FICTION
From India — a savage novel about a world in transition
“The White Tiger,” Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel, begins as a letter to the Premier of China, “His Excellency Wen Jinbao” in Beijing, “capital of the freedom-loving nation of China.” It is written on the eve of Premier Jinbao’s visit to Bangalore, India, by an Indian businessman who signs himself Ashok Sharma, “ ‘The White Tiger,’ A Thinking Man and an Entrepreneur, Living in the World Center of Outsourcing, Electronics City Phase I (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore India.”
Before we are done reading the first page, Ashok Sharma has let us know that we are in for either a magnificent tour-de- farce about outsourcing or a lesson on capitalism in Bangalore or a revolutionary cocktail of Karl Marx and curry or a book about — who knows? — white tigers.
“The White Tiger” turns out to be all of the above as well as a comedy of rupees and resentment, a novel noire about the unforgivable crime of being left behind, and a chaotic romp through a sewer system of politics, payoffs, bribery, murder, Japanese automobiles, chutzpah, Ukrainian prostitutes and rooster coops.
“Our nation,” he lectures the Chinese premier, “though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs — we entrepreneurs — have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
He adds: India is a country whose greatest product during the last 10,000 years is the rooster coop.
Why disclose this to the Chinese premier? Because the story Ashok Sharma wants to tell is a prophecy: that “the future of the world lies with the brown man, now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage and drug abuse.” “They are so yesterday,” he says of America and Britain. “I am tomorrow.”
Cell phones? This fellow is kidding, right?
If “The White Tiger” is a long joke, then it is a savage one. Ashok Sharma is an assumed name for Balram Halwai, which is yet another assumed name for a young man whose only given name as a child was Munna, or “boy.” Why? Neither his mother nor father, a rickshaw puller, thought to name him. It was a schoolteacher who named him Balram, after a sidekick of the god Krishna.
Halwai is his family’s caste, a caste of candy makers. Ashok/Balram/Munna — but let’s call him Balram for now — comes from a poor village in rural India, Laxmangarh, which Balram prefers to call Darkness, like all other such villages, a vast despairing nebula of peasants and poverty, of rickshaw pullers like his father, whose “spine was a knotted rope” and whose “clavicle curved around his neck in high relief.” His passengers? Pyramids of middle-class flesh — some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.”
American and English fiction is full of such resentment and rage: the novels of Dickens, of Dreiser, of John Steinbeck and Jack London, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” recalls especially Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” whose character hides out in his basement of light, cocooned in a womb of bulbs. Ashok/Balram/Munna also writes his letters late at night in a room blazing with chandeliers, which are his antidote to the Darkness from which he came and from a life in which the most important family member was the water buffalo. “She was the fattest thing in our family; this was true in every household in the village.”
But none of those writers could reach Adiga’s exact note of bitter comedy, which sounds more like “Gulliver’s Travels” than anything else. It could be Gulliver’s fifth travel: Voyage to the Land of the Rooster Coop. “Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the back seat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees, more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime.” Why doesn’t the chauffeur — and Ashok Sharma rises in the world as a chauffeur — steal that money? “Because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.”
We already know that Ashok Sharma has flown the coop, since his wanted poster is all over Delhi. “The suspect was last seen wearing blue checkered polyester shirt [sic], orange polyester trousers, maroon color sandals.” He flatly denies the maroon sandals. But that is not a description of Ashok Sharma, the fat cat entrepreneur and operator of a fleet of business taxis.
That is Balram Halwai, his earlier self, who was employed as a driver for one of India’s bigger bellies, one Mr. Ashok and his family, including his wife Pinky Madam and father, the Mongoose. The bulk of the narrator’s letter is about his meteoric rise in just eight months from caged rooster Balram Halwai to fat cat Ashok Sharma, and the events leading up to his murder of his employer with a bottle of his favorite American whiskey, Johnnie Walker Black Label. It is a sort of Horatio Alger story after all. Luck and pluck. And the timely whack.
“The White Tiger” is a dense thicket of a novel, though in the end it renders down to thick and thin. “In the old days (before August 1947) 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.” Will His Excellency Wen Jinbao in Beijing, capital of the freedom-loving nation of China, recognize a kindred spirit in this long and rambling letter from an Indian man with many names and a price of a million rupees on his head?
And we readers, how do we laugh along with a man who writes from his chandeliered hideaway: “Yet, even if all my chandeliers come crashing down to the floor . . . even if they make me walk the wooden stairs to the hangman’s noose — I’ll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat.”
For Aravind Adiga has written a comedy, a splendid, bitter, riotous comedy of social misery and social fortune, of dark villages and chandeliered rooms, that tells us a lot more than we want to know about the flight of capital to India. (Adiga himself has been a business reporter for The Financial Times.)
As for making an unlikely hero of Balram Halwai, aka Ashok Sharma aka Munna, what if we just changed his name to something more familiar? What if we gave him yet another name? Why not, say, The Godfather?
Why not Mack the Knife?
Mark Shechner is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo.
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