Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

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.