The White Tiger

counted out on my fingers to make sure he had got it right. “All right. Go on.”
    “Order me a tea too, won’t you?” Vitiligo-Lips sat down next to me. He smiled at Dharam.
    “Order it yourself,” I said.
    He pouted. “Is that any way for you to be talking to me, working-class hero?”
    Dharam was watching us keenly, so I said, “This boy is from my village. From my family. I’m talking to him now.”
    “Eight threes are twenty-four.”
    “I don’t care who he is,” Vitiligo-Lips said. “Order me a tea, working-class hero.”
    He flexed his palm near my face—five fingers. That meant, I want five hundred rupees.
    “I’ve got nothing.”
    “Eight fours are thirty-two.”
    He drew a line across his neck and smiled. Your master will know everything.
    “What’s your name, boy?”
    “Dharam.”
    “What a nice name. Do you know what it means?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Does your uncle know what it means?”
    “Shut up,” I said.
    It was the time of the day when the tea shop got cleaned. One of the human spiders dropped a wet rag on the floor and started to crawl with it, pushing a growing wavelet of stinking ink-black water ahead of him. Even the mice scampered out of the shop. The customers sitting at the tables were not spared—the black puddle splashed them as it passed. Bits of beedis, shiny plastic wrappers, punched bus tickets, snippets of onion, sprigs of fresh coriander floated on the black water; the reflection of a naked electric bulb shone out of the scum like a yellow gemstone.
    As the black water went past, a voice inside me said, “But your heart has become even blacker than that, Munna.”
    That night Dharam woke up when he heard the shrieking. He came to the mosquito net.
    “Uncle, what’s going on?”
    “Turn on the light, you fool! Turn on the light!”
    He did so, and saw me paralyzed inside the net: I could not even point at the thing. A thick-bodied gray gecko had come down from the wall and was on my bed.
    Dharam began to grin.
    “I’m not joking, you moron—get it out of my bed!”
    He stuck his hand into the net, grabbed the lizard, and smashed it under his foot.
    “Throw it somewhere far, far away—outside the room, outside the apartment building.”
    I saw the bewildered look in his eyes: Afraid of a lizard—a grown man like my uncle!
    Good, I thought, just as he was turning off the lights. He’ll never suspect that I’m planning anything.
    An instant later, my grin faded.
    What was I planning?
    I began to sweat. I stared at the anonymous palm prints that had been pressed into the white plaster of the wall.
    A cane began tapping on concrete—the night watchman of Buckingham B was doing his rounds with his long cane. When the tapping of the cane died out there was no noise inside the room, except for the buzzing of the roaches as they chewed on the walls or flew about. It was another hot, humid night. Even the roaches must have been sweating—I could barely breathe.
    Just when I thought I’d never go to sleep, I began reciting a couplet, over and over again.
     
    I was looking for the key for years
    But the door was always open.
     
    And then I was asleep.
     
    I should have noticed the stenciled signs on the walls in which a pair of hands smashed through shackles—I should have stopped and listened to the young men in red headbands shouting from the trucks—but I had been so wrapped up in my own troubles that I had paid no attention at all to something very important that was happening to my country.
    Two days later, I was taking Mr. Ashok down to Lodi Gardens along with Ms. Uma; he was spending more and more time with her these days. The romance was blossoming. My nose was getting used to her perfume—I no longer sneezed when she moved.
    “So you still haven’t done it, Ashok? Is it going to be like last time all over again?”
    “It’s not so simple, Uma. Mukesh and I have had a fight over you already. I will put my foot down. But give me some time, I need to get over the divorce—Balram, why have you turned the music up so loud?”
    “I like it loud. It’s romantic. Maybe he’s done it deliberately.”
    “Look, it’ll happen. Trust me. It’s just…Balram, why the hell haven’t you turned the music down? Sometimes these people from the Darkness are so stupid.”
    “I told you that already, Ashok.”
    Her voice dropped.
    I caught the words “replacement,” “driver,” and “local” in English.
    Have you thought about getting a