The White Tiger

The Fourth Morning

For the Desk of…

But we don't really need these formalities anymore, do we, Mr. Jiabao?

We know each other by now. Plus we don't have the time for formalities, I'm afraid.

It'll be a short session today, Mr. Premier-I was listening to a program on the radio about this man called Castro who threw the rich out of his country and freed his people. I love listening to programs about Great Men-and before I knew it, it had turned to two a.m.! I wanted to hear more about this Castro, but for your sake, I've turned the radio off. I'll resume the story exactly where we left off.

O, democracy!

Now, Mr. Premier, the little take-home pamphlet that you will be given by the prime minister will no doubt contain a very large section on the splendor of democracy in India-the awe-inspiring spectacle of one billion people casting their votes to determine their own future, in full freedom of franchise, and so on and so forth.

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indians are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.

If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer!

I've got no problem with democracy, Mr. Jiabao. Far from it, I owe democracy a lot-even my birthday, in fact. This was back in the days when I was smashing coals and wiping tables at the tea shop in Laxmangarh. There was a clapping from the direction of the portrait of Gandhi-the old tea shop owner began shouting that all his workers had to leave whatever they were doing and march to the school.

A man in a government uniform sat at the teacher's desk in the schoolroom, with a long book and a black pen, and he was asking everyone two questions.

"Name."

"Balram Halwai."

"Age."

"No age."

"No date of birth?"

"No, sir, my parents didn't make note of it."

He looked at me and said, "I think you're eighteen. I think you turned eighteen today. You just forgot, didn't you?"

I bowed to him. "That's correct, sir. I forgot. It was my birthday today."

"Good boy."

And then he wrote that down in his book and told me to go away. So I got a birthday from the government.

I had to be eighteen. All of us in the tea shop had to be eighteen, the legal age to vote. There was an election coming up, and the tea shop owner had already sold us. He had sold our fingerprints-the inky fingerprints which the illiterate person makes on the ballot paper to indicate his vote. I had overheard this from a customer. This was supposed to be a close election; he had got a good price for each one of us from the Great Socialist's party.

Now, the Great Socialist had been the boss of the Darkness for a decade at the time of this election. His party's symbol, a pair of hands breaking through handcuffs-symbolizing the poor shaking off the rich-was imprinted in black stencils on the walls of every government office in the Darkness. Some of the customers at the tea shop said the Great Socialist started off as a good man. He had come to clean things up, but the mud of Mother Ganga had sucked him in. Others said he was dirty from the start, but he had just fooled everyone and only now did we see him for what he was. Whatever the case was, no one seemed able to vote him out of power. He had ruled the Darkness, winning election after election, but now his rule was weakening.

You see, a total of ninety-three criminal cases-for murder, rape, grand larceny, gun-running, pimping, and many other such minor offenses-are pending against the Great Socialist and his ministers at the present moment. Not easy to get convictions when the judges are judging in Darkness, yet three convictions have been delivered, and three of the ministers are currently in jail but continue to be ministers. The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.

Now that the date for the elections had been set, and declared on radio, election fever had started spreading again. These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in. The Great Socialist's enemies seemed to be stronger this election than at the last one. They had made pamphlets, and went about on buses and trucks with microphones, and announced they were going to topple him over and drag the River Ganga and everyone who lived on its banks out of the Darkness and into the Light.

At the tea shop, the gossip grew furious. People sipped their tea and discussed the same things again and again.

Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

One morning I saw a policeman writing a slogan on the wall outside the temple with a red paintbrush:

DO YOU WANT GOOD ROADS, CLEAN WATER, GOOD

HOSPITALS? THEN VOTE OUT THE GREAT SOCIALIST!

For years there was a deal between the landlords and the Great Socialist-everyone in the village knew about this-but this year something had gone wrong with the deal, so the four Animals had joined together and started a party of their own.

And below the slogan the policeman wrote:

ALL INDIA SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE FRONT

(LENINIST FACTION)

Which was the name of the landlords' party.

In the weeks before the elections, trucks bumped up and down the dirty street of Laxmangarh, full of young men holding microphones: "Stand up to the rich!"

Vijay, the bus conductor, was always on one of these trucks. He had quit his old job and joined politics now. That was the thing about Vijay; each time you saw him he had done better for himself. He was a born politician. He wore a red headband to show that he was one of the Great Socialist's supporters, and made speeches every morning in front of the tea shop. The landlords brought in trucks full of their own supporters in retaliation. And from these trucks men shouted out, "Roads! Water! Hospitals! Vote out the Great Socialist!"

A week before the elections, both sides stopped sending out their trucks. I heard what had happened while cleaning up a table.

The Animals' bluff had worked. The Great Socialist had agreed to cut a deal with them.

Vijay bowed down and touched the feet of the Stork at a big rally in front of the tea shop. It seemed that all differences had been patched, and the Stork had been named the president of the Laxmangarh branch of the Great Socialist's party. Vijay was to be his deputy.

Now the rallies were done. The priest celebrated a special pooja to pray for the Great Socialist's victory; mutton biryani was distributed on paper plates in front of the temple; and in the evening, there was free hooch for all.

Lots of dust and policemen came into the village next morning. One officer read out voting instructions in the marketplace.

Whatever was being done, was being done for our own good. The Great Socialist's enemies would try and steal the election from us, the poor, and take the power away from us, the poor, and put those shackles back on our hands that he, the Great Socialist, had so lovingly taken off our hands. Did we understand? And then, in a cloud of dust, the police drove off.

"It's the way it always is," my father told me that night. "I've seen twelve elections-five general, five state, two local-and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I've heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves-isn't that something?"

On the day of the election, one man went mad.

This happens every time, at every election in the Darkness.

One of my father's colleagues, a small dark-skinned man whom no one had taken any notice of until now, was surrounded by a mob of rickshaw-pullers, including my father. They were trying to dissuade him, but only halfheartedly.

They had seen this thing happening before. They wouldn't be able to stop this man now.

Every now and then, even in a place like Laxmangarh, a ray of sunlight will break through. All these posters and speeches and slogans on the wall, maybe they get into a man's head. He declares himself a citizen of the democracy of India and he wants to cast his vote. That was where this rickshaw-puller had got to. He declared himself free of the Darkness: he had made his Benaras that day.

He began walking straight to the voting booth at the school. "I'm supposed to stand up to the rich, aren't I?" he shouted. "Isn't that what they keep telling us?"

When he got there, the Great Socialist's supporters had already put up the tally of votes outside on a blackboard: they had counted 2,341 votes in that booth. Everyone had voted for the Great Socialist. Vijay the bus conductor was up on a ladder, hammering into the wall a banner with the Great Socialist's symbol (the hands breaking their shackles). The slogan on the banner said:

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST ON HIS

UNANIMOUS VICTORY FROM LAXMANGARH!

Vijay dropped the hammer, the nails, and the banner when he saw the rickshaw-puller.

"What are you doing here?"

"Voting," he shouted back. "Isn't it the election today?"

I cannot confirm what happened next, even though I was only a few feet behind him. A big crowd had gathered to watch him from a distance, but when the policeman charged at us, we turned and ran in a stampede. So I never saw what they did to that brave, mad man.

I heard about it the next day, while pretending to scratch a dirty spot out of a tabletop. Vijay and a policeman had knocked the rickshaw-puller down, and they had begun beating him; they hit him with their sticks, and when he thrashed at them they kicked him. They took turns. Vijay hit him and the policeman stamped on his face and then Vijay did it again. And after a while the body of the rickshaw-puller stopped wriggling and fighting back, but they kept stamping on him, until he had been stamped back into the earth.

If I may go back for a moment to that WANTED poster, Your Excellency. Being called a murderer: fine, I have no objection to that. It's a fact: I am a sinner, a fallen human. But to be called a murderer by the police!

What a fucking joke.

Here's a little souvenir of your Indian visit to keep with you. Balram Halwai is a vanished man, a fugitive, someone whose whereabouts are unknown to the police, right?

Ha!

The police know exactly where to find me. They will find me dutifully voting on election day at the voting booth in the school compound in Laxmangarh in Gaya District, as I have done in every general, state, and local election since I turned eighteen.

I am India 's most faithful voter, and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth.

Now, though the elections were due soon in Dhanbad, life went on as ever within the high walls of the Stork's house. He sighed as his legs were pressed in warm water; games of cricket and badminton went on around him; and I washed and cleaned the two Pomeranian dogs faithfully.

Then one day a familiar face turned up at the gate. Vijay, the bus conductor from Laxmangarh. My childhood hero had a new uniform this time. He was dressed all in white, and wore a white Nehru cap on his head, and had rings of solid gold on eight of his fingers!

Public service had been good to him.

I waited by the gate and watched. The Stork himself came out to see Vijay, and bowed down before him, a landlord bowing before a pigherd's son! The marvels of democracy!

Two days later, the Great Socialist came to the house.

The entire household was abuzz because of the visit. Mr. Ashok stood at the gate, waiting with a garland of jasmine flowers. His brother and his father were by his side.

A car came to the gate, its door opened, and then the face I had seen on a million election posters since I was a boy emerged-I saw the puffy cheeks, the spiky white hair, the thick gold earrings.

Vijay was wearing his red headband today, and holding up the flag with the breaking-shackles symbol. He shouted, "Long live the Great Socialist!"

The great man folded his palms and bowed all around him. He had one of those either/or faces that all great Indian politicians have. This face says that it is now at peace-and you can be at peace too if you follow the owner of that face. But the same face can also say, with a little twitch of its features, that it has known the opposite of peace: and it can make this other fate yours too, if it so wishes.

Mr. Ashok put the garland on the great man's thick, bull-like neck.

"My son," the Stork said. "Returned from America recently."

The Great Socialist squeezed Mr. Ashok's cheeks. "Good. We need more boys to come back and build India into a superpower."

And then they went into the house, and all the doors and windows were closed. After a while, the Great Socialist came out into the courtyard, followed by the old man, the Mongoose, and Mr. Ashok.

I was trying to overhear them, and so pretended to be sweeping the ground, while inching closer and closer to them. I had swept myself right into hearing distance when the Great Socialist tapped me on the back.

"What's your name, son?" he asked.

Then he said, "Your employers are trying to bugger me, Balram. What do you say to this?"

Mr. Ashok looked stunned. The Stork simpered.

"A million and a half is a lot, sir. We'll be happy to come to a settlement with you."

The Great Socialist waved his hands as if dismissing that plea.

"Bullshit. You've got a good scam going here-taking coal for free from the government mines. You've got it going because I let it happen. You were just some little village landlord when I found you-I brought you here-I made you what you are today: and by God, you cross me, and you'll go back there into that village. I said a million and a fucking half, and I mean a million and…"

He had to stop-he had been chewing paan, and now his mouth had filled up with red spittle, which was beginning to dribble out. He turned to me and made the shape of a bowl with his hands. I rushed to the Honda City to get the spittoon.

When I came back with the spittoon, he coolly turned to the Mongoose and said, "Son, won't you hold the spittoon for me?"

The Mongoose refused to move, so the Great Socialist took the spittoon from my hands and held it out.

"Take it, son."

The Mongoose took it.

Then the Great Socialist spat into the spittoon, three times.

The Mongoose's hands trembled; his face turned black with shame.

"Thank you for that, son," the Great Socialist said, wiping his lips. He turned to me and tickled his forehead. "Where was I, now?"

There you have it. That was the positive side of the Great Socialist. He humiliated all our masters-that's why we kept voting him back in.

That night, on the pretext again of sweeping the courtyard, I got close to the Stork and his sons; they were sitting on a bench, holding glasses of golden liquor and talking. Mukesh Sir had just finished; the old man shook his head.

"We can't do that, Mukesh. We need him."

"I'm telling you, Father. We don't anymore. We can go straight to Delhi. We know people there now."

"I agree with Mukesh, Father. We shouldn't let him treat us like this anymore-like we're his slaves."

"Quiet, Ashok. Let Mukesh and me discuss this."

I swept the courtyard twice over, and listened. Then I began tightening Pinky Madam's sagging badminton net, so I could stay near them.

But a pair of suspicious Nepali eyes spotted me out: "Don't loiter in the courtyard. Go and sit in your room and wait for the masters to call you."

"All right."

Ram Bahadur glared at me, so I said, "All right, sir."

(Servants, incidentally, are obsessed with being called "sir" by other servants, sir.)

The next morning, when I was blow-drying Puddles and Cuddles after having shampooed them, Ram Bahadur came up to me, and said, "Have you ever been to Delhi?"

I shook my head.

"They're going to Delhi in a week. Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam. They're going to leave for three months."

I got down on my knees and directed the blow dryer under Cuddles's legs, pretending not to be interested, and asked, as casually as I could, "Why?"

The Nepali shrugged. Who knew? We were just servants. One thing, though, he did know.

"Only one driver will be taken along. And this driver will get three thousand rupees a month-that's how much they'll pay him in Delhi."

The blow dryer fell out of my hand. "Serious? Three thousand?"

"Yes."

"Will they take me along, sir?" I got up and asked pleadingly, "Can't you make them take me?"

"They'll take Ram Persad," he said with a sneer of his Nepali lips. "Unless…"

"Unless?"

He minted coins with his fingers.

Five thousand rupees-and he would tell the Stork that I was the man to be taken along to Delhi.

"Five thousand-where will I get such money? My family steals my whole paycheck!"

"Oh, well. In that case, it'll be Ram Persad. As for you"-he pointed to Cuddles and Puddles-"you'll be cleaning the dogs for the rest of your life, I guess."

I woke up, both nostrils burning.

It was still dark.

Ram Persad was up. He was sitting on his bed, chopping onions on a wooden board: I heard the tack, tack, tack of his knife hitting the board.

What the hell is he chopping onions so early for? I thought, turning to a side and closing my eyes again. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the tack, tack, tack of the knife hitting the board insisted:

This man has a secret.

I stayed awake, while the man on the bed chopped onions. I tried to figure it out.

What had I noticed about Ram Persad in the past few days?

For one thing, his breath had gone bad. Even Pinky Madam complained. He had suddenly stopped eating with us, either inside the house or outside. Even on Sundays, when there would be chicken, Ram Persad would refuse to eat with us, saying he had already done so, or he wasn't hungry, or…

The chopping of the onions continued, and I kept adding thought to thought in the dark.

I watched him all day. Toward evening, as I was expecting, he began moving to the gate.

From my conversation with the cook, I had learned that Ram Persad had started to head out of the house at the same time every evening. I followed at a distance. He went into a part of the city I had never seen before, and walked around a few alleys. At one point I distinctly saw him turn around, as if to make sure no one was following him; then he darted.

He had stopped in front of a two-story building. The wall had a large metal grille divided into square units; a series of small black taps jutted out from the wall below the grille. He bent down to a tap, washed his face and gargled and spat. Then he took off his sandals. Shoes and sandals had been folded and stuffed into the squares of the grille-he did the same with his sandals. Then he went into the building and closed the door.

I slapped my forehead.

What a fool I'd been! "It's Ramadan! They can't eat and drink during the day."

I ran back to the house and found the Nepali. He was standing at the gate, rubbing his teeth with a twig broken from a neem tree-which is what many poor people in my country do, Mr. Premier, when they want to clean their teeth.

"I just saw a film, sir."

"Fuck off."

"A great film, sir. Lots of dancing. Hero was a Muslim. Name of Mohammad Mohammad."

"Don't waste my time, boy. Go clean the car if you've got nothing to do."

"Now, this Mohammad Mohammad was a poor, honest, hardworking Muslim, but he wanted a job at the home of an evil, prejudiced landlord who didn't like Muslims-so, just to get a job and feed his starving family, he claimed to be a Hindu! And took the name of Ram Persad."

The twig fell out of the Nepali's mouth.

"And you know how he managed to pull this off? Because the Nepali guard at this house, whom the masters trusted absolutely, and who was supposed to check up on Ram Persad's background, was in on the scam!"

Before he could run, I caught him by the collar. Technically, in these servant-versus-servant affairs, that is all you need to do to indicate: "I have won." But if you're going to do these things, it's better to do them in style, right? So I slapped him too.

I was servant number one from now on in this household.

I ran back to the mosque. Namaz must have ended by now. And indeed, Ram Persad-or Mohammad or whatever his name really was-came out of the mosque, took his sandals down from the window, slapped them on the ground, wriggled his feet into them, and began walking out. He saw me-I winked at him-and he knew that the game was up.

I did the needful in a few precise words.

Then I went back to the house. The Nepali was watching me from behind the black bars. I took his key chain from him and put it in my pocket. "Get me some tea. And biscuits." I pinched his shirt. "And I want your uniform too. Mine is getting old."

I slept in the bed that night.

In the morning someone came into the room. It was ex-driver number one. Without a word to me, he began packing. All his things fitted into one small bag.

I thought, What a miserable life he's had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job as a driver-and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one than I will ever be. Part of me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, You go and be a driver in Delhi. You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother.

I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep.

When I woke up, he was gone-he had left all his images of gods behind, and I scooped them into a bag. You never know when those things can come in handy.

In the evening, the Nepali came to me with a grin on his face-the same fake servant's grin he showed to the Stork all day long. He told me that, since Ram Persad had left their service without a word, I would be driving Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam to Delhi. He had personally-and forcefully-recommended my name to the Stork.

I went back to my bed-all mine now-stretched out on it, and said, "Great. Now clean those webs off the ceiling, won't you?"

He glared at me, but said nothing, and went away to get a broom. I shouted:

"-Sir!"

From then on, every morning, it was hot Nepali tea, and some nice sugar biscuits, on a porcelain platter.

Kishan came to the gate that Sunday and heard the news from me. I thought he was going to bugger me for how abruptly I had left them at the village, but he was overcome with joy-his eyes were full of tears. Someone in his family was going to make it out of the Darkness and into New Delhi!

"It's just like our mother always said. She knew you were going to make it."

Two days later, I was driving Mr. Ashok, the Mongoose, and Pinky Madam to Delhi in the Honda City. It wasn't hard to find the way-I just had to follow the buses. For there were buses and jeeps all along the road-and they were bursting with passengers who packed the insides, and hung out the doors, and even got on the roofs. They were all headed from the Darkness to Delhi. You'd think the whole world was migrating.

Each time we passed by one of these buses, I had to grin; I wished I could roll down the window and yell at them, I'm going to Delhi in a car-an air-conditioned car!

But I'm sure they saw the words in my eyes.

Around noon, Mr. Ashok tapped me on the shoulder.

From the start, sir, there was a way in which I could understand what he wanted to say, the way dogs understand their masters. I stopped the car, and then moved to my left, and he moved to his right, and our bodies passed each other (so close that the stubble on his face scraped my cheeks like the shaving brush that I use every morning, and the cologne from his skin-a lovely, rich, fruity cologne-rushed into my nostrils for a heady instant, while the smell of my servant's sweat rubbed off onto his face), and then he became driver and I became passenger.

He started the car.

The Mongoose, who had been reading a newspaper the whole time, now saw what had happened.

"Don't do this, Ashok."

He was an old-school master, the Mongoose. He knew right from wrong.

"You're right-this feels weird," Mr. Ashok said.

The car came to a stop. Our bodies crossed each other again, our scents were exchanged once more, and I was again the driver and servant, and Mr. Ashok was again the passenger and master.

We reached Delhi late at night.

It is not yet three, I could go on a little while longer. But I want to stop, because from here on I have to tell you a new kind of story.

Remember, Mr. Premier, the first time, perhaps as a boy, when you opened the hood of a car and looked into its entrails? Remember the colored wires twisting from one part of the engine to the other, the black box full of yellow caps, enigmatic tubes hissing out steam and oil and grease everywhere-remember how mysterious and magical everything seemed? When I peer into the portion of my story that unfolds in New Delhi, I feel the same way. If you ask me to explain how one event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my master to thinking that-I will tell you that I myself don't understand these things. I cannot be certain that the story, as I will tell it, is the right story to tell. I cannot be certain that I know exactly why Mr. Ashok died.

It will be good for me to stop here.

When we meet again, at midnight, remind me to turn the chandelier up a bit. The story gets much darker from here.