The White Tiger

We walked for half an hour, from cage to cage. The lion and the lioness were apart from each other and not talking, like a true city couple. The hippo was lying in a giant pond full of mud; Dharam wanted to do what others were doing-throw a stone at the hippo to stir it up-but I told him that would be a cruel thing. Hippos lie in mud and do nothing-that's their nature.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.

I told Dharam it was time to leave, but he made faces and pleaded. 'Five minutes, Uncle.'

'All right, five minutes.'

We came to an enclosure with tall bamboo bars, and there-seen in the interstices of the bars, as it paced back and forth in a straight line-was a tiger.

Not any kind of tiger.

The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle.

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again-from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.

He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this-that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.

Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped moving. It turned its face to my face. The tiger's eyes met my eyes, like my master's eyes have met mine so often in the mirror of the car.

All at once, the tiger vanished.

A tingling went from the base of my spine into my groin. My knees began to shake; I felt light. Someone near me shrieked. 'His eyes are rolling! He's going to faint!' I tried to shout back at her: 'It's not true: I'm not fainting!' I tried to show them all I was fine, but my feet were slipping. The ground beneath me was shaking. Something was digging its way toward me, and then claws tore out of mud and dug into my flesh and pulled me down into the dark earth.

My last thought, before everything went dark, was that now I understood those pinches and raptures-now I understood why lovers come to the zoo.

That evening, Dharam and I sat on the floor in my room, and I spread a blue letter before him. I put a pen in his hands.

'I'm going to see how good a letter-writer you are, Dharam. I want you to write to Granny and tell her what happened today at the zoo.'

He wrote it down in his slow, beautiful hand. He told her about the hippos, and the chimpanzees, and the swamp deer.

'Tell her about the tiger.'

He hesitated, then wrote: We saw a white tiger in a cage.

'Tell her everything.'

He looked at me, and wrote: Uncle Balram fainted in front of the white tiger in the cage.

'Better still-I'll dictate; write it down.'

He wrote it all down for ten minutes, writing so fast that his pen got black and oozy with overflowing ink-he stopped to wipe the nib against his hair, and went back to the writing. In the end he read out what he had written:

I called out to the people around me, and we carried Uncle to a banyan tree. Someone poured water on his face. The good people slapped Uncle hard and made him wake up. They turned to me and said, 'Your uncle is raving-he's saying goodbye to his grandmother. He must think he's going to die.' Uncle's eyes were open now. 'Are you all right, Uncle?' I asked. He took my hand and he said, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' I asked, 'Sorry for what?' And he said, 'I can't live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny. I'm so sorry.' We took the bus back to Gurgaon and had lunch at the tea shop. It was very hot, and we sweated a lot. And that was all that happened today.

'Write whatever you want after that to her, and post it tomorrow, as soon as I leave in the car-but not before. Understand?'

* * *

It was raining all morning, a light, persistent kind of rain. I heard the rain, though I could not see it. I went to the Honda City, placed the incense stick inside, wiped the seats, wiped the stickers, and punched the ogre in the mouth. I threw a bundle near the driver's seat. I shut all the doors and locked them.

Then, taking two steps back from the Honda City, I bowed low to it with folded palms.

I went to see what Dharam was doing. He was looking lonely, so I made a paper boat for him, and we sailed it in the gutter outside the apartment block.

After lunch, I called Dharam into my room.

I put my hands on his shoulders; slowly I turned him around so he faced away from me. I dropped a rupee coin on the ground.

'Bend down and pick that up.'

He did so, and I watched. Dharam combed his hair just like Mr. Ashok did-with a part down the middle; when you stood up over him, there was a clear white line down his scalp, leading up to the spot on the crown where the strands of a man's hairline radiate from.

'Stand up straight.'

I turned him around a full circle. I dropped the rupee again.

'Pick it up one more time.'

I watched the spot.

Telling him to sit in a corner of the room and keep watch over me, I went inside my mosquito net, folded my legs, closed my eyes, touched my palms to my knees, and breathed in.

I don't know how long I sat like the Buddha, but it lasted until one of the servants shouted out that I was wanted at the front door. I opened my eyes-Dharam was sitting in a corner of the room, watching me.

'Come here,' I said-I gave him a hug, and put ten rupees into his pocket. He'd need that.

'Balram, you're late! The bell is ringing like crazy!'

I walked to the car, inserted the key, and turned the engine on. Mr. Ashok was standing at the entrance with an umbrella and a cell phone. He was talking on the phone as he got into the car and slammed the door.

'I still can't believe it. The people of this country had a chance to put an efficient ruling party back in power, and instead they have voted in the most outrageous bunch of thugs. We don't deserve-' He put the phone aside for a moment and said, 'First to the city, Balram-I'll tell you where'-and then resumed the phone talk.

The roads were greasy with mud and water. I drove slowly.

'…parliamentary democracy, Father. We will never catch up with China for this single reason.'

First stop was in the city-at one of the usual banks. He took the red bag and went in, and I saw him inside the glass booth, pressing the buttons of the cash machine. When he came back, I could feel that the weight of the bag on the backseat had increased. We went from bank to bank, and the weight of the red bag grew. I felt its pressure increase on my lower back-as if I were taking Mr. Ashok and his bag not in a car, but the way my father would take a customer and his bag-in a rickshaw.

Seven hundred thousand rupees.

It was enough for a house. A motorbike. And a small shop. A new life.

My seven hundred thousand rupees.

'Now to the Sheraton, Balram.'

'Yes, sir.'

I turned the key-started the car, changed gear. We moved.

'Play some Sting, Balram. Not too loud.'

'Yes, sir.'

I put the CD on. The voice of Sting came on. The car picked up speed. In a little while, we passed the famous bronze statue of Gandhi leading his followers from darkness to the light.

Now the road emptied. The rain was coming down lightly. If we kept going this way, we would come to the