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lunchtime. But we never ever saw rotis, or yellow daal, or pickles, and everyone knew why: the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money.
    The teacher had a legitimate excuse to steal the money—he said he hadn’t been paid his salary in six months. He was going to undertake a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages—he was going to do nothing in class until his paycheck arrived in the mail. Yet he was terrified of losing his job, because though the pay of any government job in India is poor, the incidental advantages are numerous. Once, a truck came into the school with uniforms that the government had sent for us; we never saw them, but a week later they turned up for sale in the neighboring village.
    No one blamed the schoolteacher for doing this. You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet. Every man in the village knew that he would have done the same in his position. Some were even proud of him, for having got away with it so cleanly.
    One morning a man wearing the finest suit I had seen in my life, a blue safari suit that looked even more impressive than a bus conductor’s uniform, came walking down the road that led to my school. We gathered at the door to stare at his suit. He had a cane in his hand, which he began swishing when he saw us at the door. We rushed back into the class and sat down with our books.
    This was a surprise inspection.
    The man in the blue safari suit—the inspector—pointed his cane at holes in the wall, or the red discolorations, while the teacher cowered by his side and said, “Sorry sir, sorry sir.”
    “There is no duster in this class; there are no chairs; there are no uniforms for the boys. How much money have you stolen from the school funds, you sister-fucker?”
    The inspector wrote four sentences on the board and pointed his cane at a boy:
    “Read.”
    One boy after the other stood up and blinked at the wall.
    “Try Balram, sir,” the teacher said. “He’s the smartest of the lot. He reads well.”
    So I stood up, and read, “We live in a glorious land. The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land. The River Ganga gives life to our plants and our animals and our people. We are grateful to God that we were born in this land.”
    “Good,” the inspector said. “And who was the Lord Buddha?”
    “An enlightened man.”
    “An enlightened god. ”
    (Oops! Thirty-six million and five—!)
    The inspector made me write my name on the blackboard; then he showed me his wristwatch and asked me to read the time. He took out his wallet, removed a small photo, and asked me, “Who is this man, who is the most important man in all our lives?”
    The photo was of a plump man with spiky white hair and chubby cheeks, wearing thick earrings of gold; the face glowed with intelligence and kindness.
    “He’s the Great Socialist.”
    “Good. And what is the Great Socialist’s message for little children?”
    I had seen the answer on the wall outside the temple: a policeman had written it one day in red paint.
    “Any boy in any village can grow up to become the prime minister of India. That is his message to little children all over this land.”
    The inspector pointed his cane straight at me. “You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation?”
    I thought about it and said:
    “The white tiger.”
    “That’s what you are, in this jungle.”
    Before he left, the inspector said, “I’ll write to Patna asking them to send you a scholarship. You need to go to a real school—somewhere far away from here. You need a real uniform, and a real education.”
    He had a parting gift for me—a book. I remember the title very well: Lessons for Young Boys from the Life of Mahatma Gandhi.
    So that’s how I became the White Tiger. There will be a fourth and a fifth name too, but that’s late in the story.
    Now,