“The White Tiger”- and my little retrospection

It was June 2009, Singapore. In my quiet hotel room I was absorbed in Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” (winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008). Delhi seemed a mirror image of Dhaka; privileged elite society, toxic traffic jams, the beggars at traffic lights, the destitute small children selling things on the street. And then the drivers - waiting for their masters and madams outside the Pink City mall on Gulshan Avenue. They take them through the streets of Dhaka, in the day light as well under the neon street lights in the wee hours of morning…. I was forced to see the various possibilities and far too often it was very unsettling.

An image of my poor mother from a week earlier suddenly came up to me, stranded in the hospital after her strenuous four-hour dialysis. Apparently, her driver would often, without my mother’s knowledge, stealthily sneak the car out of the hospital parking-lot, knowing that she will be connected to her dialysis machine for several hours inside the hospital. He would give driving lessons to novices. But that day one of his unauthorized students drove the car into another parked car in the street. That accident revealed what was going on.

The book tells the story of Balram Halwai, the oppressed son of a rickshaw puller and his becoming an entrepreneur. Balram, the protagonist, reveals his perspectives on the sharp contrast between the upper class of Delhi society and their employees who come from rural villages. They are exposed both to extreme poverty and to the glamorous life of the city. Balram was a personaldriver; he had a close contact with his master and madam’s personal life, his slyness and his eavesdropping on backseat conversations, cheating on his master by siphoning off gas from the car, taking the car to corrupt mechanics who over charged and then splitting the extra with the driver, and using the car as a taxi on the side when master is away…..all sounded eerily familiar.

I finished reading my copy before our weeklong vacation in Singapore ended. I stayed inside my hotel room, limiting my pleasure trips to Singapore’s popular attractions - shopping, roaming around the city, watching, and eating at Singapore’s most renowned open air hawker centers (tradition of communal dinning, now a part of UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritages).

Dhaka was then our home city again, from 2007 to 2010, after our long stay abroad for twenty-four years. During all those years we had been back in Dhaka many times, but our visits were short, for hardly more than two weeks. And the two weeks would whisk away in a blink with the excitement of seeing parents, meeting relatives and childhood friends, going for shopping, multiple visits to tailor shops and banks, and unrestrained conversation on various topics in the car. Never in those days had I ever thought of the chauffeur who could be listening to our conversation and that we were exposing a lot of our private life to him.

Dhaka was changing - more cars on the road than we used to have in our childhood, now people were living in tall apartment buildings in places where we used to have single houses with front and back yards. The city is over saturated with people, markets are busy and bustling, the electronic and digital revolutions had brought in dynamic changes in society. There had been an invisible evolution in societal attitudes, which seemed to have eluded me. Perhaps I was ambivalent of the facts - somehow those short stays were too short for me to grasp these all.

When we returned to Dhaka after our vacation in Singapore, at times when I would be trapped in my car in a traffic-clogged road, Balram would often whip me in a frenzy of anxieties. I stopped using my cell phone, refrained from any long conversation with any one in the car, and even sending text messages to my fellow passenger when there was a need to communicate.

In July 2010 we came back to Maryland, and I still sometimes marvel at the days I lived back in Dhaka!

A few days back, Netflix released a movie based on the book “The White Tiger” (indeed a true adaptation of the book). After watching the movie, my confession - the book had more literary substance that I had overlooked then. I suppose I was too obsessed (my husband witnessed its severity) with Balram.

Apparently Balram – an authentic character, a product of the existing disparity of wealth in Indian society, represents the emerging class of nouveau entrepreneurs rising up from the village tea shop, and reflecting the geopolitical realities of India today- Aravind Adiga’s “rags to riches” story!

A big difference between reading pages in my solitude and later watching the characters speaking aloud on the screen, in “The White Tiger”.