The White Tiger

Picture a six-foot-tall fellow, broad-shouldered, with a landlord’s powerful, punishing forearms; yet always gentle ( almost always—except for that time he punched Pinky Madam in the face) and kind to those around him, even his servants and driver.
    Now another face appears, to the side of his, in memory’s mirror. Pinky Madam—his wife. Every bit as good-looking as her husband; just as the image of the goddess in the Birla Hindu Temple in New Delhi is as fair as the god to whom she is married. She would sit in the back, and the two of them would talk, and I would drive them wherever they wanted, as faithfully as the servant-god Hanuman carried about his master and mistress, Ram and Sita.
    Thinking of Mr. Ashok is making me sentimental. I hope I’ve got some paper napkins here somewhere.
    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 has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.
    Now, even though I killed him, you won’t find me saying one bad thing about him. I protected his good name when I was his servant, and now that I am (in a sense) his master, I won’t stop protecting his good name. I owe him so much. He and Pinky Madam would sit in the back of the car, chatting about life, about India, about America—mixing Hindi and English together—and by eavesdropping on them, I learned a lot about life, India, and America—and a bit of English too. (Perhaps a bit more than I’ve let on so far—!) Many of my best ideas are, in fact, borrowed from my ex-employer or his brother or someone else whom I was driving about. (I confess, Mr. Premier: I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener .) True, eventually Mr. Ashok and I had a disagreement or two about an English term— income tax —and things began to sour between us, but that messy stuff comes later on in the story. Right now we’re still on best of terms: we’ve just met, far from Delhi, in the city called Dhanbad.
    I came to Dhanbad after my father’s death. He had been ill for some time, but there is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections. When he began spitting blood that morning, Kishan and I took him by boat across the river. We kept washing his mouth with water from the river, but the water was so polluted that it made him spit more blood.
    There was a rickshaw-puller on the other side of the river who recognized my father; he took the three of us for free to the government hospital.
    There were three black goats sitting on the steps to the large, faded white building; the stench of goat feces wafted out from the open door. The glass in most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring out at us from one cracked window.
    A sign on the gate said:
LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL
PROUDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT SOCIALIST
A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES
    Kishan and I carried our father in, stamping on the goat turds which had spread like a constellation of black stars on the ground. There was no doctor in the hospital. The ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital’s rooms were wide open; the beds had metal springs sticking out of them, and the cat began snarling at us the moment we stepped into the room.
    “It’s not safe in the rooms—that cat has tasted blood.”
    A couple of Muslim men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him and his friend. Kishan and I lowered Father onto the newspaper sheets. We waited there.
    Two little girls came and sat down behind us; both of them had yellow eyes.
    “Jaundice. She gave it to me.”
    “I did not. You gave it to me. And now we’ll both die!”
    An old man with a cotton patch on one eye came and sat down behind the girls.
    The Muslim men kept adding newspapers to the ground, and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds, and delirious mouths kept growing.
    “Why isn’t there a doctor here, uncle?” I asked. “This is the only hospital on either side of the river.”
    “See, it’s like this,” the older Muslim