The White Tiger

ran ahead to take their bags from them, and put them in the back of the car, and then closed the back and jumped into the driver's seat of the Honda City and drove them to their new home, which was up on the thirteenth floor of a gigantic apartment building. The name of the apartment building was Buckingham Towers B Block. It was next to another huge apartment building, built by the same housing company, which was Buckingham Towers A Block. Next to that was Windsor Manor A Block. And there were apartment blocks like this, all shiny and new, and with nice big English names, as far as the eye could see. Buckingham Towers B Block was one of the best-it had a nice big lobby, and an elevator in the lobby that all of us took up to the thirteenth floor.

Personally, I didn't like the apartment much-the whole place was the size of the kitchen in Dhanbad. There were nice, soft, white sofas inside, and on the wall above the sofas, a giant framed photo of Cuddles and Puddles. The Stork had not allowed them to come with us to the city.

I couldn't stand to look at those creatures, even in a photograph, and kept my eyes to the carpet the whole time I was in the room-which had the additional benefit of giving me the look of a pucca servant.

'Leave the bags anywhere you want, Balram.'

'No. Put them down next to the table. Put them down exactly there,' the Mongoose said.

After putting the bags down, I went into the kitchen to see if any cleaning needed to be done-there was a servant just to take care of the apartment, but he was a sloppy fellow, and as I said, they didn't really have a 'driver,' just a servant who drove the car sometimes. I knew without being told I also had to take care of the apartment. Any cleaning there was to be done, I would do, and then come back and wait near the door with folded hands until Mukesh Sir said, 'You can go now. And be ready at eight a.m. No hanky-panky just because you're in the city, understand?'

Then I went down the elevator, got out of the building, and went down the stairs to the servants' quarters in the basement.

I don't know how buildings are designed in your country, but in India every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with a servants' quarters-sometimes at the back, and sometimes (as in the case of Buckingham Towers B Block) underground-a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids, and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep, and wait. When our masters wanted us, an electric bell began to ring throughout the quarters-we would rush to a board and find a red light flashing next to the number of the apartment whose servant was needed upstairs.

I walked down two flights of stairs and pushed open the door to the servants' quarters.

The moment I got there, the other servants screamed-they yelled-they howled with laughter.

The vitiligo-lipped driver was sitting with them, howling the hardest. He had told them the question I had asked him. They could not get over their amusement; each one of them had to come up to me, and force his fingers through my hair, and call me a 'village idiot,' and slap me on the back too.

Servants need to abuse other servants. It's been bred into us, the way Alsatian dogs are bred to attack strangers. We attack anyone who's familiar.

There and then I resolved never again to tell anyone in Delhi anything I was thinking. Especially not another servant.

They kept teasing all evening long, and even at night, when we all went to the dormitory to sleep. Something about my face, my nose, my teeth, I don't know, it got on their nerves. They even teased me about my uniform. See, in cities the drivers do not wear uniforms. They said I looked like a monkey in that uniform. So I changed into a dirty shirt and trousers like the rest of them, but the teasing, it just went on all night long.

There was a man who swept the dormitory, and in the morning I asked him, 'Isn't there someplace a man can be alone here?'

'There's one empty room on the other side of the quarters, but no one wants it,' he told me. 'Who wants to live alone?'

It was horrible, this room. The floor had not been finished, and there was a cheap whitish plaster on the walls in which you could see the marks of the hand that had applied the plaster. There was a flimsy little bed, barely big enough even for me, and a mosquito net on top of it.

It would do.

The second night, I did not sleep in the dormitory-I went to the room. I swept the floor, tied the mosquito net to four nails on the wall, and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, I understood why the mosquito net had been left there. Noises woke me up. The wall was covered with cockroaches, which had come to feed on the minerals or the limestone in the plaster; their chewing made a continuous noise, and their antennae trembled from every spot on the wall. Some of the cockroaches landed on top of the net; from inside, I could see their dark bodies against its white weave. I folded in the fiber of the net and crushed one of them. The other roaches took no notice of this; they kept landing on the net-and getting crushed. Maybe everyone who lives in the city gets to be slow and stupid like this, I thought, and smiled, and went to sleep.

'Had a good night among the roaches?' they teased when I came to the common toilet.

Any thought I had of rejoining the dormitory ended there. The room was full of roaches, but it was mine, and no one teased me. One disadvantage was that the electric bell did not penetrate this room-but that was a kind of advantage too, I discovered in time.

In the morning, after waiting my turn at the common toilet, and then my turn at the common sink, and then my turn at the common bathroom, I went up one flight of stairs, pushed open the door to the parking lot, and walked to the spot where the Honda City was parked. The car had to be wiped with a soft, wet cloth, inside and outside; a stick of incense had to be placed at the small statue of the goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, which sat above the instrument board-this had the double advantage of getting rid of the mosquitoes that had sneaked in at night, and scenting the insides with an aroma of religion. I wiped the seats-nice, plush leather seats; I wiped the instruments; I lifted the leather mats on the floor and slapped the dust out of them. There were three magnetic stickers with images of the mother-goddess Kali on the dashboard-I had put them there, throwing out Ram Persad's magnetic stickers; I wiped them all. There was also a small fluffy ogre with a red tongue sticking out of its mouth hung by a chain from the rearview mirror. It was supposed to be a lucky charm, and the Stork liked to see it bob up and down as we drove. I punched the ogre in the mouth-then I wiped it clean. Next came the business of checking the box of paper tissues in the back of the car-it was elaborately carved and gilded, like something that a royal family had owned, though it was actually made of cardboard. I made sure there were fresh tissues in the box. Pinky Madam used dozens of tissues each time we went out-she said the pollution in Delhi was so bad. She had left her crushed and crumpled used tissues near the box, and I had to pick them up and throw them out.

The electric buzzer sounded through the parking lot. A voice over the lobby microphone said, 'Driver Balram. Please report to the main entrance of Buckingham B Block with the car.'

And so it was that I would get into the Honda City, drive up a ramp, and come out to see my first sunlight of the day.

The brothers were dressed in posh suits-they were standing at the door to the building, chatting and chirruping; when they got in, the Mongoose said, 'The Congress Party headquarters, Balram. We went there the other day-I hope you remember it and don't get lost again.'

I'm not going to let you down today, sir.

Rush hour in Delhi. Cars, scooters, motorbikes, autorickshaws, black taxis, jostling for space on the road. The pollution is so bad that the men on the motorbikes and scooters have a handkerchief wrapped around their faces- each time you stop at a red light, you see a row of men with black glasses and masks on their faces, as if the whole city were out on a bank heist that morning.

There was a good reason for the face masks; they say the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years out of a man's life. Of course, those in the cars don't have to breathe the outside air-it is just nice, cool, clean, air- conditioned air for us. With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open-a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road-and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

I was taking my particular dark egg right into the heart of the city. To my left I saw the domes of the President's House-the place where all the important business of the country is done. When the air pollution is