Munna Halwai alias Balram alias the White Tiger reveals his life history in a series of seven letters written to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao who is visiting Bangalore.
Why is he writing to the Chinese Premier? From the All India Radio he gathers that although the Chinese are ahead of Indians in most areas, India produces more entrepreneurs.
Jiabao is visiting India hoping to learn how to make a few Chinese entrepreneurs. Our hero, the White Tiger, decides to tell the Chinese Premier the story of his climb from filth to wealth.
The tone is sardonic and witty.
The style breezy. The author does not celebrate the famous Indian poverty.
Like most educated well-of Indians, he is appalled by the two Indias. His heart works overtime for the have nots. Which is why he has decided to tell the story from a servant’s viewpoint.
Balram is a poor boy from the Darkness ( a rural backwater named Laxmigarh), a clever student who gets pulled out of school, who is a spider (thin legged boys going around the tables) working in a tea shop.
His young life is full of non performing thieving teachers, wealthy and cruel landlords, corrupt and corpulent socialist politicians.
The cruel landlord of his village is in coal business. One of his children is kidnapped by the Naxalites. A servant who is blamed for negligence is killed with his family.
The children of the family are sent away from the village. Balram moves to Dhanbad after his father’s death (of tuberculosis, thanks to heartless hospitals and errant doctors) manages to learn driving, locates the village landlord’s son Ashok.
He becomes his driver cum factotum, and moves to Delhi with him. A dream come true. Ashok is educated in the US and has married Pinky against his family’s wishes.
Pinky wants to go back to America. Many adventures in Delhi (where the seamy side of India is revealed in all its splendour) unfurl and later Balram kills his master, walks away with a considerable amount of money and becomes an entrepreneur in Bangalore.
The letters build up the momentum to what makes him do this.
And to what Adiga thinks is the new India and its amoral businessmen.
The book is an easy read. However it is irritating and simplistic.
Many regional novelists have looked at the amoral poor and the changing India and its layered complexities in more interesting ways. But then, these regional novelists do not write for the Western readers.
By Aravind Adiga 521 pages Rs 395 HarperCollins.