Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

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.