The White Tiger

been a big believer in education—especially my own.
    The owner of the shop sat up at the front, below the big photo of Gandhi, stirring a slow-boiling broth of sugar syrup. He knew what I was up to! Whenever he saw me loafing around a table or pretending to be doing a spot of wiping just so I could hear more of a conversation, he would shout, “You thug!” then jump down from his seat, chase me around the tea shop with the ladle he had been using to stir the sugar, and whack me on the head with it. The burning syrup singed me wherever the ladle touched, and left a series of spots on my ears which people sometimes mistake for vitiligo or another skin disease; a network of pink by which you can still identify me, although the police, predictably, missed it.
    Eventually I got sent home. No one else in Laxmangarh would hire me after that, even as a field hand. So it was mostly for my sake that Kishan and Dilip had come to Dhanbad—to give me a chance to start my career as a human spider afresh.
    In his journey from village to city, from Laxmangarh to Delhi, the entrepreneur’s path crosses any number of provincial towns that have the pollution and noise and traffic of a big city—without any hint of the true city’s sense of history, planning, and grandeur. Half-baked cities, built for half-baked men.
    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.
    They said that the coal mines went on and on for miles and miles outside the town. In some places there were fires burning under the earth and sending smoke into the air—fires that had been burning continuously for a hundred years!
    And it was at the tea shop in this city built by coal, while wiping a table and lingering to overhear a conversation, that my life changed.
    “You know, sometimes I think I did the wrong thing in life, becoming a miner.”
    “Then? What else can people like you and me become? Politicians?”
    “Everyone’s getting a car these days—and you know how much they pay their drivers? One thousand seven hundred rupees a month!”
    I dropped my rag. I ran to Kishan, who was cleaning out the insides of an oven.
    After my father’s death, it was Kishan who took care of me. I don’t attempt to hide his role in making me who I am today. But he had no entrepreneurial spunk at all. He would have been happy to let me sink in the mud.
    “Nothing doing,” Kishan said. “Granny said stick to the tea shop—and we’ll stick to the tea shop.”
    I went to all the taxi stands; down on my knees I begged random strangers; but no one would agree to teach me car-driving for free.
    It was going to cost me three hundred rupees to learn how to drive a car.
    Three hundred rupees!
    Today, in Bangalore, I can’t get enough people for my business. People come and people go. Good men never stay. I’m even thinking of advertising in the newspaper.
     
    BANGALORE-BASED BUSINESSMAN SEEKS
    SMART MEN FOR HIS BUSINESS
    APPLY AT ONCE!
    ATTRACTIVE REMUNERATION PACKAGES ON OFFER
    LESSONS IN LIFE AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP INCLUDED FOR FREE!
     
    Go to any pub or bar in Bangalore with your ears open and it’s the same thing you hear: can’t get enough call-center workers, can’t get enough software engineers, can’t get enough sales managers. There are twenty, twenty-five pages of job advertisements in the newspaper every week.
    Things are different in the Darkness. There, every morning, tens of thousands of young men sit in the tea shops, reading the newspaper, or lie on a charpoy humming a tune, or sit in their rooms talking to a photo of a film actress. They have no job to do today. They know they won’t get any job today. They’ve given up the fight.
    They’re the smart ones.
    The stupid ones have gathered in a field in the center of the town. Every now and then a truck comes by, and all the men in the field rush to it with their hands outstretched, shouting, “Take me! Take me!”
    Everyone pushed me; I pushed back, but the truck scooped up only six or seven men and left the rest of us behind. They were off on some construction or digging job—the lucky bastards.