There have been many India books this past year or two, but Aravind Adiga?s debut novel, which shines a light on India?s vast area of darkness cuts through the clutter like no other. A Bangalore-based entrepreneur from Bihar ? ?Like all good Bangalore stories, mine begins far away from Bangalore.? ? decides to write to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the eve of his visit to the city to tell him the truth about India. ?One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.?
Through the course of his seven letters, Balram Halwai, the white tiger, ?the creature that comes along only once in a generation?, will have told the story of his life and his people, and India, ?? two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness.? It?s a searing portrait of a country and its people who bow to 36,000,000 gods; it?s also the story of the marginalised and dispossessed, now in every city street, seen but not often remembered, and how politicians like The Great Socialist, armtwist them; it?s the story of Halwai, how he transits from the Darkness of Laxmangarh to the Light of New India, first in Delhi and then Bangalore, in an utterly amoral way.
For the narrator, who must make a life away from Ganga, the river of death, there are just two castes in India now: ?Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat ? or get eaten up.? He chooses not to get eaten up, so what if he has blood on his hands.
Adiga packs in one image after another to highlight the Darkness vs Light theme. So, we have Halwai telling the Chinese Premier about the greatest thing to come out of this country: the rooster coop. The narrator talks of the meat shops in Old Delhi where the roosters ?see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they?re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.? So, can a man break out of the coop? ??only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed ? hunted, beaten and burned alive by the masters ? can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature. It would, in fact, take a White Tiger.?
Adiga?s tale is not without large doses of black humour. The narrator writes: ?I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves.? Once the narrator, also a killer on the run, reaches Bangalore, he listens to the man on the street, the many voices on MG Road, and invariably launches a start-up, a taxi service to ferry call centre workers, what else? His life is complete, and though he pays a huge price for it, he is ?in the Light now.?
What?s compelling about Adiga?s writing is that it?s never didactic, not even when he makes the protagonist rage against a country where there?s democracy but little else in terms of public health or primary education, where most institutions are steeped in corruption, where breaking the law is commonplace.