The White Tiger

The way I had rushed to press Mr. Ashok's feet, the moment I saw them, even though he hadn't asked me to! Why did I feel that I had to go close to his feet, touch them and press them and make them feel good-why? Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me: hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poison are poured into Mother Ganga.

I had a vision of a pale stiff foot pushing through a fire.

'No,' I said.

I pulled my feet up onto the seat, got into the lotus position, and said, ' Om,' over and over again. How long I sat that evening in the car with my eyes closed and legs crossed like the Buddha I don't know, but the giggling and scratching noise made me open my eyes. All the other drivers had gathered around me-one of them was scratching the glass with his fingernails. Someone had seen me in the lotus position inside the locked car. They were gaping at me as if I were something in a zoo.

I scrambled out of the lotus position at once. I put a big grin on my face-I got out of the car to a volley of thumps and blows and shrieks of laughter, all of which I meekly accepted, while murmuring, 'Just trying it out, yoga-they show it on TV all the time, don't they?'

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs.

Yes, that's the sad truth, Mr. Premier.

The coop is guarded from the inside.

Mr. Premier, you must excuse me-the phone is ringing. I'll be back in a minute.

* * *

Alas: I'll have to stop this story for a while. It's only 1:32 in the morning, but we'll have to break off here. Something has come up, sir-an emergency. I'll be back, trust me.

The Sixth Morning

Pardon me, Your Excellency, for the long intermission. It's now 6:20, so I've been gone five hours. Unfortunately, there was an incident that threatened to jeopardize the reputation of an outsourcing company I work with.

A fairly serious incident, sir. A man has lost his life in this incident. (No: Don't misunderstand. I had nothing to do with his death! But I'll explain later.)

Now, excuse me a minute while I turn the fan on-I'm still sweating, sir-and let me sit down on the floor, and watch the fan chop up the light of the chandelier.

The rest of today's narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness.

All these changes happened in me because they happened first in Mr. Ashok. He returned from America an innocent man, but life in Delhi corrupted him-and once the master of the Honda City becomes corrupted, how can the driver stay innocent?

Now, I thought I knew Mr. Ashok, sir. But that's presumption on the part of any servant.

The moment his brother left, he changed. He began wearing a black shirt with the top button open, and changed his perfume.

'To the mall, sir?'

'Yes.'

'Which mall, sir? The one where Madam used to go?'

But Mr. Ashok would not take the bait. He was punching the buttons of his cell phone and he just grunted, 'Sahara Mall, Balram.'

'That's the one Madam liked going to, sir.'

'Don't keep talking about Madam in every other sentence.'

I sat outside the mall and wondered what he was doing there. There was a flashing red light on the top floor, and I guessed that it was a disco. Lines of young men and women were standing outside the mall, waiting to go up to that red light. I trembled with fear to see what these city girls were wearing.

Mr. Ashok didn't stay long in there, and he came out alone. I breathed out in relief.

'Back to Buckingham, sir?'

'Not yet. Take me to the Sheraton Hotel.'

As I drove into the city, I noticed that something was different about the way Delhi looked that night.

Had I never before seen how many painted women stood at the sides of the roads? Had I never seen how many men had stopped their cars, in the middle of the traffic, to negotiate a price with these women?

I closed my eyes; I shook my head. What's happening to you tonight?

At this point, something took place that cleared my confusion-but also proved very embarrassing to me and to Mr. Ashok. I had stopped the car at a traffic signal; a girl began crossing the road in a tight T-shirt, her chest bobbing up and down like three kilograms of brinjals in a bag. I glanced at the rearview mirror-and there was Mr. Ashok, his eyes also bobbing up and down.

I thought, Aha! Caught you, you rascal!

And his eyes shone, for he had seen my eyes, and he was thinking the exact same thing: Aha! Caught you, you rascal!

We had caught each other out.

(This little rectangular mirror inside the car, Mr. Jiabao-has no one ever noticed before how embarrassing it is? How, every now and then, when master and driver find each other's eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked?)

I was blushing. Mercifully, the light turned green, and I drove on.

I swore not to look in the rearview mirror again that night. Now I understood why the city looked so different-why my beak was getting stiff as I was driving.

Because he was horny. And inside that sealed car, master and driver had somehow become one body that night.

It was with great relief that I drove the Honda into the gate of the Maurya Sheraton Hotel, and brought that excruciating trip to an end.

Now, Delhi is full of grand hotels. In ring roads and sewage plants you might have an edge in Beijing, but in pomp and splendor, we're second to none in Delhi. We've got the Sheraton, the Imperial, the Taj Palace, Taj Mansingh, the Oberoi, the InterContinental, and many more. Now, the five-star hotels of Bangalore I know inside out, having spent thousands of rupees eating kebabs of chicken, mutton, and beef in their restaurants, and picking up sluts of all nationalities in their bars, but the five-stars of Delhi are things of mystery to me. I've been to them all, but I've never stepped past the front door of one. We're not allowed to do that; there's usually a fat guard at the glass door up at the front, a man with a waxed mustache and beard, who wears a ridiculous red circus turban and thinks he's someone important because the American tourists want to have their photo taken with him. If he so much as sees a driver near the hotel, he'll glare-he'll shake a finger like a schoolteacher.

That's the driver's fate. Every other servant thinks he can boss over us.

There are strict rules at the five-stars about where the drivers keep their cars while their masters are inside. Sometimes they put you in a parking spot downstairs. Sometimes in the back. Sometimes up at the front, near the trees. And you sit there and wait, for an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, yawning and doing nothing, until the guard at the door, the fellow with the turban, mumbles into a microphone, saying, 'Driver So-and-So, you may come to the glass door with the car. Your master is waiting for you.'

The drivers were waiting near the parking lot of the hotel, in their usual key-chain-swirling, paan-chewing, gossipmongering, ammonia-releasing circle. Crouching and jabbering like monkeys.