50books_poc | The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (#2)

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. (Man Booker Prize winner.)

The White Tiger is written as a letter from Balram, the protagonist, to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the People's Republic of China -- a letter whose purpose, Balram says, is to explain "the truth about Bangalore" by describing his own life story and the way that he became what he calls a "self-made entrepreneur." Most of the book -- apart from asides where the adult Balram addresses Wen Jiabao directly -- are a depiction of Balram's childhood of extreme deprivation in rural India, and his efforts to pull himself out of it before it kills him, as it did both his parents.

The name of the book comes from a scene early in the book while Balram was still in school, when his (drunk -- at the time and in general) teacher got a surprise inspection from the government. The official questioned the students; Balram, bright and ambitious, was the only one who impressed him. He compared Balram to the white tiger, 'the rarest animal in the forest -- and by the comparison indicates that he has no expectation of finding intelligent and determined students in rural villages with any more frequency than he would find a white tiger. He arranged for Balram to receive a scholarship. And in a more hopeful book, that would be the first step in the direction of Balram's progress out of poverty: that Balram should get a scholarship, better education, movement out of the crushing inequity of his childhood.

This is not that kind of hopeful book. Before Balram got even a sniff of the scholarship, his grandmother pulled him out of school and sent him to work in the teahouse to pay for the wedding of one of his female cousins. (Weddings are treated much like natural disasters in the book, unavoidable crises -- at least the weddings of female relatives: each of the men in Balram's family got pulled out of school to work to pay for the wedding of a female relative.) There's no question after that that he'll get more education. He was sucked into the pattern of work and death that doomed his father and mother both.

(I should pause here and say that I know embarrassingly little about poverty and class in India. For the purposes of this review, I'm taking the book at face value -- although it's a sign to me that I could definitely stand to educate myself more on this subject.)

Balram does find a way out -- but it's got nothing to do with the naive 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' fantasies that I'm familiar with from most rags-to-riches stories.

Indeed -- and this isn't much of a spoiler, since it's revealed in the second chapter, but I'm being cautious -- Balram puts himself on the steps to freedom by killing his master, Ashok. You find this out well in advance of finding out the circumstances, which lends an interesting tension to the book: given that Ashok is nicer than most of the people he knows (nicer than his other possible masters, nicer than his own family -- his grandmother is not a terribly sympathetic figure either -- and nicer than the other servants he knows), why does Balram kill Ashok? And the answer, at the end, is that no matter how nice Ashok is, Ashok still in a very real sense owns him. There's a really horrifying section where Ashok and his wife Pinky take the car over from Balram (Balram's job at the time is to be their driver) and kill a child who lives in the slums. The arrangement -- unquestioned by anyone but Pinky, who is either an American or a very Americanized Indian woman, I'm not sure -- is that if it comes to an investigation, Balram will claim to have been driving, plead guilty, and take the punishment instead of Pinky and Ashok. He'll go to jail for his master's misdeeds -- and this is unquestioned. While it's not totally clear until a bit later in the book, it's clearly at this point that Balram realizes that he can't live like this: he has to find some way out, because otherwise his life could be derailed at any moment for the convenience of those above him.

The other complicating factor is that if Balram doesn't obey -- if he fails his master's family -- it's not just him who will bear the brunt of the punishment: it's his family. This is clear from the beginning of the book, where it's indicated that one of the prominent and high-status families of the village lost their child to a kidnapper. The servant responsible for looking after the child is killed... along with his entire family, as a deterrent. When Balram decides to free himself and gain the means to his own independence by killing Ashok, he has to accept that it means that Ashok's family will have everyone in his family killed in retaliation, and probably will have the women raped first.

Balram does it anyway -- it's the only way, he says, out of the 'rooster cage,' the trap wherein servants are compelled to stand still and quiet like roosters to the slaughter -- even though they can hear and see and smell the other roosters being slaughtered before them. He can see no other way out.

I think this cut is enough to see why the story stuck with me as deeply depressing, despite being very well-written and thought-provoking!

This book reminded me a great deal of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; I tried to avoid too many comparisons in the rest of the review in order to allow this one to stand alone, but I can't help it, I have to indulge the comparison here. They're both about ambitious, intelligent young men born to crushing poverty, living in towns/villages with very little possibility for improvement, and fighting for a better chance -- and more to the point, both are exceptionally depressing but written in a way that's very funny. I think I'd like The White Tiger better if it didn't remind me of Absolutely True Diary, because... because I just didn't like Balram as much as I liked Junior. I don't think this is a failing of the book: it's pretty clearly partly about the way people act in extremity, and the way people act in extremity is not always pretty. It's a bleak, bleak book, and the fact that it's funny doesn't obscure the way that it's deeply depressing.

And yet -- and yet Balram gets a happy ending, of sorts. It's just -- it's not a cheerful happy ending. It's a making-the-most-of-horrible-things happy ending. It's a happy ending in which the protaginst admits that he still has to ignore certain things that have happened, certain things he has done.

It was a very good read, sucked me in and didn't let me go, and gave me so much to think about. It was also about as far from a comfortable read as I can imagine, so do be aware of that if you're planning to read it.