The White Tiger

Balram Halwai writes to the Premier of China over seven nights, offering an account of Indian entrepreneurship based entirely on his own career. He was born in Laxmangarh in what he calls the Darkness, the son of a rickshaw puller, taken out of school to break coals in a tea shop, and clever enough that a teacher once called him a white tiger, the rarest animal in the jungle. He learns to drive, talks his way into a job with a landlord's family, and goes to Delhi as servant to the son, Ashok, who is American-educated, liberal in his opinions, and entirely dependent on a system of bribes. Balram waits in car parks, sleeps in a basement with mosquitoes and other drivers, and slowly works out the rules of what he calls the Rooster Coop: why the servants never rob their masters, though nothing physical prevents it. Then Ashok's wife runs someone over, and Balram is asked to sign a confession. Adiga's narrator is funny, self-serving and wholly unreliable about his own decency, and the novel is a scathing account of the moral arithmetic that rising out of poverty is understood to require.