That’s where entrepreneurs come in.
The next thing I did was to go to a Toyota Qualis dealer in the city and say, in my sweetest voice, “I want to drive your cars.” The dealer looked at me, puzzled.
I couldn’t believe I had said that. Once a servant, always a servant: the instinct is always there, inside you, somewhere near the base of your spine. If you ever came to my office, Mr. Premier, I would probably try to press your feet at once.
I pinched my left palm. I smiled as I held it pinched and said—in a deep, gruff voice, “I want to rent your cars.”
The last stage in my amazing success story, sir, was to go from being a social entrepreneur to a business entrepreneur. This part wasn’t easy at all.
I called them all up, one after the other, the officers of all the outsourcing companies in Bangalore. Did they need a taxi service to pick up their employees in the evening? Did they need a taxi service to drop off their employees late at night?
And you know what they all said, of course.
One woman was kind enough to explain:
“You’re too late. Every business in Bangalore already has a taxi service to pick up and drop off their employees at night. I’m sorry to tell you this.”
It was just like starting out in Dhanbad—I got depressed. I lay in bed a whole day.
What would Mr. Ashok do? I wondered.
Then it hit me. I wasn’t alone—I had someone on my side! I had thousands on my side!
You’ll see my friends when you visit Bangalore—fat, paunchy men swinging their canes, on Brigade Road, poking and harassing vendors and shaking them down for money.
I’m talking of the police, of course.
The next day I paid a local to be a translator—you know, I’m sure, that the people of the north and the south in my country speak different languages—and went to the nearest police station. In my hand I had the red bag. I acted like an important man, and made sure the policemen saw the red bag by swinging it a lot, and gave them a business card I had just had printed. Then I insisted on seeing the big man there, the inspector. At last they let me into his office—the red bag had done the trick.
The big man sat at a huge desk, with shiny badges on his khaki uniform and the red marks of religion on his forehead. Behind him were three portraits of gods. But not the one I was looking for.
Oh, thank God. There was one of Gandhi too. It was in the corner.
With a big smile—and a namaste—I handed him the red bag. He opened it cautiously.
I said, via the translator, “Sir, I want to make a small offering of my gratitude to you.”
It’s amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.
“Gratitude for what?” the inspector asked in Hindi, peering into the bag with one eye closed.
“For all the good you are going to do me, sir.”
He counted the money—ten thousand rupees—heard what I wanted, and asked for double. I gave him a bit more, and he was happy. I tell you, Mr. Premier, my poster was right there, the one that I had seen earlier, the whole time I was negotiating with him. The WANTED poster, with the dirty little photo of me.
Two days later, I called up the nice woman at the Internet company who had turned me down, and heard a shocking tale. Her taxi service had been disrupted. A police raid had discovered that most of the drivers did not have licenses.
“I’m so sorry, madam,” I said. “I offer you my sympathies. In addition, I offer you my company. White Tiger Drivers.”
“Do all your drivers have licenses?”
“Of course, madam. You can call the police and check.”
She did just that, and called me back. I think the police must have put in a good word for me. And that was how I got my own—as they say in English—“start-up.”
I was one of the drivers in the early days, but then I gave up. I don’t really think I ever enjoyed driving, you know? Talking is much more fun. Now the start-up has grown into a big business. We’ve got sixteen drivers who work in shifts with twenty-six vehicles. Yes, it’s true: a few hundred thousand rupees of someone else’s money, and a lot of hard work, can make magic happen in this country. Put together my real estate and my bank holdings, and I am worth fifteen times the sum I borrowed from Mr. Ashok. See for yourself at my Web site. See my motto: “We Drive Technology Forward.” In English! See the photos of my fleet: twenty-six shining new Toyota Qualises, all fully air-conditioned for the summer months, all contracted out to famous technology companies. If you like my SUVs, if you want your call-center boys and girls driven home in style, just click where it says CONTACT ASHOK SHARMA NOW.
Yes, Ashok! That’s what I call myself these days. Ashok Sharma, North Indian entrepreneur, settled in Bangalore.
If you were sitting here with me, under this big chandelier, I would show you all the secrets of my business. You could stare at the screen of my silver Macintosh laptop and see photos of my SUVs, my drivers, my garages, my mechanics, and my paid-off policemen.
All of them belong to me—Munna, whose destiny was to be a sweet-maker!
You’ll see photos of my boys too. All sixteen of them. Once I was a driver to a master, but now I am a master of drivers. I don’t treat them like servants—I don’t slap, or bully, or mock anyone. I don’t insult any of them by calling them my “family,” either. They’re my employees, I’m their boss, that’s all. I make them sign a contract and I sign it too, and both of us must honor that contract. That’s all. If they notice the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I keep things clean, they’ll go up in life. If they don’t, they’ll be drivers all their lives. I leave the choice up to them. When the work is done I kick them out of the office: no chitchat, no cups of coffee. A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.
Now, despite my amazing success story, I don’t want to lose contact with the places where I got my real education in life.
The road and the pavement.
I walk about Bangalore in the evenings, or in the early mornings, just to listen to the road.
One evening when I was near the train station, I saw a dozen or so manual laborers gathered together in front of a wall and talking in low tones. They were speaking in a strange language; they were the locals of the place. I didn’t have to understand their words to know what they were saying. In a city where so many had streamed in from outside, they were the ones left behind.
They were reading something on that wall. I wanted to see what it was, but they stopped their talking and crowded in front of the wall. I had to threaten to call the police before they parted and let me see what they had been reading.
It was a stenciled image of a pair of hands smashing its manacles:
THE GREAT SOCIALIST IS COMING TO BANGALORE
In a couple of weeks he arrived. He had a big rally here and gave a terrific speech, all about fire and blood and purging this country of the rich because there was going to be no fresh water for the poor in ten years because the world was getting hotter. I stood at the back and listened. At the end people clapped like crazy. There is a lot of anger in this town, that’s for sure.
Keep your ears open in Bangalore—in any city or town in India—and you will hear stirrings, rumors, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens. One night, will they all join together—will they destroy the Rooster Coop?
Ha!
Maybe once in a hundred years there is a revolution that frees the poor. I read this in one of those old textbook pages people in tea stalls use to wrap greasy samosas with. See, only four men in history have led successful revolutions to free the slaves and kill their masters, this page said:
Alexander the Great.
Abraham Lincoln of America.
Mao of your country.
And a fourth man. It may have been Hitler, I can’t remember.
But I don’t think a fifth name is getting added to the list anytime soon.
; An Indian revolution?
No, sir. It won’t happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else—from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.
Instead of which, they’re all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.
On the topic of shampoo advertisements, Mr. Premier, I must say that golden-colored hair sickens me now. I don’t think it’s healthy for a woman to have that color of hair. I don’t trust the TV or the big outdoor posters of white women that you see all over Bangalore. I go from my own experience now, from the time I spend in five-star hotels. (That’s right, Mr. Jiabao: I don’t go to “red light districts” anymore. It’s not right to buy and sell women who live in birdcages and get treated like animals. I only buy girls I find in five-star hotels.)
Based on my experience, Indian girls are the best.
(Well, second-best. I tell you, Mr. Jiabao, it’s one of the most thrilling sights you can have as a man in Bangalore, to see the eyes of a pair of Nepali girls flashing out at you from the dark hood of an autorickshaw.)
In fact, the sight of these golden-haired foreigners—and you’ll discover that Bangalore is full of them these days—has only convinced me that the white people are on the way out. All of them look so emaciated—so puny. You’ll never see one of them with a decent belly. For this I blame the president of America; he has made buggery perfectly legal in his country, and men are marrying other men instead of women. This was on the radio. This is leading to the decline of the white man. Then white people use cell phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It’s a known fact. Cell phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man’s brain and balls at the same time. I overheard this at the bus stand one night. Until then I had been very proud of my Nokia, showing it to all the call-center girls I was hoping to dip my beak into, but I threw it away at once. Every call that you make to me, you have to make it on a landline. It hurts my business, but my brain is too important, sir: it’s all that a thinking man has in this world.
White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they’re up to—the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world.
And God save everyone else.
Now I should explain about that long interruption in my narrative two nights ago.
It will also allow me to illustrate the differences between Bangalore and Laxmangarh. Understand, Mr. Jiabao, it is not as if you come to Bangalore and find that everyone is moral and upright here. This city has its share of thugs and politicians. It’s just that here, if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxmangarh, he doesn’t even have this choice. That is the difference between this India and that India: the choice.
See, that night, I was sitting here, telling you my life’s story, when my landline began to ring. Still chatting to you, I picked up the receiver and heard Mohammad Asif’s voice.
“Sir, there’s been some trouble.”
That’s when I stopped talking to you.
“What kind of trouble?” I asked. I knew Mohammad Asif had been on duty that night, so I braced myself for the worst.
There was a silence, and then he said, “I was taking the girls home when we hit a boy on a bicycle. He’s dead, sir.”
“Call the police at once,” I said.
“But sir—I am at fault. I hit him, sir.”
“That’s exactly why you will call the police.”
The police were there when I got to the scene with an empty van. The Qualis was parked by the side of the road; the girls were all still inside.
There was a body, a boy, lying on the ground, bloodied. The bike was on the ground, smashed and twisted.
Mohammad Asif was standing off to the side, shaking his head. Someone was yelling at him—yelling with the passion that you only see on the face of the relative of a dead man.
The policeman on the scene had stalled everyone. He nodded when he saw me. We knew each other well by now.
“That’s the dead boy’s brother, sir,” he whispered to me. “He’s in a total rage. I haven’t been able to get him out of here.”
I shook Mohammad Asif out of his trance. “Take my car and get these women home, first of all.”
“Let my boy go,” I told the policeman loudly. “He’s got to get the people in there home. Whatever you want to deal with, you deal with me.”
“How can you let him go?” the brother of the dead boy yelled at the policeman.
“Look here, son,” I said, “I am the owner of this vehicle. Your fight is with me, not with this driver. He was following my orders, to drive as fast as he could. The blood is on my hands, not his. These girls need to go home. Come with me to the police station—I offer myself as your ransom. Let them go.”
The policeman played along with me. “It’s a good idea, son. We need to register the case at the station.”
While I kept the brother engaged by pleading to his reason and human decency, Mohammad Asif and all the girls got into my van and slipped away. That was the first objective—to get the girls home. I have signed a contract with their company, and I honor all that I sign.
I went to the police station with the dead boy’s brother. The policemen on night duty brought me coffee. They did not bring the boy coffee. He glared at me as I took the cup; he looked ready to tear me to pieces. I sipped.
“The assistant commissioner will be here in five minutes,” one of the policemen said.
“Is he the one who’s going to register the case?” the brother asked. “Because no one has done it so far.”
I sipped some more.
The assistant commissioner who sat in the station was a man whom I had lubricated often. He had fixed a rival for me once. He was the worst kind of man, who had nothing in his mind but taking money from everyone who came to his office. Scum.
But he was my scum.
My heart lifted at the sight of him. He had come all the way to the station at night to help me out. There is honesty among thieves, as they say. He understood the situation immediately. Ignoring me, he went up to the brother and said, “What is it you want?”
“I want to file an F.I.R.,” the brother said. “I want this crime recorded.”
“What crime?”
“The death of my brother. By this man’s”—pointing a finger at me—“vehicle.”
The assistant commissioner looked at his watch. “My God, it’s late. It’s almost five o’clock. Why don’t you go home now? We’ll forget you were here. We’ll let you go home.”
“What about this man? Will you lock him up first?”
The assistant commissioner put his fingers together. He sighed. “See, at the time of the accident, your brother’s bicycle had no working lights. That is illegal, you know. There are other things that will come out. I promise you, things will come out.”
The boy stared. He shook his head, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “My brother is dead. This man is a killer. I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
“Look here—go home. Have a bath. Pray to God. Sleep. Come back in the morning. We’ll file the F.I.R. then, all right?”
The brother understood at last why I had brought him to the station—he understood at last that the trap had shut on him. Maybe he had only seen policemen in Hindi movies until now.
Poor boy.
“This is an outrage! I’ll call the papers! I’ll call the lawyers! I’ll call the police!”
The assistant commissioner, who was not a man given to humor, allowed himself a little smile. “Sure. Call the police.”
The brother stormed o
ut, shouting more threats.
“The number plates will be changed tomorrow,” the assistant commissioner said. “We’ll say it was a hit-and-run. Another car will be substituted. We keep battered cars for this purpose here. You’re very lucky that your Qualis hit a man on a bicycle.”
I nodded.
A man on a bicycle getting killed—the police don’t even have to register the case. A man on a motorbike getting killed—they would have to register that. A man in a car getting killed—they would have thrown me in jail.
“What if he goes to the papers?”
The assistant commissioner slapped his belly. “I’ve got every pressman in this town in here.”
I did not hand him an envelope at once. There is a time and a place for these things. Now was the time to smile, and say thanks, and sip the hot coffee he had offered me; now was the time to chat with him about his sons—they’re both studying in America, he wants them to come back and start an Internet company in Bangalore—and nod and smile and show him my clean, shining, fluoridated teeth. We sipped cup after cup of steaming coffee under a calendar that had the face of the goddess Lakshmi on it—she was showering gold coins from a pot into the river of prosperity. Above her was a framed portrait of the god of gods, a grinning Mahatma Gandhi.
A week from now I’ll go to see him again with an envelope, and then he won’t be so nice. He’ll count the money in front of me and say, This is all? Do you know how much it costs to keep two sons studying in a foreign college? You should see the American Express bills they send me every month! And he’ll ask for another envelope. Then another, then another, and so on. There is no end to things in India, Mr. Jiabao, as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You’ll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.