The White Tiger

I’ve got people in the U.S. Consulate who will sell me that. Does he want women? I can get that too. If he’s into boys, no problem.”
    “My master doesn’t do these things. He’s a good man.”
    The diseased lips opened up into a smile. “Aren’t they all?”
    He began whistling some Hindi film song. One of the drivers had begun reading out a story from the magazine; all the others had gone silent. I looked at the mall for a while.
    I turned to the driver with the horrible pink lips and said, “I’ve got a question to ask you.”
    “All right. Ask. You know I’ll do anything for you, Country-Mouse.”
    “This building—the one they call a mall—the one with the posters of women hanging on it—it’s for shopping, right?”
    “Right.”
    “And that”—I pointed to a shiny glass building to our left—“is that also a mall? I don’t see any posters of women hanging on it.”
    “That’s not a mall, Country-Mouse. That’s an office building. They make calls from there to America.”
    “What kind of calls?”
    “I don’t know. My master’s daughter works in one of those buildings too. I drop her off at eight o’clock and she comes back at two in the morning. I know she makes pots and pots of money in that building, because she spends it all day in the malls.” He leaned in close—the pink lips were just centimeters from mine. “Between the two of us, I think it’s rather odd—girls going into buildings late at night and coming out with so much cash in the morning.”
    He winked at me. “What else, Country-Mouse? You’re a curious fellow.”
    I pointed to one of the girls coming out of the mall.
    “What about her, Country-Mouse? You like her?”
    I blushed. “Tell me,” I said, “don’t the women in cities—like her—have hair in their armpits and on their legs like women in our villages?”
     
    After half an hour, Mukesh Sir and Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam came out of the mall with shopping bags; I ran ahead to take their bags from them, and put them in the back of the car, and then closed the back and jumped into the driver’s seat of the Honda City and drove them to their new home, which was up on the thirteenth floor of a gigantic apartment building. The name of the apartment building was Buckingham Towers B Block. It was next to another huge apartment building, built by the same housing company, which was Buckingham Towers A Block. Next to that was Windsor Manor A Block. And there were apartment blocks like this, all shiny and new, and with nice big English names, as far as the eye could see. Buckingham Towers B Block was one of the best—it had a nice big lobby, and an elevator in the lobby that all of us took up to the thirteenth floor.
    Personally, I didn’t like the apartment much—the whole place was the size of the kitchen in Dhanbad. There were nice, soft, white sofas inside, and on the wall above the sofas, a giant framed photo of Cuddles and Puddles. The Stork had not allowed them to come with us to the city.
    I couldn’t stand to look at those creatures, even in a photograph, and kept my eyes to the carpet the whole time I was in the room—which had the additional benefit of giving me the look of a pucca servant.
    “Leave the bags anywhere you want, Balram.”
    “No. Put them down next to the table. Put them down exactly there,” the Mongoose said.
    After putting the bags down, I went into the kitchen to see if any cleaning needed to be done—there was a servant just to take care of the apartment, but he was a sloppy fellow, and as I said, they didn’t really have a “driver,” just a servant who drove the car sometimes. I knew without being told I also had to take care of the apartment. Any cleaning there was to be done, I would do, and then come back and wait near the door with folded hands until Mukesh Sir said, “You can go now. And be ready at eight a.m. No hanky-panky just because you’re in the city, understand?”
    Then I went down the elevator, got out of the building, and went down the stairs to the servants’ quarters in the basement.
    I don’t know how buildings are designed in your country, but in India every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with a servants’ quarters—sometimes at the back, and sometimes (as in the case of Buckingham Towers B Block) underground—a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids, and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep, and wait. When our