The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia. These are the only three nations I admire.

baked. The country is full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy”—he pointed at me—“to characters like these. That’s the whole tragedy of this country.” He sighed. “All right, Balram, start the car again.”

Damn

I didn’t like the way he had spoken about me, but he was right.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling.

and you know how we Indians just take to technology like ducks to water.

Is it racist if an Indian says it

It was true. I’d never been given a name. “Didn’t your mother name you?”

That’s considered cool now

a jet of red paan splashed the ground of the classroom. He licked his lips.

Gross

Ram. Wait—don’t we have a Ram in this class? I don’t want any confusion. It’ll be Balram. You know who Balram was, don’t you?” “No, sir.” “He was the sidekick of the god Krishna. Know what my name is?”

He shrugged. “If it’s what he wants, then we’ll call you that.”

What the hell?

Now, what kind of place is it where people forget to name their children? Referring back to the poster: The suspect comes from the village of Laxmangarh, in the…

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies,

Those who live in this place call it the Darkness.

Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, an...

Everywhere this river flows, that area is the Darkness. One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.

Hmmm

Mr. Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.

in the district of Gaya. This is a famous district—world-famous.

when examined with tape measure and scales, to match up to the minimum height and weight standards set by the United Nations and other organizations whose treaties our prime minister has signed and whose forums he so regularly and pompously attends. Ha! Electricity poles—defunct. Water tap—broken. Children—too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid

At the doorway to my house, you’ll see the most important member of my family. The water buffalo.

Men and boys sleep in another corner of the house.

(For this land, India, has never been free. First the Muslims, then the British bossed us around. In 1947 the British left, but only a moron would think that we became free then.)

“Blue checkered polyester shirt, orange polyester trousers” . . . er, well, I’d like to deny those too, but unfortunately they’re correct. Those are the kinds of clothes, sir, that would appeal to a servant’s eye. And

Mr. Vikram Halwai, rickshaw-puller—thank you! My father was a poor man, but he was a man

they’re Communists, just like you, and go around shooting rich people on principle—the

The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen. My uncles also did backbreaking work, but they

My father could have worked with them; he could have worked with the landlords’ mud, but he chose not to. He chose to fight

up and flung it out the door. My father sat panting against the mural of the Lord Buddha surrounded by the gentle animals. When he caught his breath, he said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine—at least one—should live like a man.” What it meant to live like a man was a mystery.

We admired his bus-company-issue khaki uniform, his silver whistle and the red cord from which it hung down from his pocket. Everything about him said: he had made it in life.

Vijay’s family were pigherds, which meant they were the lowest of the low, yet he had made it up in life. Somehow he had befriended a politician.

…in the Dhaula Kuan area of New Delhi, on the night of September 2, near the ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel…

I like how he tells the story by picking apart the description of the poster, reminding while we think that the pster tells us what we need to know, theres so much more to it between the lines, to the point where the poster is actually lying to us.

Without the color, the information is all but useless, isn’t it? No wonder I was never spotted.

Open any newspaper in this country, and it’s always this crap: “A certain interested party has been spreading rumors,” or “A certain religious community doesn’t believe in contraception.” I hate that.

You always ought to talk about a man’s education when describing him.

But we never ever saw rotis, or yellow daal, or pickles, and everyone knew why: the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money. The teacher had a legitimate excuse to steal the money—he said he hadn’t been paid his salary in six months.

You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.

“He’s the Great Socialist.” “Good. And what is the Great Socialist’s message for little children?” I had seen the answer on the wall outside the temple: a policeman had written it one day in red paint. “Any boy in any village can grow up to become the prime minister of India. That is his message to little children all over this land.”

what is the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation?” I thought about it and said: “The white tiger.”

He had a parting gift for me—a book. I remember the title very well: Lessons for Young Boys from the Life of Mahatma Gandhi.

that’s how I became the White Tiger. There will be a fourth and a fifth name too, but that’s late in the story.

Because we were the girl’s family, we were screwed. We had to give the boy a new bicycle, and cash, and a silver bracelet, and arrange for a big wedding—which we did. Mr. Premier, you probably know how we Indians enjoy our weddings—I

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

I’ll tell you how I gave myself a better education at the tea shop than I could have got at any school.

Many poor say this

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

Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.

Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—possessive, even.

geez dude

You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse.

duuuude....

Kishan explained the situation to him. The old driver asked, “What caste are you?” “Halwai.” “Sweet-makers,” the

only a boy from the warrior castes can manage that. You need to have aggression in your blood. Muslims, Rajputs, Sikhs—they’re

They were slim and athletic—for men who like the Western kind. In this corner, sitting in the threshold of an open house, the “traditionals”—fat, chunky types in saris, for those who like value for their money. There were eunuchs in one window—teenagers in the next window. The face of a small boy appeared from between a woman’s legs and then vanished.

“Halwai.” “Halwai . . .” He turned to the small dark man. “What caste is that, top or bottom?” And I knew that my future depended on the answer to this question.

I should explain a thing or two about caste. Even Indians get confused about this word, especially educated Indians in the cities. They’ll make a mess of explaining it to you. But it’s simple, really. Let’s start with me. See: Halwai, my name, means “sweet-maker.”