The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god’s arse. Which god’s arse, though? There are so many choices. See, the Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods. Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from.

whose banks are full of rich, dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it?

Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere this river flows, that area is the Darkness.

know all about the Ganga, sir—when I was six or seven or eight years old (no one in my village knows his exact age), I went to the holiest spot on the banks of the Ganga—the city of Benaras. I remember going down the steps of a downhill road in the holy city of Benaras, at the rear of a funeral procession carrying my mother’s body to the Ganga.

smelled the river before I saw it: a stench of decaying flesh rising from my right. I sang louder: “ … the only truth!”

As the fire ate away the silk, a pale foot jerked out, like a living thing; the toes, which were melting in the heat, began to curl up, offering resistance to what was being done to them. Kusum shoved the foot into the fire, but it would not burn. My heart began to race. My mother wasn’t going to let them destroy her.

This mud was holding her back: this big, swelling mound of black ooze. She was trying to fight the black mud; her toes were flexed and resisting; but the mud was sucking her in, sucking her in. It was so thick, and more of it was being created every moment as the river washed into the ghat. Soon she would become part of the black mound and the pale-skinned dog would start licking her. And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras—this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here.

The crux. Nothing will get liberated here.

he liked to dip his beak into their backsides,

To break the law of his land—to turn bad news into good news—is the entrepreneur’s prerogative.

They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

Mr. Ashok’s face reappears now in my mind’s eye as it used to every day when I was in his service—reflected in my rearview mirror. It was such a handsome face that sometimes I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.

And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.

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.

Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

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.

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),

Why had my father never told me not to scratch my groin? Why had my father never taught me to brush my teeth in milky foam? Why had he raised me to live like an animal? Why do all the poor live amid such filth, such ugliness? Brush. Brush. Spit. Brush. Brush. Spit. If only a man could spit his past out so easily.

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

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

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 trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

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.

Now that she was gone, I knew that it was my duty to be like a wife to him.

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs. Yes, that’s the sad truth, Mr. Premier. The coop is guarded from the inside.

different—why my beak was getting stiff as I was driving. Because he was horny. And inside that sealed car, master and driver had somehow become one body that night.

“It seems like this is all I get to do in Delhi. Take money out of banks and bribe people. Is this what I came back to India for?”

“Balram, play Sting again. It’s the best music for a traffic jam.” “This driver knows who Sting is?” “Sure, he knows it’s my favorite CD. Show us the Sting CD, Balram. See—see—he knows Sting!”

“Why the hell did you give that beggar a rupee? What cheek! Turn the music off.” They really gave it to me that evening. Though their talk was normally in a mix of Hindi and English, the two brothers began speaking in chaste Hindi—entirely for my benefit.

That was when it struck me that there really was no difference between the two of them. They were both their father’s seed.

Go on, just look at the red bag, Balram—that’s not stealing, is it? I shook my head. And even if you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing. How so? I looked at the creature in the mirror. See—Mr. Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country—you!

each dark fruit said, You’ve already done it. In your heart you’ve already taken it.

I stared at the two puddles of red, spreading spit—and then: The

The left-hand puddle of spit seemed to say: But the right-hand puddle of spit seemed to

I looked at the red bag sitting in the center of my rearview mirror, like the exposed heart of the Honda City.

Two kinds of people use these machines: the children of the rich, or the fully grown adults of the poorer class, who remain all their lives children.

just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop.

A rooster was escaping from the coop! A hand was thrust out—I was picked up by the neck and shoved back into the coop.

A black dog was turning in circles behind me. A pink patch of skin—an open wound—glistened on its left butt; and the dog had twisted on itself in an attempt to gnaw at the wound. The wound was just out of reach of its teeth, but the dog was going crazy from pain—trying to attack the wound with its slavering mouth, it kept moving in mad, precise, pointless circles.

Symbolic of Balram's inability to do anything about his situation due to his emotional cathsarsis.

Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries—two Indias. The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr. Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place, Old Delhi, is the other end. Full of things the modern world forgot all about—rickshaws, old stone buildings, the Muslims.

Mr. Premier, I won’t be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That’s why, one day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.

Tell me, Muslim uncle, can a man make himself vanish with poetry?”

And the living buffalo walked on, without a master, drawing its load of death to the place where it knew it had to go. I walked along with that poor animal for a while, staring at the dead, stripped faces of the buffaloes. And then the strangest thing happened, Your Excellency—I swear the buffalo that was pulling the cart turned its face to me, and said in a voice not unlike my father’s: “Your brother Kishan was beaten to death. Happy?”

it took a big step forward and the cart passed by, full of dead skinned faces, which seemed to me at that moment the faces of my own family.

he fell down face-first into the ground, still laughing, exposing his stained arse to the stained sky of Delhi.

I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.

He’s going to faint!” I tried to shout back at her: “It’s not true: I’m not fainting!” I tried to show them all I was fine, but my feet were slipping. The ground beneath me was shaking. Something was digging its way toward me, and then claws tore out of mud and dug into my flesh and pulled me down into the dark earth.

“I can’t live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny.