The White Tiger

both shaken from their sleep and bleary and insomniac, go around and around carrying concrete rubble or bricks.
    A man from one of these construction sites was leading an ass; it wore a bright red saddle, and on this saddle were two metal troughs, filled to the brim with rubble. Behind this ass, two smaller ones, of the same color, were also saddled with metal troughs full of rubble. These smaller asses were walking slower, and the lead ass stopped often and turned to them, in a way that made you think it was their mother.
    At once I knew what was troubling me.
    I did not want to obey Kusum. She was blackmailing me; I understood why she had sent that letter through the Mongoose. If I refused, she would blow the whistle on me—tell Mr. Ashok I hadn’t been sending money home.
    Now, it had been a long time since I had dipped my beak into anything, sir, and the pressure had built up. The girl would be so young—seventeen or eighteen—and you know what girls taste like at that age, like watermelons. Any diseases, of body or mind, get cured when you penetrate a virgin. These are known facts. And then there was the dowry that Kusum would screw out of the girl’s family. All that twenty-four-karat gold, all that cash fresh from the bank. At least some of it I’d keep for myself. All these were sound arguments in favor of marriage.
    But on the other hand.
    See, I was like that ass now. And all I would do, if I had children, was teach them to be asses like me, and carry rubble around for the rich.
    I put my hands on the steering wheel, and my fingers tightened into a strangling grip.
    The way I had rushed to press Mr. Ashok’s feet, the moment I saw them, even though he hadn’t asked me to! Why did I feel that I had to go close to his feet, touch them and press them and make them feel good—why? Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me: hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poison are poured into Mother Ganga.
    I had a vision of a pale stiff foot pushing through a fire.
    “No,” I said.
    I pulled my feet up onto the seat, got into the lotus position, and said, “Om,” over and over again. How long I sat that evening in the car with my eyes closed and legs crossed like the Buddha I don’t know, but the giggling and scratching noise made me open my eyes. All the other drivers had gathered around me—one of them was scratching the glass with his fingernails. Someone had seen me in the lotus position inside the locked car. They were gaping at me as if I were something in a zoo.
    I scrambled out of the lotus position at once. I put a big grin on my face—I got out of the car to a volley of thumps and blows and shrieks of laughter, all of which I meekly accepted, while murmuring, “Just trying it out, yoga—they show it on TV all the time, don’t they?”
    The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs.
    Yes, that’s the sad truth, Mr. Premier.
    The coop is guarded from the inside.
    Mr. Premier, you must excuse me—the phone is ringing. I’ll be back in a minute.
     
    Alas: I’ll have to stop this story for a while. It’s only 1:32 in the morning, but we’ll have to break off here. Something has come up, sir—an emergency. I’ll be back, trust me.
     

The Sixth Morning
    Pardon me, Your Excellency, for the long intermission. It’s now 6:20, so I’ve been gone five hours. Unfortunately, there was an incident that threatened to jeopardize the reputation of an outsourcing company I work with.
    A fairly serious incident, sir. A man has lost his life in this incident. (No: Don’t misunderstand. I had nothing to do with his death! But I’ll explain later.)
    Now, excuse me a minute while I turn the fan on—I’m still sweating, sir—and let me sit down on the floor, and watch the fan chop up the light of the chandelier.
    The rest of today’s narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness.
    All these changes happened in me because they happened first in Mr. Ashok. He returned from America an innocent man, but life in Delhi corrupted him—and once the master of the Honda City becomes corrupted, how can the driver stay innocent?
    Now, I thought I knew Mr. Ashok, sir. But that’s presumption on the part of any