The White Tiger

Premier: I am not an original thinker-but I am an original listener.) True, eventually Mr. Ashok and I had a disagreement or two about an English term-income tax-and things began to sour between us, but that messy stuff comes later on in the story. Right now we're still on best of terms: we've just met, far from Delhi, in the city called Dhanbad.

I came to Dhanbad after my father's death. He had been ill for some time, but there is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections. When he began spitting blood that morning, Kishan and I took him by boat across the river. We kept washing his mouth with water from the river, but the water was so polluted that it made him spit more blood.

There was a rickshaw-puller on the other side of the river who recognized my father; he took the three of us for free to the government hospital.

There were three black goats sitting on the steps to the large, faded white building; the stench of goat feces wafted out from the open door. The glass in most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring out at us from one cracked window.

A sign on the gate said:

LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL

PROUDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT SOCIALIST

A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES

Kishan and I carried our father in, stamping on the goat turds which had spread like a constellation of black stars on the ground. There was no doctor in the hospital. The ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital's rooms were wide open; the beds had metal springs sticking out of them, and the cat began snarling at us the moment we stepped into the room.

'It's not safe in the rooms-that cat has tasted blood.'

A couple of Muslim men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him and his friend. Kishan and I lowered Father onto the newspaper sheets. We waited there.

Two little girls came and sat down behind us; both of them had yellow eyes.

'Jaundice. She gave it to me.'

'I did not. You gave it to me. And now we'll both die!'

An old man with a cotton patch on one eye came and sat down behind the girls.

The Muslim men kept adding newspapers to the ground, and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds, and delirious mouths kept growing.

'Why isn't there a doctor here, uncle?' I asked. 'This is the only hospital on either side of the river.'

'See, it's like this,' the older Muslim man said. 'There's a government medical superintendent who's meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he's having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.'

'That much!' I said, my mouth opened wide.

'Why not? There's good money in public service! Now, imagine that I'm a doctor. I beg and borrow the money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I take an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital.' He raised his feet onto an imaginary table. 'Next, I call all the junior government doctors, whom I'm supposed to supervise, into my office. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, 'Dr. Ram Pandey.''

He pointed a finger at me; I assumed my role in the play.

I saluted him: 'Yes, sir!'

He held out his palm to me.

'Now, you-Dr. Ram Pandey-will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this.' He made a tick on the imaginary ledger. 'You can keep the rest of your government salary and go work in some private hospital for the rest of the week. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you've been there. You've treated my wounded leg. You've healed that girl's jaundice.'

'Ah,' the patients said. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren't they?

When Kishan put some food into Father's mouth, he spat it out with blood. His lean black body began to convulse, spewing blood this way and that. The girls with the yellow eyes began to wail. The other patients moved away from my father.

'He's got tuberculosis, hasn't he?' the older Muslim man asked, as he swatted the flies away from the wound in his leg.

'We don't know, sir. He's been coughing for a while, but we didn't know what it was.'

'Oh, it's TB. I've seen it before in rickshaw-pullers. They get weak from their work. Well, maybe the doctor will turn up in the evening.'

He did not. Around six o'clock that day, as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported, my father was permanently cured of his tuberculosis. The ward boys made us clean up after Father before we could remove the body. A goat came in and sniffed as we were mopping the blood off the floor. The ward boys petted her and fed her a plump carrot as we mopped our father's infected blood off the floor.

Kishan's marriage took place a month after the cremation.

It was one of the good marriages. We had the boy, and we screwed the girl's family hard. I remember exactly what we got in dowry from the girl's side, and thinking about it even now makes my mouth fill up with water: five thousand rupees cash, all crisp new unsoiled notes fresh from the bank, plus a Hero bicycle, plus a thick gold necklace for Kishan.

After the wedding, Kusum Granny took the five thousand rupees and the Hero cycle and the thick gold necklace; Kishan got two weeks to dip his beak into his wife, and then he was packed off to Dhanbad. My cousin Dilip and I came along with him. We three found work in a tea shop in Dhanbad-the owner had heard good things about Kishan's work at the tea shop in Laxmangarh.

Luckily for us, he hadn't heard anything about me.

Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop-men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still 'boys.' But that is your fate if you do your job well-with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity-and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.

Instead of wiping out spots from tables and crushing coals for the oven, I used my time at the tea shop in Laxmangarh to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. I decided that this was how I would keep my education going forward-that's the one good thing I'll say for myself. I've always been a big believer in education-especially my own.

The owner of the shop sat up at the front, below the big photo of Gandhi, stirring a slow-boiling broth of sugar syrup. He knew what I was up to! Whenever he saw me loafing around a table or pretending to be doing a spot of wiping just so I could hear more of a conversation, he would shout, 'You thug!' then jump down from his seat, chase me around the tea shop with the ladle he had been using to stir the sugar, and whack me on the head with it. The burning syrup singed me wherever the ladle touched, and left a series of spots on my ears which people sometimes mistake for vitiligo or another skin disease; a network of pink by which you can still identify me, although the police, predictably, missed it.

Eventually I got sent home. No one else in Laxmangarh would hire me after that, even as a field hand. So it was mostly for my sake that Kishan and Dilip had come to Dhanbad-to give me a chance to start my career as a human spider afresh.