The White Tiger

man said. “There’s a government medical superintendent who’s meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he’s having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.”
    “That much!” I said, my mouth opened wide.
    “Why not? There’s good money in public service! Now, imagine that I’m a doctor. I beg and borrow the money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I take an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital.” He raised his feet onto an imaginary table. “Next, I call all the junior government doctors, whom I’m supposed to supervise, into my office. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, ‘Dr. Ram Pandey.’”
    He pointed a finger at me; I assumed my role in the play.
    I saluted him: “Yes, sir!”
    He held out his palm to me.
    “Now, you—Dr. Ram Pandey—will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this .” He made a tick on the imaginary ledger. “You can keep the rest of your government salary and go work in some private hospital for the rest of the week. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you’ve been there. You’ve treated my wounded leg. You’ve healed that girl’s jaundice.”
    “Ah,” the patients said. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they?
    When Kishan put some food into Father’s mouth, he spat it out with blood. His lean black body began to convulse, spewing blood this way and that. The girls with the yellow eyes began to wail. The other patients moved away from my father.
    “He’s got tuberculosis, hasn’t he?” the older Muslim man asked, as he swatted the flies away from the wound in his leg.
    “We don’t know, sir. He’s been coughing for a while, but we didn’t know what it was.”
    “Oh, it’s TB. I’ve seen it before in rickshaw-pullers. They get weak from their work. Well, maybe the doctor will turn up in the evening.”
    He did not. Around six o’clock that day, as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported, my father was permanently cured of his tuberculosis. The ward boys made us clean up after Father before we could remove the body. A goat came in and sniffed as we were mopping the blood off the floor. The ward boys petted her and fed her a plump carrot as we mopped our father’s infected blood off the floor.
    Kishan’s marriage took place a month after the cremation.
    It was one of the good marriages. We had the boy, and we screwed the girl’s family hard. I remember exactly what we got in dowry from the girl’s side, and thinking about it even now makes my mouth fill up with water: five thousand rupees cash, all crisp new unsoiled notes fresh from the bank, plus a Hero bicycle, plus a thick gold necklace for Kishan.
    After the wedding, Kusum Granny took the five thousand rupees and the Hero cycle and the thick gold necklace; Kishan got two weeks to dip his beak into his wife, and then he was packed off to Dhanbad. My cousin Dilip and I came along with him. We three found work in a tea shop in Dhanbad—the owner had heard good things about Kishan’s work at the tea shop in Laxmangarh.
    Luckily for us, he hadn’t heard anything about me.
    Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop—men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still “boys.” But that is your fate if you do your job well—with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.
    I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity—and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.
    Instead of wiping out spots from tables and crushing coals for the oven, I used my time at the tea shop in Laxmangarh to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. I decided that this was how I would keep my education going forward—that’s the one good thing I’ll say for myself. I’ve always