The White Tiger

little before midnight now, Mr. Jiabao. A good time for me to talk.
    I stay up the whole night, Your Excellency. And there’s no one else in this 150-square-foot office of mine. Just me and a chandelier above me, although the chandelier has a personality of its own. It’s a huge thing, full of small diamond-shaped glass pieces, just like the ones they used to show in the films of the 1970s. Though it’s cool enough at night in Bangalore, I’ve put a midget fan—five cobwebby blades—right above the chandelier. See, when it turns, the small blades chop up the chandelier’s light and fling it across the room. Just like the strobe light at the best discos in Bangalore.
    This is the only 150-square-foot space in Bangalore with its own chandelier! But it’s still a hole in the wall, and I sit here the whole night.
    The entrepreneur’s curse. He has to watch his business all the time.
    Now I’m going to turn the midget fan on, so that the chandelier’s light spins around the room.
    I am relaxed, sir. As I hope you are.
    Let us begin.
    Before we do that, sir, the phrase in English that I learned from my ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok’s ex-wife Pinky Madam is:
    What a fucking joke.
     
    Now, I no longer watch Hindi films—on principle—but back in the days when I used to, just before the movie got started, either the number 786 would flash against the black screen—the Muslims think this is a magic number that represents their god—or else you would see the picture of a woman in a white sari with gold sovereigns dripping down to her feet, which is the goddess Lakshmi, of the Hindus.
    It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
    I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god’s arse.
    Which god’s arse, though? There are so many choices.
    See, the Muslims have one god.
    The Christians have three gods.
    And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.
    Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from.
    Now, there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work—much like our politicians—and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That’s not to say that I don’t respect them, Mr. Premier! Don’t you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.
    So: I’m closing my eyes, folding my hands in a reverent namaste, and praying to the gods to shine light on my dark story.
    Bear with me, Mr. Jiabao. This could take a while.
    How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses?
     
    Done.
    My eyes are open again.
    11:52 p.m.—and it really is time to start.
    A statutory warning—as they say on cigarette packs—before we begin.
    One day, as I was driving my ex-employers Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam in their Honda City car, Mr. Ashok put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Pull over to the side.” Following this command, he leaned forward so close that I could smell his aftershave—it was a delicious, fruitlike smell that day—and said, politely as ever, “Balram, I have a few questions to ask you, all right?”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “Balram,” Mr. Ashok asked, “how many planets are there in the sky?”
    I gave the answer as best as I could.
    “Balram, who was the first prime minister of India?”
    And then: “Balram, what is the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim?”
    And then: “What is the name of our continent?”
    Mr. Ashok leaned back and asked Pinky Madam, “Did you hear his answers?”
    “Was he joking?” she asked, and my heart beat faster, as it did every time she said something.
    “No. That’s really what he thinks the correct answers are.”
    She giggled when she heard this: but his face, which I saw reflected in my rearview mirror, was serious.
    “The thing is, he probably has…what, two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is full of people like him,