The White Tiger

masters wanted us, an electric bell began to ring throughout the quarters—we would rush to a board and find a red light flashing next to the number of the apartment whose servant was needed upstairs.
    I walked down two flights of stairs and pushed open the door to the servants’ quarters.
    The moment I got there, the other servants screamed—they yelled—they howled with laughter.
    The vitiligo-lipped driver was sitting with them, howling the hardest. He had told them the question I had asked him. They could not get over their amusement; each one of them had to come up to me, and force his fingers through my hair, and call me a “village idiot,” and slap me on the back too.
    Servants need to abuse other servants. It’s been bred into us, the way Alsatian dogs are bred to attack strangers. We attack anyone who’s familiar.
    There and then I resolved never again to tell anyone in Delhi anything I was thinking. Especially not another servant.
    They kept teasing all evening long, and even at night, when we all went to the dormitory to sleep. Something about my face, my nose, my teeth, I don’t know, it got on their nerves. They even teased me about my uniform. See, in cities the drivers do not wear uniforms. They said I looked like a monkey in that uniform. So I changed into a dirty shirt and trousers like the rest of them, but the teasing, it just went on all night long.
    There was a man who swept the dormitory, and in the morning I asked him, “Isn’t there someplace a man can be alone here?”
    “There’s one empty room on the other side of the quarters, but no one wants it,” he told me. “Who wants to live alone?”
    It was horrible, this room. The floor had not been finished, and there was a cheap whitish plaster on the walls in which you could see the marks of the hand that had applied the plaster. There was a flimsy little bed, barely big enough even for me, and a mosquito net on top of it.
    It would do.
    The second night, I did not sleep in the dormitory—I went to the room. I swept the floor, tied the mosquito net to four nails on the wall, and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, I understood why the mosquito net had been left there. Noises woke me up. The wall was covered with cockroaches, which had come to feed on the minerals or the limestone in the plaster; their chewing made a continuous noise, and their antennae trembled from every spot on the wall. Some of the cockroaches landed on top of the net; from inside, I could see their dark bodies against its white weave. I folded in the fiber of the net and crushed one of them. The other roaches took no notice of this; they kept landing on the net—and getting crushed. Maybe everyone who lives in the city gets to be slow and stupid like this, I thought, and smiled, and went to sleep.
    “Had a good night among the roaches?” they teased when I came to the common toilet.
    Any thought I had of rejoining the dormitory ended there. The room was full of roaches, but it was mine, and no one teased me. One disadvantage was that the electric bell did not penetrate this room—but that was a kind of advantage too, I discovered in time.
    In the morning, after waiting my turn at the common toilet, and then my turn at the common sink, and then my turn at the common bathroom, I went up one flight of stairs, pushed open the door to the parking lot, and walked to the spot where the Honda City was parked. The car had to be wiped with a soft, wet cloth, inside and outside; a stick of incense had to be placed at the small statue of the goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, which sat above the instrument board—this had the double advantage of getting rid of the mosquitoes that had sneaked in at night, and scenting the insides with an aroma of religion. I wiped the seats—nice, plush leather seats; I wiped the instruments; I lifted the leather mats on the floor and slapped the dust out of them. There were three magnetic stickers with images of the mother-goddess Kali on the dashboard—I had put them there, throwing out Ram Persad’s magnetic stickers; I wiped them all. There was also a small fluffy ogre with a red tongue sticking out of its mouth hung by a chain from the rearview mirror. It was supposed to be a lucky charm, and the Stork liked to see it bob up and down as we drove. I punched the ogre in the mouth—then I wiped it clean. Next came the business of checking the box of paper tissues in the back of the car—it was elaborately carved and