The White Tiger By Aravind Adiga, HarperCollins, Rs 395

Aravind Adiga has done something quite simple in his debut novel. He has taken Forrest Gump out of his American idyll and planted him in Laxmangarh, India. If the life and times of Forrest Gump justify the saying, “You can’t keep a good man down”, then so does the journey — from child to “social entrepreneur” — of his Indian alter-ego, Balram Halwai, alias Munna, alias Ashok Sharma. Only, India takes out the “good” from “good man”, and frees it from its restrictive moral shackles.

The White Tiger is also a trip through ‘Other India’. But Balram (and Adiga) is not interested in Other India tourism, when he writes a series of letters to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, telling the story of his life. In any case, those who accuse others of vending this brand of tourism forget that when facts are placed on the table, no tourist in his right mind would want to visit Other India.

The choice of the Chinese prime minister, though at first glance surprising (Indians have hardly ever had kinship feelings towards the Chinese), becomes clear when Balram writes, towards the end of his letters, “in twenty years’ time, it will be just us, yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world.” Of course. If China and India are to rule the world together, it is imperative that the Chinese and Indians exchange notes.

So Balram Halwai tells the no-holds-barred story of his life —from the “Darkness” of Laxmangarh into the “Light” of Bangalore, via the chiaroscuro world of Gurgaon. He is born into the familiar squalor of Other India, where water buffaloes are any day more precious than human beings. His mother is the first to die, before his rickshaw-puller father meets a tubercular end in one of the dungeons that are passed off as hospitals in the Darkness. Balram has by this time served his time in that temple of education and moral training, the Indian village school. One of the few redeeming incidents of Balram’s life takes place in this lizard-filled den of corruption. Pleased with his reading skills and political common sense, the school inspector calls him the “white tiger’, “the rarest of animals — the creature that comes along only once in a generation”.

Even without the inspector’s hint, Balram knew he would have to break free one day. It happens in a somewhat long-winded way — a menial job in a roadside tea-shop, coal-breaking in Dhanbad, getting appointed as driver to the foreign-returned son of a coal mafia who also happens to be the prime exploiter of the downtrodden of Laxmangarh, moving to Gurgaon with the master and his wife, faithful chauffeur for some time, then killing the master, absconding with his cash-filled bag and resurfacing after a while in Bangalore under the assumed name of his master to start a taxi service for ferrying late-night workers from the mushrooming call-centres of the country’s tech-capital. And prospering guiltily ever after, one might add.

The India of today, as Adiga sees it, is an amalgamation of several bitter truths. Balram’s area of specialization, as one says in modern corporate jargon, is servitude. As such, he is in a position to explain why “the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the Indian economy”. The phenomenon is called the Rooster Coop: “A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent — as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way — to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of emancipation in a man’s hand and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”

Balram is a White Tiger because he is smart enough to decode the Rooster Coop, to arrive at the truth that “the Indian family is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop”. What distinguishes the White Tiger from the rest of the coop is that he “is prepared to see his family destroyed — hunted, beaten and burned alive by the masters”. Although he calls himself “a freak, a pervert of nature”, there is no doubt that what makes the job easy for him is the fact that his family too has never been interested in anything other than exploiting him. Even the young cousin who is dumped on him by his family and is carried into his new life, learns soon enough that blackmailing is the way to get by in the world that is ready to exploit you, cheat you and beat the living daylights out of you at the first opportunity.

A book like The White Tiger always runs the risk of generalizing, sermonizing, justifying, and sounding either pat or lofty. And indeed the novel is full of generalizations. Drivers are a “key-chain-swirling, paan-chewing, gossip-mongering, ammonia-releasing” lot, foreigners “go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to Bodh Gaya... get into weird poses of yoga, smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they are getting enlightened”. But Adiga breaks out of the Rooster Coop too — by refusing to exoticize or to beg for sympathy, by ruthlessly uncovering the core of Corrupt India, and above all, by his dark humour. It is not everyday that an inhabitant of ‘this’ India comes forward to say that the difference between ‘this’ India and ‘that’ India is that in the latter, no one is given the choice of being good if he wants to.