Then he said, "What's it say? That poster you're reading?"

"Read it for yourself."

"Can't."

Now I understood why he had come running. It was the desperation of an illiterate man to get the attention of the literate man. From his accent I knew he was from the Darkness too.

"It's the wanted-men list for this week," I said. "Those two are terrorists. From Kashmir."

"What did they do?"

"They blew up a school. They killed eight children."

"And this fellow? The one with the mustache?" He tapped my photo with a knuckle of his right hand.

"He's the guy who caught them."

"How did he do that?"

To create the illusion I was reading the printing on the wall, I squinted at the two posters, and moved my lips.

"This fellow was a driver. Says here he was in his car, and these two terrorist guys came up to him."

"Then?"

"Says he pretended he didn't know they were terrorists, and took them for a ride around Delhi in his car. Then he stopped the car in a dark spot, and smashed a bottle and cut their necks with it." I slashed two necks with my thumb.

"What kind of bottle?"

"An English liquor bottle. They tend to be pretty solid."

"I know," he said. "I used to go to the English liquor shop for my master every Friday. He liked Smir-fone."

"Smir-noff," I said, but he wasn't listening. He was peering again at the photo in the poster.

Suddenly he put his hand on my shoulder.

"You know who this fellow in the poster looks like?"

"Who?" I asked.

He grinned.

"Me."

I looked at his face, and I looked at the photo.

"It's true," I said, slapping him on the back.

I told you: it could be the face of half the men in India.

And then, because I felt sorry for that poor illiterate, thinking he had just endured what my father must have endured at so many railway stations-being mocked and hoodwinked by strangers-I bought him a cup of tea before going back to the train.

Sir:

I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves.

For those four weeks I did the same thing again and again. I left the hotel-a small, seedy place near the train station that I had taken after leaving a deposit of five hundred rupees-every morning at eight and walked around with a bag full of cash in my hands for four hours (I dared not leave it in the hotel room) before returning for lunch.

Dharam and I ate together. What he did to keep himself amused in the mornings I don't know, but he was in good spirits. This was the first holiday he had had in his whole life. His smiles cheered me up.

Lunch was four rupees a plate. The food is good value in the south. It is strange food, though, vegetables cut up and served in watery curries. Then I went up to my room and slept. At four o'clock I came down and ordered a pack of Parle Milk biscuits and a tea, because I did not know yet how to drink the coffee.

I was eager to try coffee. You see, poor people in the north of this country drink tea, and poor people in the south drink coffee. Who decided that things should be like this, I don't know, but it's like this. So this was the first time I was smelling coffee on a daily basis. I was dying to try it out. But before you could drink it, you had to know how to drink it. There was an etiquette, a routine, associated with it that fascinated me. It was served in a cup set into a tumbler, and then it had to be poured in certain quantities and sipped at a certain speed from the tumbler. How the pouring was to be done, how the sipping was to be done, I did not know. For a while I only watched.

It took me a week to realize that everyone was doing it differently. One man poured all the coffee into his tumbler at once; another never used the tumbler at all.

They're all strangers here, I said to myself. They're all drinking coffee for the first time.

That was another of the attractions of Bangalore. The city was full of outsiders. No one would notice one more.

I spent four weeks in that hotel near the railway station, doing nothing. I admit there were doubts in my mind. Should I have gone to Mumbai instead? But the police would have thought of that at once-everyone goes to Mumbai in the films after they kill someone, don't they?

Calcutta! I should have gone there.

One morning Dharam said: "Uncle, you look so depressed. Let's go for a walk." We walked through a park where drunken men lay on benches amid wild overgrown weeds. We came out onto a broad road; on the other side of the road stood a huge stone building with a golden lion on top of it.

"What is this building, Uncle?"

"I don't know, Dharam. It must be where the ministers live in Bangalore."

On the gable of the building I saw a slogan:

GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK

"You're smiling, Uncle."

"You're right, Dharam. I am smiling. I think we'll have a good time in Bangalore," I said and I winked at him.

I moved out of the hotel and took a flat on rent. Now I had to make a living in Bangalore -I had to find out how I could fit into this city.

I tried to hear Bangalore 's voice, just as I had heard Delhi 's.

I went down M.G. Road and sat down at the Cafй Coffee Day, the one with the outdoor tables. I had a pen and a piece of paper with me, and I wrote down everything I overheard.

I completed that computer program in two and a half minutes.

An American today offered me four-hundred thousand dollars for my start-up and I told him, "That's not enough!"

Is Hewlett-Packard a better company than IBM?

Everything in the city, it seemed, came down to one thing.

Outsourcing. Which meant doing things in India for Americans over the phone. Everything flowed from it-real estate, wealth, power, sex. So I would have to join this outsourcing thing, one way or the other.

The next day I took an autorickshaw up to Electronics City. I found a banyan tree by the side of a road, and I sat down under it. I sat and watched the buildings until it was evening and I saw all the SUVs racing in; and then I watched until two in the morning, when the SUVs began racing out of the buildings.

And I thought, That's it. That's how I fit in.

Let me explain, Your Excellency. See, men and women in Bangalore live like the animals in a forest do. Sleep in the day and then work all night, until two, three, four, five o'clock, depending, because their masters are on the other side of the world, in America. Big question: how will the boys and girls-girls especially-get from home to the workplace in the late evening and then get back home at three in the morning? There is no night bus system in Bangalore, no train system like in Mumbai. The girls would not be safe on buses or trains anyway. The men of this city, frankly speaking, are animals.

That's where entrepreneurs come in.

The next thing I did was to go to a Toyota Qualis dealer in the city and say, in my sweetest voice, "I want to drive your cars." The dealer looked at me, puzzled.

I couldn't believe I had said that. Once a servant, always a servant: the instinct is always there, inside you, somewhere near the base of your spine. If you ever came to my office, Mr. Premier, I would probably try to press your feet at once.

I pinched my left palm. I smiled as I held it pinched and said-in a deep, gruff voice, "I want to rent your cars."

The last stage in my amazing success story, sir, was to go from being a social entrepreneur to a business entrepreneur. This part wasn't easy at all.

I called them all up, one after the other, the officers of all the outsourcing companies in Bangalore. Did they need a taxi service to pick up their employees in the evening? Did they need a taxi service to drop off their employees late at night?

And you know what they all said, of course.

One woman was kind enough to explain:

"You're too late. Every business in Bangalore already has a taxi service to pick up and drop off their employees at night. I'm sorry to tell you this."

It was just like starting out in Dhanbad-I got depressed. I lay in bed a whole day.

What would Mr. Ashok do? I wondered.

Then it hit me. I wasn't alone-I had someone on my side! I had thousands on my side!

You'll see my friends when you visit Bangalore -fat, paunchy men swinging their canes, on Brigade Road, poking and harassing vendors and shaking them down for money.

I'm talking of the police, of course.

The next day I paid a local to be a translator-you know, I'm sure, that the people of the north and the south in my country speak different languages-and went to the nearest police station. In my hand I had the red bag. I acted like an important man, and made sure the policemen saw the red bag by swinging it a lot, and gave them a business card I had just had printed. Then I insisted on seeing the big man there, the inspector. At last they let me into his office-the red bag had done the trick.

The big man sat at a huge desk, with shiny badges on his khaki uniform and the red marks of religion on his forehead. Behind him were three portraits of gods. But not the one I was looking for.

Oh, thank God. There was one of Gandhi too. It was in the corner.

With a big smile-and a namaste-I handed him the red bag. He opened it cautiously.

I said, via the translator, "Sir, I want to make a small offering of my gratitude to you."

It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.

"Gratitude for what?" the inspector asked in Hindi, peering into the bag with one eye closed.

"For all the good you are going to do me, sir."

He counted the money-ten thousand rupees-heard what I wanted, and asked for double. I gave him a bit more, and he was happy. I tell you, Mr. Premier, my poster was right there, the one that I had seen earlier, the whole time I was negotiating with him. The WANTED poster, with the dirty little photo of me.

Two days later, I called up the nice woman at the Internet company who had turned me down, and heard a shocking tale. Her taxi service had been disrupted. A police raid had discovered that most of the drivers did not have licenses.

"I'm so sorry, madam," I said. "I offer you my sympathies. In addition, I offer you my company. White Tiger Drivers."

"Do all your drivers have licenses?"

"Of course, madam. You can call the police and check."

She did just that, and called me back. I think the police must have put in a good word for me. And that was how I got my own-as they say in English-"start-up."

I was one of the drivers in the early days, but then I gave up. I don't really think I ever enjoyed driving, you know? Talking is much more fun. Now the start-up has grown into a big business. We've got sixteen drivers who work in shifts with twenty-six vehicles. Yes, it's true: a few hundred thousand rupees of someone else's money, and a lot of hard work, can make magic happen in this country. Put together my real estate and my bank holdings, and I am worth fifteen times the sum I borrowed from Mr. Ashok. See for yourself at my Web site. See my motto: "We Drive Technology Forward." In English! See the photos of my fleet: twenty-six shining new Toyota Qualises, all fully air-conditioned for the summer months, all contracted out to famous technology companies. If you like my SUVs, if you want your call-center boys and girls driven home in style, just click where it says CONTACT ASHOK SHARMA NOW.

Yes, Ashok! That's what I call myself these days. Ashok Sharma, North Indian entrepreneur, settled in Bangalore.

If you were sitting here with me, under this big chandelier, I would show you all the secrets of my business. You could stare at the screen of my silver Macintosh laptop and see photos of my SUVs, my drivers, my garages, my mechanics, and my paid-off policemen.

All of them belong to me-Munna, whose destiny was to be a sweet-maker!

You'll see photos of my boys too. All sixteen of them. Once I was a driver to a master, but now I am a master of drivers. I don't treat them like servants-I don't slap, or bully, or mock anyone. I don't insult any of them by calling them my "family," either. They're my employees, I'm their boss, that's all. I make them sign a contract and I sign it too, and both of us must honor that contract. That's all. If they notice the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I keep things clean, they'll go up in life. If they don't, they'll be drivers all their lives. I leave the choice up to them. When the work is done I kick them out of the office: no chitchat, no cups of coffee. A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.

Now, despite my amazing success story, I don't want to lose contact with the places where I got my real education in life.

The road and the pavement.

I walk about Bangalore in the evenings, or in the early mornings, just to listen to the road.

One evening when I was near the train station, I saw a dozen or so manual laborers gathered together in front of a wall and talking in low tones. They were speaking in a strange language; they were the locals of the place. I didn't have to understand their words to know what they were saying. In a city where so many had streamed in from outside, they were the ones left behind.

They were reading something on that wall. I wanted to see what it was, but they stopped their talking and crowded in front of the wall. I had to threaten to call the police before they parted and let me see what they had been reading.

It was a stenciled image of a pair of hands smashing its manacles:

THE GREAT SOCIALIST IS COMING TO BANGALORE

In a couple of weeks he arrived. He had a big rally here and gave a terrific speech, all about fire and blood and purging this country of the rich because there was going to be no fresh water for the poor in ten years because the world was getting hotter. I stood at the back and listened. At the end people clapped like crazy. There is a lot of anger in this town, that's for sure.

Keep your ears open in Bangalore -in any city or town in India -and you will hear stirrings, rumors, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens. One night, will they all join together-will they destroy the Rooster Coop?

Ha!

Maybe once in a hundred years there is a revolution that frees the poor. I read this in one of those old textbook pages people in tea stalls use to wrap greasy samosas with. See, only four men in history have led successful revolutions to free the slaves and kill their masters, this page said:

Alexander the Great.

Abraham Lincoln of America.

Mao of your country.

And a fourth man. It may have been Hitler, I can't remember.

But I don't think a fifth name is getting added to the list anytime soon.

An Indian revolution?

No, sir. It won't happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else-from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.

Instead of which, they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.

On the topic of shampoo advertisements, Mr. Premier, I must say that golden-colored hair sickens me now. I don't think it's healthy for a woman to have that color of hair. I don't trust the TV or the big outdoor posters of white women that you see all over Bangalore. I go from my own experience now, from the time I spend in five-star hotels. (That's right, Mr. Jiabao: I don't go to "red light districts" anymore. It's not right to buy and sell women who live in birdcages and get treated like animals. I only buy girls I find in five-star hotels.)

Based on my experience, Indian girls are the best.

(Well, second-best. I tell you, Mr. Jiabao, it's one of the most thrilling sights you can have as a man in Bangalore, to see the eyes of a pair of Nepali girls flashing out at you from the dark hood of an autorickshaw.)

In fact, the sight of these golden-haired foreigners-and you'll discover that Bangalore is full of them these days-has only convinced me that the white people are on the way out. All of them look so emaciated-so puny. You'll never see one of them with a decent belly. For this I blame the president of America; he has made buggery perfectly legal in his country, and men are marrying other men instead of women. This was on the radio. This is leading to the decline of the white man. Then white people use cell phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It's a known fact. Cell phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man's brain and balls at the same time. I overheard this at the bus stand one night. Until then I had been very proud of my Nokia, showing it to all the call-center girls I was hoping to dip my beak into, but I threw it away at once. Every call that you make to me, you have to make it on a landline. It hurts my business, but my brain is too important, sir: it's all that a thinking man has in this world.

White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they're up to-the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world.

And God save everyone else.

Now I should explain about that long interruption in my narrative two nights ago.

It will also allow me to illustrate the differences between Bangalore and Laxmangarh. Understand, Mr. Jiabao, it is not as if you come to Bangalore and find that everyone is moral and upright here. This city has its share of thugs and politicians. It's just that here, if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxmangarh, he doesn't even have this choice. That is the difference between this India and that India: the choice.

See, that night, I was sitting here, telling you my life's story, when my landline began to ring. Still chatting to you, I picked up the receiver and heard Mohammad Asif's voice.

"Sir, there's been some trouble."

That's when I stopped talking to you.

"What kind of trouble?" I asked. I knew Mohammad Asif had been on duty that night, so I braced myself for the worst.

There was a silence, and then he said, "I was taking the girls home when we hit a boy on a bicycle. He's dead, sir."

"Call the police at once," I said.

"But sir-I am at fault. I hit him, sir."

"That's exactly why you will call the police."

The police were there when I got to the scene with an empty van. The Qualis was parked by the side of the road; the girls were all still inside.

There was a body, a boy, lying on the ground, bloodied. The bike was on the ground, smashed and twisted.

Mohammad Asif was standing off to the side, shaking his head. Someone was yelling at him-yelling with the passion that you only see on the face of the relative of a dead man.

The policeman on the scene had stalled everyone. He nodded when he saw me. We knew each other well by now.

"That's the dead boy's brother, sir," he whispered to me. "He's in a total rage. I haven't been able to get him out of here."

I shook Mohammad Asif out of his trance. "Take my car and get these women home, first of all."

"Let my boy go," I told the policeman loudly. "He's got to get the people in there home. Whatever you want to deal with, you deal with me."

"How can you let him go?" the brother of the dead boy yelled at the policeman.

"Look here, son," I said, "I am the owner of this vehicle. Your fight is with me, not with this driver. He was following my orders, to drive as fast as he could. The blood is on my hands, not his. These girls need to go home. Come with me to the police station-I offer myself as your ransom. Let them go."

The policeman played along with me. "It's a good idea, son. We need to register the case at the station."

While I kept the brother engaged by pleading to his reason and human decency, Mohammad Asif and all the girls got into my van and slipped away. That was the first objective-to get the girls home. I have signed a contract with their company, and I honor all that I sign.

I went to the police station with the dead boy's brother. The policemen on night duty brought me coffee. They did not bring the boy coffee. He glared at me as I took the cup; he looked ready to tear me to pieces. I sipped.

"The assistant commissioner will be here in five minutes," one of the policemen said.

"Is he the one who's going to register the case?" the brother asked. "Because no one has done it so far."

I sipped some more.

The assistant commissioner who sat in the station was a man whom I had lubricated often. He had fixed a rival for me once. He was the worst kind of man, who had nothing in his mind but taking money from everyone who came to his office. Scum.

But he was my scum.

My heart lifted at the sight of him. He had come all the way to the station at night to help me out. There is honesty among thieves, as they say. He understood the situation immediately. Ignoring me, he went up to the brother and said, "What is it you want?"

"I want to file an F.I.R.," the brother said. "I want this crime recorded."

"What crime?"

"The death of my brother. By this man's"-pointing a finger at me-"vehicle."

The assistant commissioner looked at his watch. "My God, it's late. It's almost five o'clock. Why don't you go home now? We'll forget you were here. We'll let you go home."

"What about this man? Will you lock him up first?"

The assistant commissioner put his fingers together. He sighed. "See, at the time of the accident, your brother's bicycle had no working lights. That is illegal, you know. There are other things that will come out. I promise you, things will come out."

The boy stared. He shook his head, as if he hadn't heard correctly. "My brother is dead. This man is a killer. I don't understand what's going on here."

"Look here-go home. Have a bath. Pray to God. Sleep. Come back in the morning. We'll file the F.I.R. then, all right?"

The brother understood at last why I had brought him to the station-he understood at last that the trap had shut on him. Maybe he had only seen policemen in Hindi movies until now.

Poor boy.

"This is an outrage! I'll call the papers! I'll call the lawyers! I'll call the police!"

The assistant commissioner, who was not a man given to humor, allowed himself a little smile. "Sure. Call the police."

The brother stormed out, shouting more threats.

"The number plates will be changed tomorrow," the assistant commissioner said. "We'll say it was a hit-and-run. Another car will be substituted. We keep battered cars for this purpose here. You're very lucky that your Qualis hit a man on a bicycle."

I nodded.

A man on a bicycle getting killed-the police don't even have to register the case. A man on a motorbike getting killed-they would have to register that. A man in a car getting killed-they would have thrown me in jail.

"What if he goes to the papers?"

The assistant commissioner slapped his belly. "I've got every pressman in this town in here."

I did not hand him an envelope at once. There is a time and a place for these things. Now was the time to smile, and say thanks, and sip the hot coffee he had offered me; now was the time to chat with him about his sons-they're both studying in America, he wants them to come back and start an Internet company in Bangalore-and nod and smile and show him my clean, shining, fluoridated teeth. We sipped cup after cup of steaming coffee under a calendar that had the face of the goddess Lakshmi on it-she was showering gold coins from a pot into the river of prosperity. Above her was a framed portrait of the god of gods, a grinning Mahatma Gandhi.

A week from now I'll go to see him again with an envelope, and then he won't be so nice. He'll count the money in front of me and say, This is all? Do you know how much it costs to keep two sons studying in a foreign college? You should see the American Express bills they send me every month! And he'll ask for another envelope. Then another, then another, and so on. There is no end to things in India, Mr. Jiabao, as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You'll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.

The difference is everything.

The next day, sir, I called Mohammad Asif to the office. He was burning with shame over what he had done-I didn't need to reproach him.

And it was not his fault. Not mine either. Our outsourcing companies are so cheap that they force their taxi operators to promise them an impossible number of runs every night. To meet such schedules, we have to drive recklessly; we have to keep hitting and hurting people on the roads. It's a problem every taxi operator in this city faces. Don't blame me.

"Don't worry about it, Asif," I said. The boy looked so devastated.

I've come to respect Muslims, sir. They're not the brightest lot, except for those four poet fellows, but they make good drivers, and they're honest people, by and large, although a few of them seem to get this urge to blow trains up every year. I wasn't going to fire Asif over this.

But I did ask him to find out the address of the boy, the one we had killed.

He stared at me.

"Why go, sir? We don't have to fear anything from the parents. Please don't do this."

I made him find the address and I made him give it to me.

I took cash out of my locker in crisp new one-hundred-rupee notes; I put them in a brown envelope. I got into a car and drove myself to the place.

The mother was the one who opened the door. She asked me what I wanted, and I said, "I am the owner of the taxi company."

I didn't have to tell her which one.

She brought me a cup of coffee in a cup set in a metal tumbler. They have exquisite manners, these South Indians.

I poured the coffee into the tumbler, and sipped the correct way.

There was a photo of a young man, with a large jasmine garland around it, up on the wall.

I said nothing until I finished the coffee. Then I put the brown envelope on the table.

An old man had come into the room now, and he stood staring at me.

"First of all, I want to express my deep sorrow at the death of your son. Having lost relatives myself-so many of them-I know the pain that you have suffered. He should not have died."

"Second, the fault is mine. Not the driver's. The police have let me off. That is the way of this jungle we live in. But I accept my responsibility. I ask for your forgiveness."

I pointed to the brown envelope lying on the table.

"There are twenty-five thousand rupees in here. I don't give it to you because I have to, but because I want to. Do you understand?"

The old woman would not take the money.

But the old man, the father, was eyeing the envelope. "At least you were man enough to come," he said.

"I want to help your other son," I said. "He is a brave boy. He stood up to the police the other night. He can come and be a driver with me if you want. I will take care of him if you want."

The woman clenched her face and shook her head. Tears poured out of her eyes. It was understandable. She might have had the hopes for that boy that my mother had for me. But the father was amenable; men are more reasonable in such matters.

I thanked him for the coffee, bowed respectfully before the bereaved mother, and left.

Mohammad Asif was waiting for me at the office when I got back. He shook his head and said, "Why? Why did you waste so much money?"

That's when I thought, Maybe I've made a mistake. Maybe Asif will tell the other drivers I was frightened of the old woman, and they will think they can cheat me. It makes me nervous. I don't like showing weakness in front of my employees. I know what that leads to.

But I had to do something different; don't you see? I can't live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh.

I am in the Light now.

Now, what happens in your typical Murder Weekly story-or Hindi film, for that matter? A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. But then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him with bloody fingers, saying, Mur-der-er, mur-der-er.

Doesn't happen like that in real life. Trust me. It's one of the reasons I've stopped going to Hindi films.

There was just that one night when Granny came chasing me on a water buffalo, but it never happened again.

The real nightmare you get is the other kind. You toss about in the bed dreaming that you haven't done it-that you lost your nerve and let Mr. Ashok get away-that you're still in Delhi, still the servant of another man, and then you wake up.

The sweating stops. The heartbeat slows.

You did it! You killed him!

About three months after I came to Bangalore, I went to a temple and performed last rites there for all of them: Kusum, Kishan, and all my aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. I even said a prayer for the water buffalo. Who knows who has lived and who has not? And then I said to Kishan, and to Kusum, and to all of them: "Now leave me in peace."

And they have, sir, by and large.

One day I read a story in a newspaper: "Family of 17 Murdered in North Indian Village." My heart began to thump-seventeen? That can't be right-that's not mine. It was just one of those two-inch horror stories that appear every morning in the papers-they didn't give a name to the village. They just said it was somewhere in the Darkness-near Gaya. I read it again and again-seventeen! There aren't seventeen at home…I breathed out…But what if someone's had children…?

I crumpled that paper and threw it away. I stopped reading the newspaper for a few months after that. Just to be safe.

Look, here's what would have happened to them. Either the Stork had them killed, or had some of them killed, and the others beaten. Now, even if by some miracle he-or the police-didn't do that, the neighbors would have shunned them. See, a bad boy in one family casts the village's reputation into the dust. So the villagers would have forced them out-and they'd have to go to Delhi, or Calcutta, or Mumbai, to live under some concrete bridge, begging for their food, and without a hope for the future. That's not much better than being dead.

What's that you say, Mr. Jiabao? Do I hear you call me a cold-blooded monster?

There is a story I think I heard at a train station, sir, or maybe I read it on the torn page that had been used to wrap an ear of roasted corn I bought at the market-I can't remember. It was a story of the Buddha. One day a cunning Brahmin, trying to trick the Buddha, asked him, "Master, do you consider yourself a man or a god?"

The Buddha smiled and said, "Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping."

I'll give you the same answer to your question, Mr. Jiabao. You ask, "Are you a man or a demon?"

Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

I shouldn't think of them at all. My family.

Dharam certainly doesn't.

He's figured out what's happened by now. I told him at first we were going on a holiday, and I think he bought it for a month or two. He doesn't say a word, but sometimes I see him watching me out of the corner of his eye.

He knows.

At night we eat together, sitting across the table, watching each other and not saying much. After he's done eating, I give him a glass of milk. Two nights ago, after he finished his milk, I asked him, "Don't you ever think of your mother?"

Not a word.

"Your father?"

He smiled at me and then he said, "Give me another glass of milk, won't you, Uncle?"

I got up. He added, "And a bowl of ice cream too."

"Ice cream is for Sundays, Dharam," I said.

"No. It's for today."

And he smiled at me.

Oh, he's got it all figured out, I tell you. Little blackmailing thug. He's going to keep quiet as long as I keep feeding him. If I go to jail, he loses his ice cream and glasses of milk, doesn't he? That must be his thinking. The new generation, I tell you, is growing up with no morals at all.

He goes to a good school here in Bangalore -an English school. Now he pronounces English like a rich man's son. He can say "pizza" the way Mr. Ashok said it. (And doesn't he love eating pizza-that nasty stuff?) I watch with pride as he does his long division on clean white paper at the dinner table. All these things I never learned.

One day, I know, Dharam, this boy who is drinking my milk and eating my ice cream in big bowls, will ask me, Couldn't you have spared my mother? Couldn't you have written to her telling her to escape in time?

And then I'll have to come up with an answer-or kill him, I suppose. But that question is still a few years away. Till then we'll have dinner together, every evening, Dharam, last of my family, and me.

That leaves only one person to talk about.

My ex.

I thought there was no need to offer a prayer to the gods for him, because his family would be offering very expensive prayers all along the Ganga for his soul. What can a poor man's prayers mean to the 36,000,004 gods in comparison with those of the rich?

But I do think about him a lot-and, believe it or not, I do miss him. He didn't deserve his fate.

I should have cut the Mongoose's neck.

Now, Your Excellency, a great leap forward in Sino-Indian relations has been taken in the past seven nights. Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, as they say. I have told you all you need to know about entrepreneurship-how it is fostered, how it overcomes hardships, how it remains steadfast to its true goals, and how it is rewarded with the gold medal of success.

Sir: although my story is done, and my secrets are now your secrets, if you allow me, I would leave you with one final word.

(That's an old trick I learned from the Great Socialist-just when his audience is yawning, he says "one final word"-and then he goes on for two more hours. Ha!)

When I drive down Hosur Main Road, when I turn into Electronics City Phase 1 and see the companies go past, I can't tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens-they're all here in Bangalore. And so many more are on their way. There is construction everywhere. Piles of mud everywhere. Piles of stones. Piles of bricks. The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like?

Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams, policemen. But you never know. It may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can live like humans and animals can live like animals. A new Bangalore for a new India. And then I can say that, in my own way, I helped to make New Bangalore.

Why not? Am I not a part of all that is changing this country? Haven't I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making-the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga? True, there was the matter of murder-which is a wrong thing to do, no question about it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India won't clean my hands again.

But isn't it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our prime minister (including you, Mr. Jiabao), has killed someone or other on their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi -but that is glory, and not what I am after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man-and for that, one murder was enough.

What comes next for me? I know that's what you're wondering.

Let me put it this way. This afternoon, driving down M.G. Road, which is our posh shopping road with lots of American shops and technology companies, I saw the Yahoo! people putting up a new sign outside their office:

HOW BIG CAN YOU THINK?

I took my hands off the wheel and held them wider than an elephant's cock.

"That big, sister-fucker!"

I love my start-up-this chandelier, and this silver laptop, and these twenty-six Toyota Qualises-but honestly, I'll get bored of it sooner or later. I'm a first-gear man, Mr. Premier. In the end, I'll have to sell this start-up to some other moron-entrepreneur, I mean-and head into a new line. I'm thinking of real estate next. You see, I'm always a man who sees "tomorrow" when others see "today." The whole world will come to Bangalore tomorrow. Just drive to the airport and count the half-built glass-and-steel boxes as you pass them. Look at the names of the American companies that are building them. And when all these Americans come here, where do you think they're all going to sleep? On the road?

Ha!

Anywhere there's an empty apartment, I take a look at it, I wonder, How much can I get from an American for this in 2010? If the place has a future as the home of an American, I put a down payment on it at once. The future of real estate is Bangalore, Mr. Jiabao. You can join in the killing if you want-I'll help you out!

After three or four years in real estate, I think I might sell everything, take the money, and start a school-an English-language school-for poor children in Bangalore. A school where you won't be allowed to corrupt anyone's head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi-nothing but the facts of life for these kids. A school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore! We'd have this city at our knees, I tell you. I could become the Boss of Bangalore. I'd fix that assistant commissioner of police at once. I'd put him on a bicycle and have Asif knock him over with the Qualis.

All this dreaming I'm doing-it may well turn out to be nothing.

See, sometimes I think I will never get caught. I think the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr. Ashok-who, for all his numerous virtues, was not much of a master-to be weeded out, and exceptional servants like me to replace them. At such times, I gloat that Mr. Ashok's family can put up a reward of a million dollars on my head, and it will not matter. I have switched sides: I am now one of those who cannot be caught in India. At such moments, I look up at this chandelier, and I just want to throw my hands up and holler, so loudly that my voice would carry over the phones in the call-center rooms all the way to the people in America:

I've made it! I've broken out of the coop!

But at other times someone in the street calls out, "Balram," and I turn my head and think, I've given myself away.

Getting caught-it's always a possibility. There's no end to things in India, as Mr. Ashok used to say. You can give the police all the brown envelopes and red bags you want, and they might still screw you. A man in a uniform may one day point a finger at me and say, Time's up, Munna.

Yet even if all my chandeliers come crashing down to the floor-even if they throw me in jail and have all the other prisoners dip their beaks into me-even if they make me walk the wooden stairs to the hangman's noose-I'll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master's throat.

I'll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.

I think I am ready to have children, Mr. Premier.

Ha!

Yours forever,

Ashok Sharma

The White Tiger

Of Bangalore

boss@whitetiger-technologydrivers.com