The White tiger Roars

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, introduces an exciting new writer who happens to be Indian. If it’s true—and I happen to think it is—that the quality of a writer’s voice is the key to success, then Adiga has a great future. The compelling and often terrifying but never dull voice in this novel belongs to Balram Halwai, the owner of a car service, who sits in his office in the middle of the night in Bangalore speaking to the premier of China, due to visit India shortly. He’s alone in his tiny office with only his chandelier for company. The room is filled with the flickering light that is thrown around the room by the turning fan just above it. Having heard on the radio that Premier Jiabao wants to learn the truth about Bangalore, to “meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips,” Balram has determined that Jiabao hear his life story because he believes that the “future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse.” And what’s more, his story is the right one because, as he says, “I am tomorrow.”
Forget images of the Taj Mahal, incense, golden chrysanthemums, elephants padding through the jungle, or “lyrical India,” as one critic has described it; Balram’s India is a savage place, a country where he, the son of a rickshaw puller, can rise from “The Darkness” only by the most nefarious of means. Balram’s life reflects all the clichés—rags to riches, poor boy makes good, etc. You can’t listen to him without thinking of Dickens’s Pip, of David Copperfield on the one hand, of Horatio Alger stories, even Stendhal’s The Charter House of Parma or The Red and the Black. Except that, and it’s a big except, Balram gets where he gets in his own way, by conniving and cheating and murdering. And yet, and yet, it’s hard to despise him because his world is so vicious and corrupt. Balram compares it to a Rooster Coop, the box into which roosters are crammed in the market. Above them the butcher chops up chickens and the roosters smell the blood. But they don’t rebel or try to escape the coop, and as Balram says, the “very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”
And so he has become a White Tiger, the “rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation,” in the jungle of his country." The angry outrage, the biting wit, the sheer power of Balram’s voice is so persuasive that readers are carried along, complicit in the acts that he carries out to achieve his office and his chandelier. Is he mad? Maybe. Is this the voice of the future? Possibly. Whatever else, his is a narrative of enormous power that keeps a reader turning the pages until the end just to hear where Balram will go next. Much as I have enjoyed books by other Indian writers such as Amitov Ghosh, Rohan Mistry, Karen Desai, and Manil Suri, this is the first one I’ve read that seemed to look to the future. Prophetically, it seems to suggest the world of the recent attacks in Mumbai rather than the world of a film like “Monsoon Wedding.” Finally, the angry energy of Balram’s voice reminded me a lot of Salmon Rushdie’s classic novel about partition, Midnight’s Children. Is Balram’s world the child of that 1947 midnight? This is not a happy thought.