The White Tiger

“‘The thing is, he probably has...what, two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-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.’”

Discussing Balram with Pinky Madam, Ashok finds Balram’s answers to his questions foolish, positing that India’s problems stem from “half-baked” voters like Balram. This image of people as clay transforms once Balram talks about his own education, as he sees his uneducated status as potential. Ashok calls out Balram’s supposed ignorance, ignoring that his family’s wealth robs those in the Darkness of opportunities.

“Now, being praised by the school inspector in front of my teacher and fellow students, being called a ‘White Tiger,’ being given a book, and being promised a scholarship: all this constituted good news, and the one infallible law of life in the Darkness is that good news becomes bad news—and soon.”

After Balram answers the school inspector’s questions correctly and receives a book, he observes that the inspector’s promise of a scholarship must be balanced with bad news. In the Darkness, Balram notes that all good things turn bad; for example, the Stork demands that he be paid back a loan from Balram’s family, forcing Balram to leave school.

“Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body must be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.”

As Balram considers his murder of Ashok, he links himself to Ashok through the intimacy of death, connecting his killing of the Stork’s son to birth. He depicts Ashok’s corpse with imagery borrowed from the funeral pyre of his mother, whose body also seems to fight the fire and grasp at life.

"There was money in the air in Dhanbad. I saw buildings with sides made entirely of glass, and men with gold in their teeth. And all this glass and gold—all of it came from the coal pits. Outside the town, there was coal, more coal than you would find anywhere else in the Darkness, maybe more coal than anywhere else in the world. Miners came to eat at my tea shop—I always gave them the best service, because they had the best tales to tell.”

As Balram moves away from the Darkness toward Dhanbad, he witnesses the intertwined relationship between the Darkness and the Light that characterizes India. Coal is a physical reminder of both the Darkness and the landlords’ wealth, as this material can be refined into glass and gold. The glamor of the Light depends on the raw nature of the Darkness.

“I saw Kusum grinning and rubbing her forearms and talking of my marriage. She served me lunch herself. As she ladled the curry onto my plate—she had made chicken, just for me—she said, ‘We’ll fix up the wedding for later this year, okay? We’ve already found someone for you—a nice plump duck. The moment she has her menstrual cycle, she can come here.’ There was red, curried bone and flesh in front of me—and it seemed to me that they had served me flesh from Kishan’s own body on that plate.”

As Balram returns to Laxmangarh driving Ashok and Pinky Madam, he visits his grandmother Kusum, who tries to convince him to marry, knowing she would be able to take most of his wife’s dowry. Reducing his choice of wife to a “bird” made fat for slaughter, Kusum serves a chicken dish that reminds Balram of his married brother. Using this imagery, Balram recognizes that his family sacrifices themselves through marriage for Kusum’s greed and control.

“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.”

As Balram observes the Great Socialist, he notes the politician’s dual nature, his face that promises peace or peril. Claiming that the Great Socialist’s face belongs to all “great Indian politicians,” Balram frames him as an amalgamation of Indian politicians, capable of great kindness and great cruelty.

“From the start, sir, there was a way in which I could understand what he wanted to say, the way dogs understand their masters.”

Likening his rapport with Ashok to a dog’s loyalty to its owner, Balram stresses not only the depth of their connection, but the difference between servant and employer, animal and human. Theirs is an inherently unequal relationship.

“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.”

Attempting to explain why his connection to Ashok faltered and escalated to murder, Balram compares the complex series of events to a car engine’s wires, tubes, and oil. This metaphor is especially fitting, as Balram uses a car-related excuse to trick and kill Ashok.

“There—I’m revealing the secret to a successful escape. The police searched for me in darkness: but I hid myself in light.”

In trying to explain how the police missed him, Balram refers to both literal and metaphorical darkness—because he was born in the Darkness near the River Ganga (Ganges), the police assume he will return home. They expect him, as a servant, to hide. He instead embraces literal and metaphorical Light, choosing to move to Bangalore, in an apartment filled with chandeliers.

“He yelled it so hard that the spit burst from his mouth like a fountain and his knees were trembling.”

A poor, sandal-wearing man attempts to enter a mall, but is stopped by a guard for wearing the wrong shoes; he then yells whether he’s human or not. Likened to a fountain, the man embodies both the strength and weakness of the poor in Delhi, with the force of his yell and shaking knees.

“The streetlights were too dim, and the object—a large black lump—was too far behind us already to be seen clearly. There was no other car in sight. No other living human being in sight. As if in slow motion, her hands moved back from the wheel and covered her ears.”

After Ashok offers to take Pinky Madam to a TGI Friday’s in Delhi, they get drunk and Pinky Madam drives. In her inebriated state, Pinky Madam accidentally murders a child. Although the street is deserted, she covers her ears, as if to deny the murder. Her crime is no different from those of Ashok’s family: The Stork makes money in coal, and the dead child resembles a piece of coal, a “large black lump.” The entire family’s pleasure and business prove fatal to the poor.

“The answer to the first question is that the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice, the subject of no doubt considerable space in the pamphlet that the prime minister will hand over to you, the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.”

As Balram describes the systems of control that trap servants, he links them to the image of a Rooster Coop, where chickens fight among themselves for room, rather than escape. The Indian family as a concept supplies one of the locks on this metaphorical coop—rather than risk the elimination of a family, a servant is taught and pressured to remain faithful and sacrifice for them.

“Even at night, the construction work goes on in Gurgaon—big lights shine down from towers, and dust rises from pits, scaffolding is being erected, and men and animals, both shaken from their sleep and bleary and insomniac, go around and around carrying concrete rubble or bricks.”

Balram describes the constant construction in a fashionable section of Delhi as men and animals working late into the night. The framing of men and animals as experiencing the same labor and lack of sleep, Balram shows how Delhi blurs the boundary between animal and human.

“How long I sat that evening in the car with my eyes closed and legs crossed like the Buddha I don’t know, but the giggling and scratching noise made me open my eyes. All the other drivers had gathered around me—one of them was scratching the glass with his fingernails. Someone had seen me in the lotus position inside the locked car. They were gaping at me as if I were something in a zoo.”

Balram suggests meditation and yoga to help Ashok move on from Pinky Madam’s absence, practices which he enjoys himself. However, the other servants’ teasing reinforces the metaphorical Rooster Coop, as the servants regulate and trap others of their caste rather than let them try new things. Likening himself to a zoo animal, Balram foreshadows his later visit to the Delhi zoo and its elusive white tiger. Like the white tiger, he can’t be caged for long.

“This little rectangular mirror inside the car, Mr. Jiabao—has no one ever noticed before how embarrassing it is? How, every now and then, when master and driver find each other’s eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked?”

As Balram and Ashok watch the same attractive woman cross the street, their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. As an instrument that erases distance, this mirror allows each man to be truly seen by the other—a changing room of sorts, a shared space for desire that leaves them uncomfortable.

“My heart was bitter that night. The city knew this—and under the dim orange glow cast everywhere by the weak streetlamps, she was bitter.”

Balram drives Ashok and a minister’s assistant through Delhi, the assistant criticizing Ashok’s divorce while pushing him to sleep with a sex worker. When alone, Balram personifies the city as a woman with agency and feelings.

“Colored pieces of glass have been embedded into the boundary wall of Buckingham Towers B Block—to keep robbers out. When headlights hit them, the shards glow, and the wall turns into a Technicolored, glass-spined monster.”

A wall containing colorful but dangerous pieces of glass surrounds Ashok’s apartment, a symbol of wealth and the measures taken to protect it. This wall glows when exposed by headlights, personifying the monstrosity of wealth as that of a covetous dragon hoarding gold amid poverty.

“A low growling noise made me turn. 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.”

As Balram waits at a train station, he sees a wounded dog who fails to reach the source of its discomfort. The dog, however, tries again and again. The pink patch of its wound mirrors the pink discolorations and scars on Balram; the train station itself is a wound Balram can’t fix, as he struggles to escape the Rooster Coop and his mounting anger.

“But sometimes what is most animal in a man may be the best thing in him. From my waist down, nothing stirred. They’re like parrots in a cage. It’ll be one animal fucking another animal.”

As he explores the red-light district in Old Delhi, Balram can’t bring himself to sleep with a sex worker—fixating on his own place in the metaphorical Rooster Coop. Redefining animal and human instincts, Balram recognizes the purpose of animalistic desire. However, the human-made cages of the red-light district and castes pervert this desire.

“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.”

At a Sunday book fair, Balram encounters a seller with books of poetry written in Urdu, and asks the seller to read some and answer questions. As he listens to the poems, Balram realizes that history consists of a war between the rich and the poor—a collection of metaphors and symbols that give comfort.

“I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again—from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.”

Balram takes his young relative Dharam to a zoo, allegedly a place where true enlightenment can be found. As they spot a white tiger, it paces from one end of its cage to another—and its “disappearance” causes Balram to pass out, as if he were overwhelmed by the thought of his own end and ascension.

“Let me explain, Your Excellency. See, men and women in Bangalore live like the animals in a forest do. Sleep in the day and then work all night, until two, three, four, five o’clock, depending, because their masters are on the other side of the world, in America.”

Once in former Bangalore (now Bengaluru), Balram notices the ties between call centers and other offshore businesses and America. While this economic activity has benefits, Balram’s comparison of workers to animals, beholden to remain active and available for American customers and employers, implies that the movement toward globalization renders some employers and some servants, some humans and some animals.

“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?”

Balram discusses the idle talk that permeates India, that seems to encourage a revolution. However, he also touches on the futility of such talk. Whether by reading or blaming the heavens, revolutionary groups lack cohesion. In the end, Balram implies unity is achieved through the crucible of the Rooster Coop.