The White Tiger

Completely confused by this time, I compromised-I took the car five feet in front of the white line, and then came to a stop.

'Did you see what he did?' Mr. Ashok said. 'That was pretty clever.'

'Yes, Ashok. He's a fucking genius.'

The timer next to the red light said that there were still thirty seconds to go before the light changed to green. I was watching the timer when the giant Buddha materialized on my right. A beggar child had come up to the Honda City holding up a beautiful plaster-of-paris statue of the Buddha. Every night in Delhi, beggars are always selling something by the roadside, books or statues or strawberries in boxes-but for some reason, perhaps because my nerves were in such a bad state, I gazed at this Buddha longer than I should have.

…it was just a tilt of my head, just a thing that happened for half a second, but she caught me out.

'Balram appreciates the statue,' she said.

Mr. Ashok chuckled.

'Sure, he's a connoisseur of fine art.'

She cracked the egg open-she lowered the window and said, 'Let's see it,' to the beggar child.

He-or she, you can never tell with beggar children-pushed the Buddha into the Honda.

'Do you want to buy the sculpture, driver?'

'No, madam. I'm sorry.'

'Balram Halwai, maker of sweets, driver of cars, connoisseur of sculpture.'

'I'm sorry, madam.'

The more I apologized, the more amused the two of them got. At last, putting an end to my agony, the light changed to green, and I drove away from the wretched Buddha as fast as I could.

She reached over and squeezed my shoulder. 'Balram, stop the car.' I looked at Mr. Ashok's reflection-he said nothing.

I stopped the car.

'Balram, get out. We're leaving you to spend the night with your Buddha. The maharaja and the Buddha, together for the night.'

She got into the driver's seat, started the car, and drove away, while Mr. Ashok, dead drunk, giggled and waved goodbye at me. If he hadn't been drunk, he never would have allowed her to treat me like this-I'm sure of that. People were always taking advantage of him. If it were just me and him in that car, nothing bad would ever have happened to either of us.

There was a traffic island separating the two sides of the road, and trees had been planted in the island. I sat down under a tree.

The road was dead-then two cars went by, one behind the other, their headlights making a continuous ripple on the leaves, like you see on the branches of trees that grow by a lake. How many thousands of such beautiful things there must be to see in Delhi. If you were just free to go wherever you wanted, and do whatever you wanted.

A car was coming straight toward me, flashing its headlights on and off and sounding its horns. The Honda City had done a U-turn-an illegal U-turn, mind you-down the road, and was charging right at me, as if to plow me over. Behind the wheel I saw Pinky Madam, grinning and howling, while Mr. Ashok, next to her, was smiling.

Did I see a wrinkle of worry for my fate on his forehead-did I see his hand reach across and steady the steering wheel so that the car wouldn't hit me?

I like to think so.

The car stopped half a foot in front of me, with a screech of burning rubber. I cringed: how my poor tires had suffered, because of this woman.

Pinky Madam opened the door and popped her grinning face out.

'Thought I had really left you behind, Mr. Maharaja?'

'No, madam.'

'You're not angry, are you?'

'Not at all.' And then I added, to make it more believable, 'Employers are like mother and father. How can one be angry with them?'

I got into the backseat. They did another U-turn across the middle of the avenue, and then drove off at top speed, racing through one red light after the other. The two of them were shrieking, and pinching each other, and making giggling noises, and, helpless to do anything, I was just watching the show from the backseat, when the small black thing jumped into our path, and we hit it and knocked it over and rolled the wheels of the car over it.

From the way the wheels crunched it completely, and from how there was no noise when she stopped the car, not even a whimper or a barking, I knew at once what had happened to the thing we had hit.

She was too drunk to brake at once-by the time she had, we had hurtled on another two or three hundred yards, and then we came to a complete stop. In the middle of the road. She had kept her hands on the wheel; her mouth was open.

'A dog?' Mr. Ashok asked me. 'It was a dog, wasn't it?'

I nodded. The streetlights were too dim, and the object-a large black lump-was too far behind us already to be seen clearly. There was no other car in sight. No other living human being in sight.

As if in slow motion, her hands moved back from the wheel and covered her ears.

'It wasn't a dog! It wasn't a-'

Without a word between us, Mr. Ashok and I acted as a team. He grabbed her, put a hand on her mouth, and pulled her out of the driver's seat; I rushed out of the back. We slammed the doors together; I turned the ignition key and drove the car at full speed all the way back to Gurgaon.

Halfway through she quieted down, but then, as we got closer to the apartment block, she started up again. She said, 'We have to go back.'

'Don't be crazy, Pinky. Balram will get us back to the apartment block in a few minutes. It's all over.'

'We hit something, Ashoky.' She spoke in the softest of voices. 'We have to take that thing to the hospital.'

'No.'

Her mouth opened again-she was going to scream again in a second. Before she could do that, Mr. Ashok gagged her with his palm-he reached for the box of facial tissues and stuffed the tissues into her mouth; while she tried to spit them out, he tore the scarf from around her neck, tied it tightly around her mouth, and shoved her face into his lap and held it down there.

When we got to the apartment, he dragged her to the elevator with the scarf still around her mouth.

I got a bucket and washed the car. I wiped it down thoroughly, and scrubbed out every bit of blood and flesh- there was a bit of both around the wheels.

When he came down, I was washing the tires for the fourth time.

'Well?'

I showed him a piece of bloodied green fabric that had got stuck to the wheel.

'It's cheap stuff, sir, this green cloth,' I said, rubbing the rough material between my fingers. 'It's what they put on children.'

'And do you think the child…' He couldn't say the word.

'There was no sound at all, sir. No sound at all. And the body didn't move even a bit.'

'God, Balram, what will we do now-what will we-' He slapped his hand to his thigh. 'What are these children doing, walking about Delhi at one in the morning, with no one to look after them?'

When he had said this, his eyes lit up.

'Oh, she was one of those people.'

'Who live under the flyovers and bridges, sir. That's my guess too.'

'In that case, will anyone miss her…?'

'I don't think so, sir. You know how those people in the Darkness are: they have eight, nine, ten children- sometimes they don't know the names of their own children. Her parents-if they're even here in Delhi, if they even know where she is tonight-won't go to the police.'

He put a hand on my shoulder, the way he had been touching Pinky Madam's shoulder earlier in the night.