Sunday, October 11, 2009

By Reviewed by John French

"The White Tiger"

By Aravind Adiga

Free Press

Paperback, $14

Balram Halwai, the narrator and protagonist of "The White Tiger," has spent his boyhood in miserable, squalid, remote Laxmangarh, India, where his family and all of the other villagers were oppressed and gouged by four all-powerful landlords.

Young Balram's mother has died and he has watched her body cremated on a frightening funeral pyre by the banks of the muddy, polluted "Ganga" River. Presently, his father dies of tuberculosis on the floor of an unstaffed hospital, one of the nearly 1,000 indigent people to expire from this disease every day in India.

The only glimmer of hope for Balram's future is that he is intelligent. But this seems to be a gift of marginal value because the village school teacher is habitually drunk and supplements his meager, tardy government salary payments by stealing the children's state-supplied lunch money.

One day, however, a government inspector comes to the school and things start to change. Balram is the only student who can read what the inspector writes on the blackboard. Moreover, he can answer the inspector's questions. When the inspector asks what is the rarest animal in the jungle, Balram correctly tells him it is the white tiger. The inspector then tells Balram that, "in this jungle," he is the white tiger and Balram begins to sense that he can go somewhere.

His family senses something too: That Balram can become their meal ticket. They scrape together the money to buy him driving lessons. The son of one of the evil landlords hires him as a chauffeur and he is off to the big city of Bangalore.

Thus begins the rags-to-riches story of a contemporary Indian entrepreneur. In the world's leading outsourcing economy, there is ample room for entrepreneurs. But, because this is India, the entrepreneur's rise to wealth and comfort requires extraordinary measures, such as murdering his employer.

No, I have not violated the reviewer's code by revealing the end of the story; the author, Aravind Adiga, makes this stunning disclosure in his opening chapter.

At that point, nothing I was reading made sense to me. "The White Tiger" has received international acclaim as a "dazzling narrative," a "funny and imaginative" tour of India, "sarcastic, cunning and often hilarious." I was not seeing any of this.

Then, too, there was the problem of the author. Adiga is a man who was born in India, raised partly in Australia, educated at Columbia and Oxford universities and employed as a correspondent for Time Magazine. How, I wondered, could this man of education and achievement be qualified to immerse me in the wretched details of India's impoverished, downtrodden underclass?

So I took a time-out from the story to search for answers and I found them at the end of the book in a section titled, "A Conversation with Aravind Adiga." There the author carefully explains that this is a work of fiction. "Nothing in its chapters actually happened and no one you meet is real." The story is built "on a substratum of Indian reality" but Balram "is a composite of various men I've met when traveling through India" -- "what you hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking."

Armed with this information, I returned to the book. By the end of a long second chapter, I understood what I was reading. Aravind Adiga is India's incarnation of Joseph Heller and "The White Tiger" is India's version of "Catch 22." You do not, of course, encounter Yossarian or Major Major or Milo Mindbinder in "The White Tiger" but you do meet the comparably bizarre Stork and Mongoose and Pinky Madam. Like "Catch 22," "The White Tiger" is written not to depict reality but to shock and satirize.

If you approach "The White Tiger" from this perspective, you can enjoy most of it because Adiga writes so well. He does indulge in the strained artifice that his novel is actually Balram's long memorandum to the Premier of China to prepare him for his impending visit to India, but this is a minor irritation. What he does best, in an exaggerated "Catch 22" way, is provide insights into the India of today.

It is not a pretty picture. We have been conditioned to think of an India on the rise, which appears to be true. But those doing the rising seem to require graft and corruption to make it. The big entrepreneurs must bribe high government officials. The embryonic entrepreneurs must bribe the police. And, oh yes, the best way to finance your climb is to murder your employer and steal his cache of bribe money. No need to fear being caught; your bribes to the police will trump your picture on "Wanted" posters.

The enthusiastic worldwide audience for "The White Tiger" must be a source of irritation to India's government, which has on its hands a truly gifted author who specializes in giving his country a black eye. "The White Tiger" must be wreaking havoc on India's tourist trade.