It could be called the burden of being a Booker Prize winner the first-time round. When Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker in 2008, he did not just write a novel, he created a meme. Ever since then, his White Tiger has become the shorthand for describing the invisible creatures hiding in the undergrowth of our fractured society, waiting to maul their owners.
In another era the same character would be a societal misfit called Frankenstein’s monster, or the many variations of our fear of the other that has created some of our most compelling literary narratives.
Discovering nature
Adiga is himself the White Tiger here. He focuses on one of the most pressing issues of our times — the plight of the individual
seeking asylum in a foreign land. Danny, the cleaner who walks around Sydney with his vacuum cleaner attached to his back, golden highlights glinting in his hair, is the bait. The time frame of the novel stretches into a day in the life of Danny, or Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan migrant from Batticaloa.
His job is to scrub the houses of the more established inhabitants. In the course of his day he comes upon the shocking news of a murder of one of his clients.
Radha Thomas, whose apartment Danny cleans once a week, is the epitome of a successful woman of Indian extraction who has married a white Australian and made the most of her privileged status, which includes having a macho Indian lover named Prakash Wadhwa. He sounds a bit like our Hrithik Roshan as he has eyes the colour of hazelnuts, but alas for our heroine, a nasty habit of playing “Pokies”, that is to say, gambling on the gaming machines. It’s a habit Radha Thomas also has.
The timeline is elastic. Adiga stretches it to include the four years that Danny has spent in Australia as a student. The narrative is not going to do much for those who are aspiring to one of Australia’s oft-touted educational programmes. The story also yo-yos back and forth between some of the other places and episodes in Danny’s life. There’s a wonderful evocation of Danny as a young lad swimming out into the lagoon in Batticaloa and waiting for the mermaids to emerge from the surf.
Adiga appears to have discovered nature during his Australia sojourn. Not only are there mentions of a jabiru, a black stork native to Australia that is reminiscent of the Jubjub bird from Lewis Carroll, but repeated references to fig trees, from which a white bird drops out like a hot stone, and yellow-crested cockatoos.
Surreal bond
Danny is prone to morphing into Adiga when he is not wielding his vacuum cleaner. There is, for instance, a flashback to an elephant he names Prabhakaran.
Danny feels a surreal bond when he comes across an old naval gun rusting in a park. Is it Danny or Adiga who tells us that the gun is a relic from the German warship Emden that had created panic in Chennai when it suddenly appeared on its waters during World War I, terrifying Tamils even in Sri Lanka? “A dragon over there, it had become a dodo over here and was destroyed; and now the last piece of the Emden, this gun, perhaps the same one that had set the waters of the Marina ablaze and lit nightmares in Chennai for two generations, was mounted on a park in Sydney.”
In another place, Sonja, Danny’s Vietnamese girlfriend, tells her mother that once Danny had watched “a brown man and a girl who were dancing to no music at all but the sunlight — wearing nothing except their glistening heat resistant skin” and suddenly realised that they were not Indian, not Sri Lankan, but Aborigines. Rumours of links between the tribals of South India, as also between the Veddas of Sri Lanka and Australian Aborigines, were once popular.
But as the geneticist A.K. Roychoudhary pointed out in a paper in 1984: “Despite the morphological similarity there is no genetic evidence to suggest that the Indian tribes and Australian Aborigines are biologically related.” Danny could be presumed to cater to popular fantasies of a Tamil presence in early Australia, but what could induce Adiga to repeat such canards?
Even as he prowls around Sydney on that fatal day, Danny’s greatest fear is that someone will see through him and dob him. To dob , the dictionary of slang will tell you, is Australian for a person who is morally obliged to rat on another person. Trying to evade the system is the catch 22 at the heart of Adiga’s narrative. There is an immutable element called the Law in Australia. It may be the white man’s concept of what constitutes right and wrong but inevitably, it becomes the brown man’s burden.
To freeze or to run — that is the question that frames Danny. Adiga provides the amnesty.
The Chennai-based writer is a critic and cultural commentator.
Amnesty; Aravind Adiga, Pan Macmillan, ₹599
