The White Tiger

conductor got down to have a cup of tea. Now, he was a man all of us who worked in that tea shop looked up to. 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. People said he had let the politician dip his beak in his backside. Whatever he had to do, he had done: he was the first entrepreneur I knew of. Now he had a job, and a silver whistle, and when he blew it—just as the bus was leaving—all the boys in the village went crazy and ran after the bus, and banged on its sides, and begged to be taken along too. I wanted to be like Vijay—with a uniform, a paycheck, a shiny whistle with a piercing sound, and people looking at me with eyes that said, How important he looks.
    Two a.m. already, Mr. Premier. I’ll have to stop for tonight fairly soon. Let me put my finger on the laptop screen, and see if there is any other useful information here.
    Leaving out a few inessential details…
…in the Dhaula Kuan area of New Delhi, on the night of September 2, near the ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel…
    Now, this hotel, the Sheraton, is the finest in Delhi—I’ve never been inside, but my ex-boss, Mr. Ashok, used to do all his late-night drinking there. There’s a restaurant in the basement that’s supposed to be very good. You should visit it if you get the chance.
The missing man was employed as driver of a Honda City vehicle at the time of the alleged incident. In this regard a case, FIR No. 438/05, P. S. Dhaula Kuan, Delhi, has been registered. He is also believed to be in possession of a bag filled with a certain quantity of cash.
    Red bag, they should have said. Without the color, the information is all but useless, isn’t it? No wonder I was never spotted.
    Certain quantity of cash. 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.
    Seven hundred thousand rupees.
    That was how much cash was stuffed into the red bag. And trust me, the police knew it too. How much this is in Chinese money, I don’t know, Mr. Jiabao. But it buys ten silver Macintosh laptops from Singapore.
    There’s no mention of my school in the poster, sir—that’s a real shame. You always ought to talk about a man’s education when describing him. They should have said something like, The suspect was educated in a school with two-foot-long lizards the color of half-ripe guavas hiding in its cupboards…
    If the Indian village is a paradise, then the school is a paradise within a paradise.
    There was supposed to be free food at my school—a government program gave every boy three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at lunchtime. 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. He was going to undertake a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages—he was going to do nothing in class until his paycheck arrived in the mail. Yet he was terrified of losing his job, because though the pay of any government job in India is poor, the incidental advantages are numerous. Once, a truck came into the school with uniforms that the government had sent for us; we never saw them, but a week later they turned up for sale in the neighboring village.
    No one blamed the schoolteacher for doing this. You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet. Every man in the village knew that he would have done the same in his position. Some were even proud of him, for having got away with it so cleanly.
    One morning a man wearing the finest suit I had seen in my life, a blue safari suit that looked even more impressive than a bus conductor’s uniform, came walking down the road that led to my school. We gathered at the door to stare at his suit. He had a cane in his hand, which he began swishing when he saw us at the door. We rushed back into the class and sat down with our books.
    This was a surprise inspection.
    The man in the blue safari suit—the inspector—pointed his cane at holes in the wall, or the red discolorations, while the teacher