The White Tiger

me to pieces. I sipped.
    “The assistant commissioner will be here in five minutes,” one of the policemen said.
    “Is he the one who’s going to register the case?” the brother asked. “Because no one has done it so far.”
    I sipped some more.
    The assistant commissioner who sat in the station was a man whom I had lubricated often. He had fixed a rival for me once. He was the worst kind of man, who had nothing in his mind but taking money from everyone who came to his office. Scum.
    But he was my scum.
    My heart lifted at the sight of him. He had come all the way to the station at night to help me out. There is honesty among thieves, as they say. He understood the situation immediately. Ignoring me, he went up to the brother and said, “What is it you want?”
    “I want to file an F.I.R.,” the brother said. “I want this crime recorded.”
    “What crime?”
    “The death of my brother. By this man’s”—pointing a finger at me—“vehicle.”
    The assistant commissioner looked at his watch. “My God, it’s late. It’s almost five o’clock. Why don’t you go home now? We’ll forget you were here. We’ll let you go home.”
    “What about this man? Will you lock him up first?”
    The assistant commissioner put his fingers together. He sighed. “See, at the time of the accident, your brother’s bicycle had no working lights. That is illegal, you know. There are other things that will come out. I promise you, things will come out.”
    The boy stared. He shook his head, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “My brother is dead. This man is a killer. I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
    “Look here—go home. Have a bath. Pray to God. Sleep. Come back in the morning. We’ll file the F.I.R. then, all right?”
    The brother understood at last why I had brought him to the station—he understood at last that the trap had shut on him. Maybe he had only seen policemen in Hindi movies until now.
    Poor boy.
    “This is an outrage! I’ll call the papers! I’ll call the lawyers! I’ll call the police!”
    The assistant commissioner, who was not a man given to humor, allowed himself a little smile. “Sure. Call the police.”
    The brother stormed out, shouting more threats.
    “The number plates will be changed tomorrow,” the assistant commissioner said. “We’ll say it was a hit-and-run. Another car will be substituted. We keep battered cars for this purpose here. You’re very lucky that your Qualis hit a man on a bicycle.”
    I nodded.
    A man on a bicycle getting killed—the police don’t even have to register the case. A man on a motorbike getting killed—they would have to register that. A man in a car getting killed—they would have thrown me in jail.
    “What if he goes to the papers?”
    The assistant commissioner slapped his belly. “I’ve got every pressman in this town in here.”
    I did not hand him an envelope at once. There is a time and a place for these things. Now was the time to smile, and say thanks, and sip the hot coffee he had offered me; now was the time to chat with him about his sons—they’re both studying in America, he wants them to come back and start an Internet company in Bangalore—and nod and smile and show him my clean, shining, fluoridated teeth. We sipped cup after cup of steaming coffee under a calendar that had the face of the goddess Lakshmi on it—she was showering gold coins from a pot into the river of prosperity. Above her was a framed portrait of the god of gods, a grinning Mahatma Gandhi.
    A week from now I’ll go to see him again with an envelope, and then he won’t be so nice. He’ll count the money in front of me and say, This is all? Do you know how much it costs to keep two sons studying in a foreign college? You should see the American Express bills they send me every month! And he’ll ask for another envelope. Then another, then another, and so on. There is no end to things in India, Mr. Jiabao, as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You’ll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.
    The difference is everything.
    The next day, sir, I called Mohammad Asif to the office. He was burning with shame over what he had done—I didn’t need to reproach him.
    And it was not his fault. Not mine either. Our outsourcing companies are so cheap that they force their taxi operators to promise them an impossible number of runs every night. To