The White Tiger

I liked this book. On my own scale of Greatness, I would call it 'Very Good.'

The book was widely talked about after the Booker Prize and so I knew that it was about Balram Halwai, who was a driver once and had murdered his master, writing his life story to the Chinese President. Now, I didn't really believe that somebody, Indian or otherwise, would write letters telling his story to the head of another country. I decided the writer had tried to be over-smart. Plus, I read some reviewer saying that the book was gimmicky. So, I had no desire at all to read it.

A few days ago I spotted it on the shelves of British Library. This time, I thought of giving it a try.

First, the pluses.

1. The book is written very lucidly. It is an engrossing book. My definition of 'engrossing' is that even when my eyes fall shut with sleep, I force them open to read some more. This book is like that.

2. The narrator is a driver. And Aravind Adiga has adapted the narrative language to the level of a driver very well. There is not one difficult word in the whole book, because the driver obviously cannot know such words. The language, the way of speaking, is totally believable.

3. The way the driver tells us his story too is believable. He is speaking into a tape recorder. No, he is chatting with the invisible Chinese Premier and letting the tape recorder record it. Now, it usually happens that while speaking, we leap between topics quite easily. We may have started telling one thing, but in-between, we remembered something else and started talking about that instead, and only after some time do we realize that we have got off the track from our original topic, and so come back to it. But if we were to convey all that information through writing, we would not allow ourselves to digress that way. We would first finish one topic neatly, and only then move on to the next. So, the way a person would tell us something orally is different from the way the same person would tell us the same story in writing.

It is an achievement of Aravind that the driver genuinely seems to be talking. The book seems to be just a (grammatically edited) transcript of the driver's talk.

4. I liked how the driver boasts to us of his smartness and intelligence- he really believes that he is very smart- but reading further down, we can see for ourselves how naive and ordinary he really is. Isn't this true for us too? The others' view of us is often quite different from our own grand misconceptions about ourselves.

5. The story of the driver's poverty is absolutely true. While reading the book, this thought had come to me again and again that, "Yes! This is how it is! He's an honest writer!"

6. The characters too are very well drawn. Though, I cannot believe that the Balram's granny would have been as mercenary as he and her letters to him make her out to be. I particularly liked Balram's master Ashok's characterization. He thinks that he is a very genial and gentle master. His father and brother think the same and admonish him again and again for it. Balram thinks the same and loves him for it. But he, and we, slowly realize that Ashok too is no less cruel than masters usually are with their servants. True, he is very soft-spoken with Balram, never shouts at him, gives him good food to eat, increases his wages regularly. But- and it is only with time that Balram realizes this, and still later, that he begins to resent it- he is indifferent to Balram. His relationship with Balram is purely opportunistic. Balram is easily replaceable. He is no more than a human machine to him.

And that is how most masters are.

7. Balram Halwai never says 'he had sex with her'. He says 'he dipped his beak into her.' I found that euphemism cute.

Now, the minuses. The minus, in fact. It is the same thing that had kept me away from the book in the first place. The whole premise of Balram wanting to write to the Chinese Premier just does not seem believable enough. Balram is an entrepreneur. And not a naive one either. In fact, he has become a rather shrewd man towards the end. I cannot imagine such a man suddenly turn so innocent and ingenuous that he thinks of writing to Wen Jiabo to explain entrepreneurship to him and, in the process, tells his entire life story, even the fact that he is a murderer at large. I cannot imagine a real-life Balram Halwai doing that. The writer has forcibly made him do it.

Could Balram not have recorded his tapes directly for us instead of using the excuse of the Chinese Prez? The entire narration would have remained the same even then. Only it would have been much more believable, for me at least.