The White Tiger

a policeman writing a slogan on the wall outside the temple with a red paintbrush:
DO YOU WANT GOOD ROADS, CLEAN WATER, GOOD
HOSPITALS? THEN VOTE OUT THE GREAT SOCIALIST!
    For years there was a deal between the landlords and the Great Socialist—everyone in the village knew about this—but this year something had gone wrong with the deal, so the four Animals had joined together and started a party of their own.
    And below the slogan the policeman wrote:
ALL INDIA SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE FRONT
(LENINIST FACTION)
    Which was the name of the landlords’ party.
    In the weeks before the elections, trucks bumped up and down the dirty street of Laxmangarh, full of young men holding microphones: “Stand up to the rich!”
    Vijay, the bus conductor, was always on one of these trucks. He had quit his old job and joined politics now. That was the thing about Vijay; each time you saw him he had done better for himself. He was a born politician. He wore a red headband to show that he was one of the Great Socialist’s supporters, and made speeches every morning in front of the tea shop. The landlords brought in trucks full of their own supporters in retaliation. And from these trucks men shouted out, “Roads! Water! Hospitals! Vote out the Great Socialist!”
    A week before the elections, both sides stopped sending out their trucks. I heard what had happened while cleaning up a table.
    The Animals’ bluff had worked. The Great Socialist had agreed to cut a deal with them.
    Vijay bowed down and touched the feet of the Stork at a big rally in front of the tea shop. It seemed that all differences had been patched, and the Stork had been named the president of the Laxmangarh branch of the Great Socialist’s party. Vijay was to be his deputy.
    Now the rallies were done. The priest celebrated a special pooja to pray for the Great Socialist’s victory; mutton biryani was distributed on paper plates in front of the temple; and in the evening, there was free hooch for all.
    Lots of dust and policemen came into the village next morning. One officer read out voting instructions in the marketplace.
    Whatever was being done, was being done for our own good. The Great Socialist’s enemies would try and steal the election from us, the poor, and take the power away from us, the poor, and put those shackles back on our hands that he, the Great Socialist, had so lovingly taken off our hands. Did we understand? And then, in a cloud of dust, the police drove off.
    “It’s the way it always is,” my father told me that night. “I’ve seen twelve elections—five general, five state, two local—and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves—isn’t that something?”
    On the day of the election, one man went mad.
    This happens every time, at every election in the Darkness.
    One of my father’s colleagues, a small dark-skinned man whom no one had taken any notice of until now, was surrounded by a mob of rickshaw-pullers, including my father. They were trying to dissuade him, but only halfheartedly.
    They had seen this thing happening before. They wouldn’t be able to stop this man now.
    Every now and then, even in a place like Laxmangarh, a ray of sunlight will break through. All these posters and speeches and slogans on the wall, maybe they get into a man’s head. He declares himself a citizen of the democracy of India and he wants to cast his vote. That was where this rickshaw-puller had got to. He declared himself free of the Darkness: he had made his Benaras that day.
    He began walking straight to the voting booth at the school. “I’m supposed to stand up to the rich, aren’t I?” he shouted. “Isn’t that what they keep telling us?”
    When he got there, the Great Socialist’s supporters had already put up the tally of votes outside on a blackboard: they had counted 2,341 votes in that booth. Everyone had voted for the Great Socialist. Vijay the bus conductor was up on a ladder, hammering into the wall a banner with the Great Socialist’s symbol (the hands breaking their shackles). The slogan on the banner said:
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST ON HIS
UNANIMOUS VICTORY FROM LAXMANGARH!
    Vijay dropped the hammer, the nails, and the banner when he saw the rickshaw-puller.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Voting,” he shouted back. “Isn’t it the election today?”
    I cannot confirm what happened next, even though I was only a few feet behind