The White Tiger Read Online Free PDF

toddy he had emptied the previous night—my father picked it up.
    The lizard ran, and he ran behind it, swinging the pot of toddy at it.
    “Don’t kill it, Daddy—please!”
    But he wouldn’t listen. He kicked the cupboard, and the lizard darted out, and he chased it again, smashing everything in his way, and yelling, “Heeyaa! Heeyaa!” He pounded it with the pot of toddy until the pot broke. He smashed its neck with his fist. He stamped on its head.
    The air became acrid: a stench of crushed flesh. He picked the dead lizard up and flung it out the door.
    My father sat panting against the mural of the Lord Buddha surrounded by the gentle animals.
    When he caught his breath, he said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine—at least one—should live like a man.”
    What it meant to live like a man was a mystery. I thought it meant being like Vijay, the bus conductor. The bus stopped for half an hour at Laxmangarh, and the passengers got off, and the conductor got down to have a cup of tea. Now, he was a man all of us who worked in that tea shop looked up to. We admired his bus-company-issue khaki uniform, his silver whistle and the red cord from which it hung down from his pocket. Everything about him said: he had made it in life.
    Vijay’s family were pigherds, which meant they were the lowest of the low, yet he had made it up in life. Somehow he had befriended a politician. People said he had let the politician dip his beak in his backside. Whatever he had to do, he had done: he was the first entrepreneur I knew of. Now he had a job, and a silver whistle, and when he blew it—just as the bus was leaving—all the boys in the village went crazy and ran after the bus, and banged on its sides, and begged to be taken along too. I wanted to be like Vijay—with a uniform, a paycheck, a shiny whistle with a piercing sound, and people looking at me with eyes that said, How important he looks.
    Two a.m. already, Mr. Premier. I’ll have to stop for tonight fairly soon. Let me put my finger on the laptop screen, and see if there is any other useful information here.
    Leaving out a few inessential details…
…in the Dhaula Kuan area of New Delhi, on the night of September 2, near the ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel…
    Now, this hotel, the Sheraton, is the finest in Delhi—I’ve never been inside, but my ex-boss, Mr. Ashok, used to do all his late-night drinking there. There’s a restaurant in the basement that’s supposed to be very good. You should visit it if you get the chance.
The missing man was employed as driver of a Honda City vehicle at the time of the alleged incident. In this regard a case, FIR No. 438/05, P. S. Dhaula Kuan, Delhi, has been registered. He is also believed to be in possession of a bag filled with a certain quantity of cash.
    Red bag, they should have said. Without the color, the information is all but useless, isn’t it? No wonder I was never spotted.
    Certain quantity of cash. Open any newspaper in this country, and it’s always this crap: “A certain interested party has been spreading rumors,” or “A certain religious community doesn’t believe in contraception.” I hate that.
    Seven hundred thousand rupees.
    That was how much cash was stuffed into the red bag. And trust me, the police knew it too. How much this is in Chinese money, I don’t know, Mr. Jiabao. But it buys ten silver Macintosh laptops from Singapore.
    There’s no mention of my school in the poster, sir—that’s a real shame. You always ought to talk about a man’s education when describing him. They should have said something like, The suspect was educated in a school with two-foot-long lizards the color of half-ripe guavas hiding in its cupboards…
    If the Indian village is a paradise, then the school is a paradise within a paradise.
    There was supposed to be free food at my school—a government program gave every boy three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at