The White Tiger won the Booker in 2008, and I remember skim-reading the first few pages when one of my lecturers brought a copy to the pub that year. Ostensibly it is an epistolary novel, written as a series of unanswered letters from a young Indian entrepreneur to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China, and I think that when I first flicked through the book the set-up somehow struck me as an awkward conceit, and so I didn't bother chasing down a copy of my own.
Three years later, standing in a bookshop in the south of India, looking for a novel that would complement the experience of being outside of Europe for the first time in my life, my eyes alighted on the bold spine of Aravind Adiga's debut. I opened it at random, read a little. It was better than I remembered. Quite a lot better. Whether this was because I was reading it in a different mood, or because I had now spent some time in India and could better identify with the tone of the book, I'm not sure. Either way, I bought it (along with an authoritative-looking, pictureless Keralan recipe book, which has gone on to provide hours of amusement in my cold English kitchen, as I try to work out what I can substitute for ingredients that are unobtainable in my local Co-op).
The White Tiger is an uncomfortable read. Written from the perspective of Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw-puller, it shines an uncompromising light onto the 'India of Darkness', where a dip in the River Ganga will fill your mouth with 'faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.' As a small boy, Balram watches his mother's body burn in a pyre on the banks of the river, and is appalled to watch her become part of the 'black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here.' Thus begins Balram's quest to liberate himself from this desperately inevitable cycle, and to emerge into the second India, the 'India of Light'.
Balram goes to great pains to learn to drive, whereupon he wins himself a job as driver for Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam, the son and daughter-in-law of one of the three malefic landlords from his home village. Through his rear-view mirror, Balram is introduced to the seamier underpinnings of middle-class India: bribery, abuse and prostitution. A traditional fictional hero would rail against such practices. As an anti-hero, Balram becomes complicit in them. In modern India, he tells us, 'there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.'
Balram is not a character with whom it is easy to sympathise. Yes, like many a downtrodden protagonist, he is given a miserable start in life, and yes, he aspires to greater things. But he is cold-blooded in his attitudes and his actions: he wants sex, he pays a whore; he wants job security, he hounds his Muslim colleague out of town; he wants a new life, he slits the throat of his boss with a broken Johnny Walker bottle and steals his suitcase of bribe money. At times, his crude turn of phrase made my skin crawl - 'dip my beak into her' was, for me, the most repulsive of these. But then, this unlikeable crudeness is the whole point. Balram is a tea-wallah turned driver turned entrepreneur, a 'half-baked' semi-urchin from a lowly sweet-making caste, and all he has been exposed to in his short life is filth, corruption and greed. He is unshakeable in his belief that if he is to improve his lot in life, he must be ruthless. And ruthless he is, and improve his lot in life he does.
At the close of the book, Balram reflects on the decisions he has made and the damage he has wrought, and decides that even if he is caught and punished, 'I will never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master's throat. I'll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.' He is morally bankrupt, but he is exultant. To me and to the reader, it seems a hollow triumph, but Balram sees it as the pinnacle of all achievement: to have tasted life on the other side of India, the India of Light.
As a novel, The White Tiger is not a conventionally satisfying read. Balram's crimes are never resolved: the last page leaves him in Bangalore, hiding in plain sight as a successful businessman who also happens to be on India's 'Most Wanted' list. The brilliance of the book is in Adiga's acute observations of India's serving class - and, nested within that, the servants' own gimlet-eyed observations of the middle classes who employ them. Theirs is an India of air-conditioned cars and cut-throat ambition, where religion is played for advantage, and the accrual of rupees is the ultimate goal in life. It is not the India I saw in December, which was one of canalways festooned with water hyacinth, impeccably turned-out government workers, and cheeky-faced village children running along the river banks soliciting 'one pen, one pen' - but then, I was an affluent tourist, with pale skin and a return ticket to England. I am quite certain that there was plenty that that was hidden away in entirety from my foreign eyes.
