The White Tiger

work in the cinemas, and who sweep them clean, come here to eat. The beggars have their homes here.
    I bought a tea and a potato vada, and sat under a banyan tree to eat.
    “Brother, give me three rupees.” An old woman, looking lean and miserable, with her hand stretched out.
    “I’m not one of the rich, mother—go to that side and ask them.”
    “Brother—”
    “Let me eat, all right? Just leave me alone!”
    She went. A knife-grinder came and set up his stall right next to my tree. Holding two knives in his hand, he sat on his machine—it was one of the foot-pedaled whetstones—and began pedaling. Sparks began buzzing a couple of inches away from me.
    “Brother, do you have to do your work here ? Don’t you see a human being is trying to eat?”
    He stopped pedaling, blinked, then put the blades to the whizzing whetstone again, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
    I threw the potato vada at his feet:
    “How stupid can you people get?”
    The old beggar woman made the crossing with me, into the other PVR. She hitched up her sari, took a breath, and then began her routine: “Sister, just give me three rupees. I haven’t eaten since morning…”
    A giant pile of old books lay in the center of the market, arranged in a large, hollow square, like the mandala made at weddings to hold the sacred fire. A small man sat cross-legged on a stack of magazines in the center of the square of books, like the priest in charge of this mandala of print. The books drew me toward them like a big magnet, but as soon as he saw me, the man sitting on the magazines snapped, “All the books are in English.”
    “So?”
    “Do you read English?” he barked.
    “Do you read English?” I retorted.
    There. That did it. Until then his tone of talking to me had been servant-to-servant; now it became man-to-man. He stopped and looked me over from top to bottom.
    “No,” he said, breaking into a smile, as if he appreciated my balls.
    “So how do you sell the books without knowing English?”
    “I know which book is what from the cover,” he said. “I know this one is Harry Potter.” He showed it to me. “I know this one is James Hadley Chase.” He picked it up. “This is Kahlil Gibran—this is Adolf Hitler—Desmond Bagley— The Joy of Sex. One time the publishers changed the Hitler cover so it looked like Harry Potter, and life was hell for a week after that.”
    “I just want to stand around the books. I had a book once. When I was a boy.”
    “Suit yourself.”
    So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
    Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.
    Forty-seven hundred rupees. In that brown envelope under my bed.
    Odd sum of money—wasn’t it? There was a mystery to be solved here. Let’s see. Maybe she started off giving me five thousand, and then, being cheap, like all rich people are—remember how the Mongoose made me get down on my knees for that one-rupee coin?—deducted three hundred.
    That’s not how the rich think, you moron. Haven’t you learned yet?
    She must have taken out ten thousand at first. Then cut it in half, and kept half for herself. Then taken out another hundred rupees, another hundred, and another hundred. That’s how cheap they are.
    So that means they really owe you ten thousand. But if she thought she owed you ten thousand, then what she truly owed you was, what—ten times more?
    “No, a hundred times more.”
    The small man, putting down the newspaper he was reading, turned me to from inside his mandala of books. “What did you say?” he shouted.
    “Nothing.”
    He shouted again. “Hey, what do you do?”
    I grabbed an imaginary wheel and turned it one hundred and eighty degrees.
    “Ah, I should have known. Drivers are smart men—they hear a lot of interesting things. Right?”
    “Other drivers might. I go deaf inside the car.”
    “Sure, sure. Tell me, you must know English—some of what they talk must stick to you.”
    “I told you, I don’t listen. How can it stick?”
    “What does this word in the newspaper mean? Pri-va-see.”
    I told him, and he smiled gratefully. “We had just started the English alphabet when I got taken out of school by my family.”
    So he was another of the half-baked. My caste.
    “Hey,” he shouted again.