The White Tiger

to Kishan, and to Kusum, and to all of them: “Now leave me in peace.”
    And they have, sir, by and large.
    One day I read a story in a newspaper: “Family of 17 Murdered in North Indian Village.” My heart began to thump—seventeen? That can’t be right—that’s not mine. It was just one of those two-inch horror stories that appear every morning in the papers—they didn’t give a name to the village. They just said it was somewhere in the Darkness—near Gaya. I read it again and again—seventeen! There aren’t seventeen at home…I breathed out…But what if someone’s had children…?
    I crumpled that paper and threw it away. I stopped reading the newspaper for a few months after that. Just to be safe.
    Look, here’s what would have happened to them. Either the Stork had them killed, or had some of them killed, and the others beaten. Now, even if by some miracle he—or the police—didn’t do that, the neighbors would have shunned them. See, a bad boy in one family casts the village’s reputation into the dust. So the villagers would have forced them out—and they’d have to go to Delhi, or Calcutta, or Mumbai, to live under some concrete bridge, begging for their food, and without a hope for the future. That’s not much better than being dead.
    What’s that you say, Mr. Jiabao? Do I hear you call me a cold-blooded monster?
    There is a story I think I heard at a train station, sir, or maybe I read it on the torn page that had been used to wrap an ear of roasted corn I bought at the market—I can’t remember. It was a story of the Buddha. One day a cunning Brahmin, trying to trick the Buddha, asked him, “Master, do you consider yourself a man or a god?”
    The Buddha smiled and said, “Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.”
    I’ll give you the same answer to your question, Mr. Jiabao. You ask, “Are you a man or a demon?”
    Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
    I shouldn’t think of them at all. My family.
    Dharam certainly doesn’t.
    He’s figured out what’s happened by now. I told him at first we were going on a holiday, and I think he bought it for a month or two. He doesn’t say a word, but sometimes I see him watching me out of the corner of his eye.
    He knows.
    At night we eat together, sitting across the table, watching each other and not saying much. After he’s done eating, I give him a glass of milk. Two nights ago, after he finished his milk, I asked him, “Don’t you ever think of your mother?”
    Not a word.
    “Your father?”
    He smiled at me and then he said, “Give me another glass of milk, won’t you, Uncle?”
    I got up. He added, “And a bowl of ice cream too.”
    “Ice cream is for Sundays, Dharam,” I said.
    “No. It’s for today.”
    And he smiled at me.
    Oh, he’s got it all figured out, I tell you. Little blackmailing thug. He’s going to keep quiet as long as I keep feeding him. If I go to jail, he loses his ice cream and glasses of milk, doesn’t he? That must be his thinking. The new generation, I tell you, is growing up with no morals at all.
    He goes to a good school here in Bangalore—an English school. Now he pronounces English like a rich man’s son. He can say “pizza” the way Mr. Ashok said it. (And doesn’t he love eating pizza—that nasty stuff?) I watch with pride as he does his long division on clean white paper at the dinner table. All these things I never learned.
    One day, I know, Dharam, this boy who is drinking my milk and eating my ice cream in big bowls, will ask me, Couldn’t you have spared my mother? Couldn’t you have written to her telling her to escape in time?
    And then I’ll have to come up with an answer—or kill him, I suppose. But that question is still a few years away. Till then we’ll have dinner together, every evening, Dharam, last of my family, and me.
    That leaves only one person to talk about.
    My ex.
    I thought there was no need to offer a prayer to the gods for him, because his family would be offering very expensive prayers all along the Ganga for his soul. What can a poor man’s prayers mean to the 36,000,004 gods in comparison with those of the rich?
    But I do think about him a lot—and, believe it or not, I do miss him. He didn’t deserve his fate.
    I should have cut the Mongoose’s neck.
     
    Now, Your Excellency, a great leap forward in Sino-Indian