The White Tiger

Towers B Block, I told Dharam to wait for me, then went back and watched the entrance to the building. Half an hour passed, and then Mr. Ashok was down at the lobby. A small dark man—of the servant class—had come to see him. Mr. Ashok and he talked for a while, and then the small man bowed and left. They looked like two men who had just concluded a deal.
    I went back to where Dharam was waiting. “Let’s go!”
    He and I took the bus to the Old Fort, which is where the National Zoo is. I kept my hand on Dharam’s head the whole time—he must have thought it was out of affection, but it was only to stop my hand from trembling—it had been shaking all morning like a lizard’s tail that has fallen off.
    The first strike would be mine. Everything was in place now, nothing could go wrong—but like I told you, I am not a brave man.
    The bus was crowded, and the two of us had to stand for the entire journey. We both sweated like pigs. I had forgotten what a bus trip in summer was like. When we stopped at a red light, a Mercedes-Benz pulled up alongside the bus. Behind his upraised window, cool in his egg, the chauffeur grinned at us, exposing red teeth.
    There was a long line at the ticket counter of the zoo. There were lots of families wanting to go into the zoo, and that I could understand. What puzzled me, though, was the sight of so many young men and women going into the zoo, hand in hand: giggling, pinching each other, and making eyes, as if the zoo were a romantic place. That made no sense to me.
    Now, Mr. Premier, every day thousands of foreigners fly into my country for enlightenment. They go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to Bodh Gaya. They get into weird poses of yoga, smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they’re getting enlightened.
    Ha!
    If it is enlightenment you have come to India for, you people, forget the Ganga—forget the ashrams—go straight to the National Zoo in the heart of New Delhi.
    Dharam and I saw the golden-beaked storks sitting on palm trees in the middle of an artificial lake. They swooped down over the green water of the lake, and showed us traces of pink on their wings. In the background, you could see the broken walls of the Old Fort.
    Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
    I made sure Dharam appreciated the gorgeous rise and fall of the fort’s outline—the way its loopholes filled up with blue sky—the way the old stones glittered in the light.
    We walked for half an hour, from cage to cage. The lion and the lioness were apart from each other and not talking, like a true city couple. The hippo was lying in a giant pond full of mud; Dharam wanted to do what others were doing—throw a stone at the hippo to stir it up—but I told him that would be a cruel thing. Hippos lie in mud and do nothing—that’s their nature.
    Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.
    I told Dharam it was time to leave, but he made faces and pleaded. “Five minutes, Uncle.”
    “All right, five minutes.”
    We came to an enclosure with tall bamboo bars, and there—seen in the interstices of the bars, as it paced back and forth in a straight line—was a tiger.
    Not any kind of tiger.
    The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle.
    I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again—from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.
    He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this—that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.
    Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped moving. It turned its face to my face. The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my master’s eyes have met mine so often in the mirror of the car.
    All at once, the tiger vanished.
    A tingling went from the base of my spine into my groin. My knees began to shake; I felt light. Someone near me shrieked. “His eyes are rolling! He’s going to faint!” I tried to shout back at her: “It’s not true: I’m not