The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga Read Free Book Online

his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.
    Now, even though I killed him, you won’t find me saying one bad thing about him. I protected his good name when I was his servant, and now that I am (in a sense) his master, I won’t stop protecting his good name. I owe him so much. He and Pinky Madam would sit in the back of the car, chatting about life, about India, about America—mixing Hindi and English together—and by eavesdropping on them, I learned a lot about life, India, and America—and a bit of English too. (Perhaps a bit more than I’ve let on so far—!) Many of my best ideas are, in fact, borrowed from my ex-employer or his brother or someone else whom I was driving about. (I confess, Mr. Premier: I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener .) True, eventually Mr. Ashok and I had a disagreement or two about an English term— income tax —and things began to sour between us, but that messy stuff comes later on in the story. Right now we’re still on best of terms: we’ve just met, far from Delhi, in the city called Dhanbad.
    I came to Dhanbad after my father’s death. He had been ill for some time, but there is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections. When he began spitting blood that morning, Kishan and I took him by boat across the river. We kept washing his mouth with water from the river, but the water was so polluted that it made him spit more blood.
    There was a rickshaw-puller on the other side of the river who recognized my father; he took the three of us for free to the government hospital.
    There were three black goats sitting on the steps to the large, faded white building; the stench of goat feces wafted out from the open door. The glass in most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring out at us from one cracked window.
    A sign on the gate said:
LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL
PROUDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT SOCIALIST
A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES
    Kishan and I carried our father in, stamping on the goat turds which had spread like a constellation of black stars on the ground. There was no doctor in the hospital. The ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital’s rooms were wide open; the beds had metal springs sticking out of them, and the cat began snarling at us the moment we stepped into the room.
    “It’s not safe in the rooms—that cat has tasted blood.”
    A couple of Muslim men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him and his friend. Kishan and I lowered Father onto the newspaper sheets. We waited there.
    Two little girls came and sat down behind us; both of them had yellow eyes.
    “Jaundice. She gave it to me.”
    “I did not. You gave it to me. And now we’ll both die!”
    An old man with a cotton patch on one eye came and sat down behind the girls.
    The Muslim men kept adding newspapers to the ground, and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds, and delirious mouths kept growing.
    “Why isn’t there a doctor here, uncle?” I asked. “This is the only hospital on either side of the river.”
    “See, it’s like this,” the older Muslim man said. “There’s a government medical superintendent who’s meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he’s having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.”
    “That much!” I said, my mouth opened wide.
    “Why not? There’s good money in public service! Now, imagine