For one who has led a privileged life Adiga has captured, quite unbelievably, the psyche and thought processes of the Indian underdog, says Reginald Massey

[The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 9781843547204. HB. 321pp. £12.99]

A great many journalists secretly nurse the ambition of writing a bestseller. Few ever do. Hammering out a 600 word piece for next day’s rag is one thing, patiently crafting a 100,000 word novel that holds the reader’s attention page after page is quite another cup of tea. Therein lies the difference between a hack and a writer. However, some choice spirits such as Dickens and Hemingway did bridge the gap. Aravind Adiga is such another. He worked for Time magazine in India and also reported for other papers. His background is rather international: born in Chennai, he lived in Australia before proceeding to Columbia and Oxford. He now lives in Mumbai. This is his first novel and it scooped the 2008 Booker prize.  First time lucky ? You can say that again.

For one who has led a privileged life Adiga has captured, quite unbelievably, the psyche and thought processes of the Indian underdog. The protagonist of this most unusual story, one Balram, is not only an underdog  but is also quite a nasty dog to boot. He is, in fact, booted by one and all; his family, his fellow servants, his employers and by society in general. But he’s a survival expert who uses his conspicuous corpus of native wit to outwit his oppressors. The narrative, comical and tragic by turns, is difficult to label. Is this novel a picaresque piece or is it an epistolary effort ? Balram is certainly a rogue, at times almost likeable, and the tale is told  in the form of a letter addressed to none other than His Excellency Wen Jiabao, The Premier’s Office, Beijing, Capital of the Freedom-Loving Nation of China.

Written when the former char/domestic servant from the north has made it in south India as the owner of a fleet of taxis, the epistle informs His Excellency Wen Jiabao that the wide ranging report on China’s southern neighbour is being despatched From the Desk of The White Tiger, A Thinking Man, And an entrepreneur living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing, Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore, India. It begins with the memorablel sentence: Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. And then the entrepreneur proceeds to unburden his soul. And what a guilt ridden, sodden soul it is.

Our hero, if that is what one must call him, was born in a malodorous village called Laxmangarh not far from Bodh Gaya where the Buddha found Enlightenment. The Buddha preached universal love, understanding and compassion. However, not much of these  excellent virtues were evident in Laxmangarh. Life was hard for our hero’s father, an illiterate rickshaw puller. He found it difficult to feed his wife and children and, to make matters worse, his fellow villagers were exploitative, grasping and mean minded. The extended family that owned the surrounding land and the havelis, mansions, exercised power with all the ferocity that the feudals of India had done for centuries.

After the death of his parents Balram was pulled out of school by his relatives and put to work scrubbing the floor, tending the fire and clearing the tables in a teashop near the village bus stop. Being an ambitious lad he decided to get away and, as soon as he got the opportunity, that is what he did. In Dhanbad, the city of coal, he managed to procure a driving licence. He then  wangled a job as the second chauffeur cum odd job man in the establishment headed by a grandee from Laxmangarh who with his elder son operated dodgy coal mines in the Dhanbad area. The grandee, known as The Stork because he owned the river that coursed past Laxmangarh and often dipped his beak into the fishermen’s nubile daughters, had sent his younger son Ashok (Mr Ashok to the servants) to the States. There, to the Stork’s great disappointment, the Americanised Ashok had contracted what in India is called a love marriage. Moreover, Pinky Madam was not a Hindu and this the family found intolerable. They had expected Ashok to return to India like a good boy and accept an arranged marriage to a well brought up girl from the right caste, the right family and with, of course, the right dowry.

Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam had just arrived in India when Balram is taken on and our hero is detailed to drive them about on their shopping and sightseeing trips. Pinky Madam has taken an instant dislike to India and its inhabitants but Balram has taken a shine to Pinky Madam. Her generous bosoms which she heaves frequently stir base desires in him and he soon memorizes her favourite swear words which had better not be repeated here.

Soon the westernised Mr Ashok and his wife are despatched to Delhi where, with their suave ways and command of English, they are to cultivate and bribe ministers and senior civil servants. All in the cause of, you will understand, lubricating the Stork’s wheeling and dealing. They live not far from the international airport in a plush apartment in Gurgaon fitted with all the latest mod-cons. The driver of their Honda City is our hero who is consigned to a cockroach infested servant’s room at the bottom of the high rise condo.
It is in the great capital of the resurgent nation that Balram’s education takes off. As he confesses in one of his weaker moments, he is a good listener. He eavesdrops on all the conversations in Hindi and Hinglish. The latter, a handy though inelegant mode of expression,  being the bastard lingua franca of the upwardly mobile Indian in a hurry to haul himself up to the topmost rung of the socio-economic ladder. Hinglish, in fact, is a first cousin of Pakistan’s Urdish. The post-1947 elites of the two countries are amazingly similar.

Delhi is described with accuracy and relish. The traffic jams, the pollution, the arrant snobbery of the new rich, the chasm between the Johnnie Walker imbibing class and those for whom clean drinking water is a rare luxury, the daily humiliations meted out to the poor, etcetera, etcetra, etcetra, are set down in the words, thoughts and feelings of Balram who understands, without an iota of doubt, that he is not only a driver but a serf as well. However, he bides his time. After all, in every underdog there is always an avaricious overdog waiting for the right moment to pounce.

How Balram longs to enter the swank shopping malls and airconditioned luxury hotels and restaurants. But he knows that he’d be unceremoniously shunted out by the security guards who can suss out members of the servant class from half a mile. After all, they too are servants and soon recognize their own caste and kind. And thus while Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam entertain their high powered contacts in five-star establishments, he sits patiently and passively, sometimes even plotting, in the Honda City. Any minute the loudspeaker might bark: Driver Balram! Honda City ka Driver Balram, Jaldi karo! Mr Ashok is waiting to be picked up from the front foyer.’ (The functionaries who issue these orders are often former havildar-majors). God help him if the call comes while he’s in the middle of a surreptitious leak behind one of the ornate palms that graciously screen the hotel car park.

The New Morality that his compatriots have embraced is soon grasped with both hands by the man from the Darkness who thought that he had seen the Light. Like the Stork, like Mr Ashok, like the corrupt ministers, industrialists, judges, generals and bureaucrats, like the police and their political bosses, like the pickpockets, pimps and prostitutes, Balram too becomes an entrepreneur of the New India. How he manages this is revealed in Adiga’s revealing book. And how come the strange title? I have already told too much. Nevertheless, it must be said that Balram has an ear for poetry. He believes that the four best poets in the world are Muslims. Among these are Rumi, Ghalib and Iqbal. Unfortunately he has forgotten the name of the fourth. He can be forgiven; he is always in a hurry.

Reginald Massey’s latest book is INDIA: Definitions and Clarifications (Hansib, London). Last year he was Writer-in-Residence at the Wolfsberg think tank in Switzerland. Born in Lahore before the partition of the subcontinent, he lives in Wales.