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The Nation and the Liberal Polemicist examines the writing of India's liberal polemicists on the Mumbai terror attacks.
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IPL, 20-20 Cricket and Audience Manipulation
tries to find logic in the aesthete's view that places 20-20 cricket much lower than traditional test cricket.
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| Home > Jaidev Raja |
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"Gritty India" |
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Review of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, HarperCollins, 2008, pp 321, Price: Rs 395/-
Jaidev Raja
“Gritty India”is all the rage this season. Slum children rise from rivers of human feces holding aloft photos of their favourite movie stars, and have hairsbreadth escapes from eye-gouging beggar masters. This reviewer believes in the rather quaint dogma that a novel should make sense on its own terms – so if gritty realism is the name of the game then one expects the novel to be realistic. One does not for instance expect the main character to “wade” across a pond at the age of thirteen and “swim” across it at the age of twenty-four on the same page (41 in the Harper Collins India edition of the novel). And when this shrinking homunculus is actually able to set up a flourishing business in a strange city while fleeing a nationwide manhunt, suspension of disbelief is tested to the extreme.
 Balram Halwai, the hero of Mr Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize winning novel The White Tiger is an entrepreneur. He runs a fleet of taxis in Bangalore which ferries call center executives to and from their jobs. This nocturnal occupation needs him to be in his office at all times within reach of a land line, as he
The White Tiger believes cell phones (with sodomy) are responsible for the decline and fall of Western civilization. On the All India Radio (Balram has apparently never heard of television) he learns that the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao will visit India the following week “to learn”as he puts it, “about entrepreneurship”. (A cursory bit of research shows that Wen visited India from 9th to 11th April 2005 and his primary aim seems to have been to resolve the border dispute between the two countries). As Balram considers himself a successful entrepreneur he decides to write a series of letters to Wen giving his life history and how he got to where he is, and promising to tell him “the truth about Bangalore”. As Balram puts it, or as Mr Adiga would have us believe, äpparently you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs” – an absurd statement for which one can forgive Balram, but not Mr. Adiga.
It transpires that Balram is a murderer. He stole his initial capital from his employer after smashing his head in with a sturdy bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and then cutting his throat with the jagged fragments. A case is registered against him and he is on the run. He expects to be apprehended sooner or later but meanwhile celebrates his freedom from servitude. (The case 428 of 05, judging by its serial number is apparently registered after Wen’s Delhi visit - an interesting bit of time warping for which Mr. Adiga does not favour us with an explanation).
Balram has earned the soubriquet White Tiger from a school inspector because he is the most intelligent boy in his class – the rarest beast in the jungle. However, his family is deeply in debt and he is forced to drop out of school early and work in a tea shop in the mining town of Dhanbad. By waiting at tables and keeping his eyes and ears open he acquires, as it were from the atmosphere, an education good enough to enable him to read “the four greatest poets in the world – Rumi, Iqbal, Ghalib and a fourth chap, also a Muslim, whose name I cannot remember” – which is odd considering that Urdu poets have the habit of inserting their noms de plume into their verses. Pankaj Mishra has argued vehemently in the London Review of Books that it is perfectly credible that a teaboy in the Indo Gangetic plain should know Ghalib and Iqbal. Fair enough, but Jalaluddin Rumi (1207 – 1273) a poet who wrote in Persian and Turkish? Even white tigers are not quite as white as that. One suspects that Mr. Adiga merely threw together a few names at random.
Through this teashop osmosis, as it were, Balram also acquires a sort of Gnostic metaphysics – he contrasts Darkness (his present condition of poverty and servitude) with Light (wealth and power). He chafes against this life in Darkness and aspires towards Light. (The osmotic process of education is not confined to Balram – he manages to transmit this private dualism into the minds of his employers who use the same terms). The novel is the story of Balram’s journey from Darkness to Light.
By wheedling a local taxiwala Balram learns driving (but not, apparently, the purpose of the rearview mirror, which he uses exclusively to study employer’s face or his employer’s wife’s bosom). He searches for a job in Dhanbad and, as luck would have it finds one at the home of a landlord from his native village. As luck would further have it (and Mr Adiga is prodigal with good fortune), the family has just then acquired a car for the use of their US returned son Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam (a pants- wearing, badminton-racket-twirling stock character from Hindi movies). Balram moves with his employers to New Delhi where Ashok has the assignment of bribing politicians to cover up his family’s nefarious activities – a job he hates. The family lives in an apartment block called Buckingham Towers and Balram stays at the servants’ quarters in the basement amidst an army of cockroaches. In India, Balram informs Wen Jiabao, every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with servants’ quarters – a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids and chefs of the apartment can rest, sleep and wait”. The present reviewer has some knowledge of apartments in India and has never come across such an arrangement – again a piece of pseudo India plucked out of Mr Adiga’s imagination.
On a drunken spree Pinky madam runs over a child and Balram is forced to take the rap. The case is covered up but a disgusted Pinky leaves Ashok who sinks into a self pitying alcoholic daze. One night when Ashok has drawn out 700,000 rupees from various ATMs around Delhi, Balram murders him and hides the body in the scrub near the Maurya Sheraton hotel. He escapes to Bangalore with the money and manages to elude the manhunt set for him because the photo put out by the police in the wanted posters is unrecognizable. Again, Mr Adiga is too generous to his creation – to produce a competent likeness with software like Identi-Kit after interviewing Balram’s colleagues at Buckingham Towers would be child’s play – after all we are talking of the New Delhi police investigating the murder of a politically well connected businessman. Has Mr Adiga never heard of Kiran Bedi?
Walking the streets of Bangalore (and ignorant of any local language) Balram eavesdrops on conversations in cafes and discovers that what runs Bangalore is the outsourcing industry and that they need transport. He strides confidently into a Toyota dealership and demands that they rent cars to him. Like the Booker prize committee the Toyota dealership is stunned by Balram’s chutzpah. (And this reviewer naively believed that the job of a car dealership is to sell cars not rent them). This murderous little gnome then goes to an inspector of police (who has the wanted poster on the wall of his office) and bribes him to cancel the licenses of his competitors. At the end of the novel Balram is a prosperous entrepreneur with a fleet of twenty-six Toyotas.
What does one make of this improbable yarn? While a novelist may demand that we suspend disbelief, we cannot be expected to hang it by the neck till dead.
And what of his promise to tell the truth about Bangalore? Alas, Wen Jiabao, like the rest of us, must remain disappointed. Nevertheless (mirabile dictu) the 36000004 gods that Balram invoked by kissing, as he charmingly puts it, their arses at the beginning of the novel appear to have kicked in and done their job – this execrably written volume is now firmly established in the Booker Prize firmament.
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| Jaidev Raja is a retired army officer, a writer and a quiz aficionado. He was first runner-up at the second Mastermind India. |
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