The White Tiger

you’ll discover that Bangalore is full of them these days—has only convinced me that the white people are on the way out. All of them look so emaciated—so puny. You’ll never see one of them with a decent belly. For this I blame the president of America; he has made buggery perfectly legal in his country, and men are marrying other men instead of women. This was on the radio. This is leading to the decline of the white man. Then white people use cell phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It’s a known fact. Cell phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man’s brain and balls at the same time. I overheard this at the bus stand one night. Until then I had been very proud of my Nokia, showing it to all the call-center girls I was hoping to dip my beak into, but I threw it away at once. Every call that you make to me, you have to make it on a landline. It hurts my business, but my brain is too important, sir: it’s all that a thinking man has in this world.
    White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they’re up to—the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world.
    And God save everyone else.
     
    Now I should explain about that long interruption in my narrative two nights ago.
    It will also allow me to illustrate the differences between Bangalore and Laxmangarh. Understand, Mr. Jiabao, it is not as if you come to Bangalore and find that everyone is moral and upright here. This city has its share of thugs and politicians. It’s just that here, if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxmangarh, he doesn’t even have this choice. That is the difference between this India and that India: the choice .
    See, that night, I was sitting here, telling you my life’s story, when my landline began to ring. Still chatting to you, I picked up the receiver and heard Mohammad Asif’s voice.
    “Sir, there’s been some trouble.”
    That’s when I stopped talking to you.
    “What kind of trouble?” I asked. I knew Mohammad Asif had been on duty that night, so I braced myself for the worst.
    There was a silence, and then he said, “I was taking the girls home when we hit a boy on a bicycle. He’s dead, sir.”
    “Call the police at once,” I said.
    “But sir—I am at fault. I hit him, sir.”
    “That’s exactly why you will call the police.”
    The police were there when I got to the scene with an empty van. The Qualis was parked by the side of the road; the girls were all still inside.
    There was a body, a boy, lying on the ground, bloodied. The bike was on the ground, smashed and twisted.
    Mohammad Asif was standing off to the side, shaking his head. Someone was yelling at him—yelling with the passion that you only see on the face of the relative of a dead man.
    The policeman on the scene had stalled everyone. He nodded when he saw me. We knew each other well by now.
    “That’s the dead boy’s brother, sir,” he whispered to me. “He’s in a total rage. I haven’t been able to get him out of here.”
    I shook Mohammad Asif out of his trance. “Take my car and get these women home, first of all.”
    “Let my boy go,” I told the policeman loudly. “He’s got to get the people in there home. Whatever you want to deal with, you deal with me.”
    “How can you let him go?” the brother of the dead boy yelled at the policeman.
    “Look here, son,” I said, “I am the owner of this vehicle. Your fight is with me, not with this driver. He was following my orders, to drive as fast as he could. The blood is on my hands, not his. These girls need to go home. Come with me to the police station—I offer myself as your ransom. Let them go.”
    The policeman played along with me. “It’s a good idea, son. We need to register the case at the station.”
    While I kept the brother engaged by pleading to his reason and human decency, Mohammad Asif and all the girls got into my van and slipped away. That was the first objective—to get the girls home. I have signed a contract with their company, and I honor all that I sign.
    I went to the police station with the dead boy’s brother. The policemen on night duty brought me coffee. They did not bring the boy coffee. He glared at me as I took the cup; he looked ready to tear