The
White Tiger
-Aravind
Adiga
The Sixth Night
Balram
says about the dreams of rich and poor. The poor dreams all their lives of
getting enough to eat and the rich dreams to lose weight. Every evening, the
compound around Buckingham Towers B block becomes an exercise ground, Because
of the late night parties and drinking alcohols the rich gets fat in Delhi. So
they walk to lose weight. While they walk around the apartment, most of the
drivers stand at various spots with bottles of mineral water and fresh towels
in their hands. Each time they complete a circuit stop next to their man, drink
some water, wipe their sweats and continue the next round. Vitiligo-lips also
stands in one corner of the compound, Balram asks him for a golden- haired
prostitute for his master Mr. Ashok. He also enquires about the cost and
Vitiligo-lips answers, that depends on high-class or low-class, virgin or
non-virgin. Balram says that his master can’t pay more than four thousand seven
hundred. Next Balram asks Vitiligo-lips “How many ways are there for a driver
to cheat his master?”. He says there are four ways for a servant to betray his
master to get extra cash, I. He can sell petrol from the car. II. To make a
repair to the car , he can go to a corrupt mechanic and inflates the price and
he can keep the rest for himself. III. He can sell the empty whisky bottles.
IV. He can use the car as a freelance taxi. Balram has never cheated his master
before, but starts to do it for a couple of weeks and feels rage instead of
guilt. He says that “ the more I stole from him, the more I realized how much
he had stole from him”.
The
moment he has enough money he goes to Vitiligo-lips again and asks for the
prostitute not for his master but for himself. Vitiligo-lips takes him to the
hotel and asks the golden-hair women for him. The manager asks for extra five
hundred rupees. Balram takes out the last three hundred rupees. He goes to the
room number 114A. A girl named Anastasia sits on the bed. she is not as pretty
as the woman Mr. Ashok met. Balram and Anastasia talks for a while and suddenly
he jumps out of the bed because he has discovered that the golden hair was not
real. He leaves the hotel and in consequence he has spent all his money for
nothing.
Balram
reaches his rom and identify a surprise there. Mr. Ashok is sitting on his bed
and says he knows where Balram has been, that the man with pink lips says that
he has gone to the temple. Mr. Ashok notice that there are red marks on
Balram’s palm and finds it as a skin disease and asks him whether he can treat
it with medicine. Balram replies that “The disease of the poor can never get
treated” and he revels that his father had TB and it killed him. But Mr. Ashok
asks Balram to go hospital and he offers to pay for the treatment. Then they
both goes to the tea shop, where the poor used to eat. Balram orders the
commoners food like okra, cauliflower, radish, spinach and dhal, and for the
final touch he orders a lessi for
Mr. Ashok. He likes the food for commoners.
Mukesh
comes to town again. He persuades Mr. Ashok to marry again. Mukesh gives him a
red bag with lots of money inside, He has to bring it to the minister again and
remembers Mr. Ashok tp ask for the bag back because it an Italian-made and no
need to give any additional gifts,
As
they are waiting in the traffic jam, Balram offers a one rupee to the begger.
Mongoose gets really angry and shouts at him. The next day Balram drives them
to some minister’s house with the red bag. Afterward he takes them to the hotel
and he takes the mongoose to the railway station. When the train leaves the
station, Balram dances around the platform.
Next
morning, Mr. Ashok asks Balram to bring the red bag full of money to the car.
While driving he tried hard not to look at the red bag. Balram is in a bad
conflict within himself. On the one hand he is aware of Mr. Ashok as a good and
gracious master. On the other hand Mr. Ashok gave Balram the blame for the car
accident and the chids death.
After
bringing Ashok to the hotel, Balram drives to the train station, planning out a
possible escape routes in case he decided to steel the money. There he put a
coin in the fortune-telling machine, and received a printed fortune insisting
command “Respect for the law is the first command of the gods.”
That
Sunday, Balram says Ashok he is going to the temple, but instead he goes to the
red-light district. However, realizing that the Nepali girls are simply caged
animals like himself, he is not attracted towards them. Then he goes straight
on to an older part of the city, Balram gets to a second hand market where books
are sold. He names it as ” one of the wonders of the world”. He flips through
books without paying for them. There he meets a Muslim book seller. This man
talks to him a lot about poetry and poets. Balram names the four wise poets
they are Reemi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, and he has forget the fourth name.
On
the way home an image of buffalo appears in front of his eyes. The buffalo is
pulling a cart fills with buffalo
skulls, without any direction from the human. Balram walks along the poor
animal for a while. The buffalo says to Balram that he has brought a lot of
shame to his family and all of them will die. Balram imagines the skulls where
there of his own family, and the buffalo
shaming him for allowing their murder.
Submitted
by,
C.
Asha
I.
M. A English literature
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