Tiger on the Prowl

Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger is follows the life of Balram Halwai, a driver, who is treated like a servant or ghulam -- a ubiquitous and normalized culture in India -- and his justification to take revenge.

A good book is like a nice wine — the taste lingers for quite some time after it is consumed. Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger is one such book. The book follows the journey of Balram Halwai — a poor yet ambitious person — from his village in Bihar to becoming a car driver to a wealthy household.

The book consists of a series of letters from Balram to the then Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, narrating his life journey to becoming a driver. He is an ambitious man who aspires for upward social and economic mobility. Despite his best efforts, he realizes his caste and economic status remains the biggest obstacle to becoming successful. The more he attempts to break, the more he realized how much he is truly shackled due to his caste and economic status.

Unlike others, Balram thinks he is different from his community. He calls himself the White Tiger (hence the title) — a rare breed and misfit in the jungle just like him. Despite being good in school, he is forced to drop out of school to help his family with additional expenses. Later, he works as a waiter in a small tea shop. But Balram was ambitious. As a kid, he would aspire to become a bus conductor since they were the most charismatic occupation he had seen. But he hustled to get a better job — a driver to a wealthy household. However, it is not the job but how you are treated in the job that matters.

The book highlights the relationship between the two Indias: those that are served a.k.a sahibs or masters and those who serve them a.k.a ghulams or servants. Balram is treated like a ghulam in the household he is hired as a driver. This is because wealthy people don’t hire full-time drivers. They hire servants who also drive. Other times, he is expected to buy groceries, wash clothes and do dirty laundry for his sahib (pun intended), massage the legs of older members of the households and get hit on the head every time he makes a mistake.

The book traces how Balram’s perception of his master, Ashok, changes over time. It can be broken into six stages although it might not always be linear. The six stages are as follows:

Stage 1: Worship — my master is god. I worship my master.

Stage 2: Gratitude — my master gives me food, money, and shelter. I am grateful to my master.

Stage 3: Respect — my master speaks to me nicely. I respect my master.

Stage 4: Betrayal — my master made me commit a sin. Master betrayed me.

Stage 5: Anger — my master commits sin. I don’t like my master

Stage 6: Hatred — my master is bad. I am poor because my master is rich. I hate him.

The book is written in a simple language (similar to Chetan Bhagat) since it is a series of letters by Balram. However, simple language doesn’t stop it from becoming hard-hitting and visceral. On the contrary, it enhanced the empathy for the servants. We feel a sense of outrage when Balram or other ghulams are treated poorly by the sahibs.

The pain requires an outlet. It talks about the subtle ways the servants take their revenge. For example, when one master got a toupee to hide his baldness, the driver would deliberately speed up during the speed breaker to make the toupee fall out of his master’s head. Other times, they would piss on the flower pots, kick the pet dog when taking them for a walk, slap their master if drunk.

It is a quick read but hard-hitting. After reading the book, you might start looking at the world from the driver's perspective when you enter the bus, cab, or a rickshaw.

Reflections of an English butler

 Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a moving story imbued with absurdity and laughter.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, Murakami, for me have one thing in common — I have heard their names but never actually got on to read their books. So when I saw Ishiguro’s book, “The Remains of the Day’’, on my friend’s bookshelf I immediately borrowed it. I had no idea about Ishiguro’s writing style — should I expect humour, thriller or drama. The backside of the book provided as much information as my prior knowledge — an ageing butler embarks on holiday while reflecting on his past.

The first 20 pages of the book felt slow for my taste. It is exactly the opposite of an article, which aims to start with a hook to capture the audience’s attention. However, the book meandered in all directions before arriving at the destination, around 20 pages too late in the author’s opinion.

The story follows the leisurely holiday of an ageing butler, Stevens, who embarks on a motoring trip across the English countryside at the insistence of his American employer. As Stevens starts his trip, memories from the past start engulfing his thoughts. He ponders over his interactions with his previous employer, his strictly professional relationship with the housekeeper Miss Kenton and his father, and most importantly, his idea of an exemplary butler.

Stevens sole purpose was to provide perfect service to his landlord and perform his duties as the butler to the best of his ability. This meant serving his landlord and his guest even as his father was suffering from severe illness or carrying out tasks instructed by his landlord without any questions, even if they might be considered unethical and immoral.

The dispassionate attitude of Stevens was unsettling sometimes. At these times, I missed (and my favourite butler) good old Jeeves. Stevens was no Jeeves in humour but his thoughts and actions were so ridiculous that I couldn’t stop laughing. For example, Stevens notices that his new American landlord likes to banter. Upon realizing his ineptitude at banter, he promptly starts listening to a radio programme called ‘Twice a Week or More’ to improve his witticism and practices it on unwitting strangers during his trip. His poor attempts at banter and resolution to try harder makes up for his failure at least for the reader.

The story explores relationships between different societies of people — butler and landlord, landlord’s friends. Since a part of the story is set at the backdrop of WW1 and WW2, it presents viewpoints of aristocrats, especially English, who were sympathetic to Hitler’s ideology. Further, the book captures the tension between Stevens and Miss Keaton — while attracted to one another at a personal level, their professional arrangement makes it hard for their love to blossom. It reminded me of Faiz’s sher, “Kuch Ishq kiya, Kuch Kaam Kiya / Loved at bit, worked a bit.” Stevens, a professional butler, would agree only with the latter.

As I read the book further, I felt slowly drawn towards Stevens and his reflections. After some time, I couldn’t stop reading the book. The book felt like a composition by an accomplished classical musician. At first, one doesn’t want to listen to it but once you start listening, it is impossible to stop it. Ishiguro’s writing is the same — it is evocative, reflective, humorous and beautiful.

If you are like me who always wanted to read Ishiguro in the past, The Remains of the Day is a great start.

 

Too many Aurelianos!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a difficult but an worthwhile adventure filled with magical realism. 

I first heard about Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM) in 2014 when my friend wrote a post about him after his passing on Facebook. I was surprised at my ignorance about GGM and Latin literature in general. I decided to read his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude (OHYS). When I started reading the book, however, confusing names and convoluted timelines made it difficult to get past a couple of chapters. When I conveyed my predicament to my friend, she suggested the only way to conquer the book is by drawing a family tree.

Several years later, I would celebrate the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions by taking strolls across the streets of Berkeley. While walking, I came across OHYS lying on the sidewalk. My old inkling was rekindled and decided to give the book another try. Before reading the book, however, I heeded my friend’s advice by drawing the family tree of Buendias and embarked on an adventure.

But why start with the family tree? Because OHYS is a 400-page novel tracing seven generations of the Buendia family filled with five Arcadios, three Remedios, and more Aurielianos than I could count (actually, 22). The names become so repetitive that one character promises to name her child anything but Aurieliano or Remedios (only to name the child Aurieliano later). Initially, the repeated names became a nuisance as I spent half of the time looking back at the family tree before identifying the character and their relationship with others. Over time, however, I realized that the same character names were indicative of similar characteristics, with many repeating the actions and mistakes as their previous namesakes. Some were intensely boisterous and impulsive while others quiet and pensive. Yet, one characteristic connected them all — solitude.

Family tree of Buendia

The story is based in Macondo, an isolated city of mirrors founded by José Arcadio Buendía, which is initially cut off from the world. It was established with utopian principles but over time, greed and selfishness creep into the characters resulting in their destruction. This results in characters becoming increasingly solitary and unable to truly love anyone apart from themselves. There are rich sentences capturing this theme like, “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude” or “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction” or “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

As Salman Rushdie remembers a joke told by his friend, “I have a feeling that writers in Latin America can’t use the word solitude anymore, because they worry that people might think it is a reference to Gabo [Gabriel Garcia Marquaez’s nickname]. And I am afraid,” he added, “soon we will not be able to use the phrase one hundred years either.”

While I read this a work of fiction, the book had references to historical events in Columbia which I later learnt. The war of ideology in the story closely resembles the war between Conservatives and Liberals between 1899 to 1902, and the massacre which killed three thousand protestors in the book resembles the ‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928 in Columbia.

If navigating one hundred Aurelianos wasn’t sufficient, the genre didn’t make it any easier. The book falls into the genre of magical realism (a genre the author of this article detested until now). The world of Macondo is filled with supernatural things that are considered normal. A character is swarmed with yellow butterflies around him; a beautiful girl ascends to heaven while folding white sheets; characters return from the dead as ghosts; the rain falls in Macondo for four years, eleven months, and two days. On the other hand, science and technology are considered a pariah and idiosyncratic. When the father states that the earth is round like an orange, his wife admonishes him for putting gypsy ideas into the heads of the children. While I faced challenges initially, once I delved deeper into the world of Macondo, I was able to accept absurdity as normal, quotidian events just like any other Macondoian but not without an involuntary chuckle.

The story follows the cyclical nature of life with future generations of Buendia committing similar mistakes as their previous generations. As one matriarch let out a deep laugh with resignation after Aureliano confesses incestuous sentiments about his cousin and states:

“There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” This felt like a microcosm of the world where people and world leaders keep repeating the same mistakes committed by the previous generations even when the consequences of these actions in the past were terrible.

My favourite part of the book is the profoundly rich sentences that lit my eyes on almost every other page, which should be credited to GGM and also the translator, Gregory Rabassa. Some of my favourite lines include:

1. The first and one of the iconic lines in English literature:“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

2. Or when one of them realizes the futility of utopia: “Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

3. The race was condemned from the beginning: “Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Imitation is greatest form of flattery. In the end, let me summarize the book to my readers as follows: Many years later, when he read this summary, Ashwin Mb was to remember that distant afternoon when he picked the book to discover a masterpiece.