The White Tiger

was a man of honor and courage. I wouldn't be here, under this chandelier, if not for his guidance.

In the afternoons, I went from my school to the tea shop to see him. This tea shop was the central point of our village; the bus from Gaya stopped there at noon every day (never late by more than an hour or two) and the policemen would park their jeep here when they came to bugger someone in the village. A little before sunset, a man circled around the tea shop three times, ringing his bell loudly. A stiff cardboard-backed poster for a pornographic film was tied to the back of his cycle-what traditional Indian village is complete without its blue-movie theater, sir? A cinema across the river showed such films every night; two-and-a-half-hour fantasias with names like He Was a True Man, or We Opened Her Diary, or The Uncle Did It, featuring golden-haired women from America or lonely ladies from Hong Kong-or so I'm guessing, Mr. Premier, since it's not like I ever joined the other young men and went to see one of these films!

The rickshaw-pullers parked their vehicles in a line outside the tea shop, waiting for the bus to disgorge its passengers.

They were not allowed to sit on the plastic chairs put out for the customers; they had to crouch near the back, in that hunched-over, squatting posture common to servants in every part of India. My father never crouched-I remember that. He preferred to stand, no matter how long he had to wait and how uncomfortable it got for him. I would find him shirtless, usually alone, drinking tea and thinking.

Then there would be the honk of a car.

The hogs and stray dogs near the tea shop would scatter, and the smell of dust, and sand, and hog shit would blow into the shop. A white Ambassador car had stopped outside. My father put down his teacup and went out.

The door of the Ambassador opened: a man got out with a notebook. The regular customers of the tea shop could go on eating, but my father and the others gathered in a line.

The man with the notebook was not the Buffalo; he was the assistant.

There was another fellow inside the Ambassador; a stout one with a bald, brown, dimpled head, a serene expression on his face, and a shotgun on his lap.

He was the Buffalo.

The Buffalo was one of the landlords in Laxmangarh. There were three others, and each had got his name from the peculiarities of appetite that had been detected in him.

The Stork was a fat man with a fat mustache, thick and curved and pointy at the tips. He owned the river that flowed outside the village, and he took a cut of every catch of fish caught by every fisherman in the river, and a toll from every boatman who crossed the river to come to our village.

His brother was called the Wild Boar. This fellow owned all the good agricultural land around Laxmangarh. If you wanted to work on those lands, you had to bow down to his feet, and touch the dust under his slippers, and agree to swallow his day wages. When he passed by women, his car would stop; the windows would roll down to reveal his grin; two of his teeth, on either side of his nose, were long and curved, like little tusks.

The Raven owned the worst land, which was the dry, rocky hillside around the fort, and took a cut from the goatherds who went up there to graze with their flocks. If they didn't have their money, he liked to dip his beak into their backsides, so they called him the Raven.

The Buffalo was greediest of the lot. He had eaten up the rickshaws and the roads. So if you ran a rickshaw, or used the road, you had to pay him his feed-one-third of whatever you earned, no less.

All four of the Animals lived in high-walled mansions just outside Laxmangarh-the landlords' quarters. They had their own temples inside the mansions, and their own wells and ponds, and did not need to come out into the village except to feed. Once upon a time, the children of the four Animals went around town in their own cars; Kusum remembered those days. But after the Buffalo 's son had been kidnapped by the Naxals-perhaps you've heard about them, Mr. Jiabao, since they're Communists, just like you, and go around shooting rich people on principle-the four Animals had sent their sons and daughters away, to Dhanbad or to Delhi.

Their children were gone, but the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on. So the rest of the village left Laxmangarh for food. Each year, all the men in the village waited in a big group outside the tea shop. When the buses came, they got on-packing the inside, hanging from the railings, climbing onto the roofs-and went to Gaya; there they went to the station and rushed into the trains-packing the inside, hanging from the railings, climbing onto the roofs-and went to Delhi, Calcutta, and Dhanbad to find work.

A month before the rains, the men came back from Dhanbad and Delhi and Calcutta, leaner, darker, angrier, but with money in their pockets. The women were waiting for them. They hid behind the door, and as soon as the men walked in, they pounced, like wildcats on a slab of flesh. There was fighting and wailing and shrieking. My uncles would resist, and managed to keep some of their money, but my father got peeled and skinned every time. 'I survived the city, but I couldn't survive the women in my home,' he would say, sunk into a corner of the room. The women would feed him after they fed the buffalo.

I would come to him, and play around with him, by climbing his back, and passing my palm over his forehead-over his eyes-over his nose-and down to his neck, to the little depression at the pit of his neck. I would let my finger linger there-it still is my favorite part of the human body.

A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

My uncles also did backbreaking work, but they did what everyone else did. Each year, as soon as it began raining, they would go out to the fields with blackened sickles, begging one landlord or the other for some work. Then they cast seed, cut weeds, and harvested corn and paddy. My father could have worked with them; he could have worked with the landlords' mud, but he chose not to.

He chose to fight it.

Now, since I doubt that you have rickshaw-pullers in China -or in any other civilized nation on earth-you will have to see one for yourself. Rickshaws are not allowed inside the posh parts of Delhi, where foreigners might see them and gape. Insist on going to Old Delhi, or Nizamuddin-there you'll see the road full of them-thin, sticklike men, leaning forward from the seat of a bicycle, as they pedal along a carriage bearing a pyramid of middle-class flesh-some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.

And when you see these stick-men, think of my father.

Rickshaw-puller he may have been-a human beast of burden-but my father was a man with a plan.

I was his plan.

One day he lost his temper at home and began yelling at the women. This was the day they told him that I had not been going to class. He did something he had never dared do before-he yelled at Kusum:

'How many times have I told you: Munna must read and write!'

Kusum was startled, but only for a moment. She yelled back:

'This fellow came running back from school-don't blame me! He's a coward, and he eats too much. Put him to work in the tea shop and let him make some money.'

My aunts and cousin-sisters gathered around her. I crawled behind my father's back as they told him the story of my cowardice.

Now, you may find it incredible that a boy in a village would be frightened of a lizard. Rats, snakes, monkeys, and mongooses don't bother me at all. On the contrary-I love animals. But lizards…each time I see one, no matter how tiny, it's as if I turn into a girl. My blood freezes.

There was a giant cupboard in my classroom, whose door was always slightly ajar-no one knew what it was there for. One morning, the door creaked open, and a lizard jumped out.

It was light green in color, like a half-ripe guava. Its tongue flicked in and out of its mouth. It was at least two feet long.

The other boys barely noticed. Until someone saw my face. They gathered in a circle around me.

Two of them pinned my hands behind my back and held my head still. Someone caught the thing in his hands, and began walking toward me with slow, exaggerated steps. Making no noise-only flicking its red tongue in and out of its mouth-the lizard came closer and closer to my face. The laughter grew louder. I couldn't make a noise.