The White Tiger "The Sixth Night"

At this stage of the story, to relieve you of tedium, I would like to insert my own "sidebar" into the narrative of the modern entrepreneur's growth and development.

When his master is not around, he can siphon petrol from the car, with a funnel.

It's the yoga guru, paying us a rare visit.

My caste, we're teetotalers.

Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us.

A paan-maker sat on a wooden stall outside the gaudy blue door of a brothel, using a knife to spread spices on moist leaves that he had picked out of a bowl of water, which is the first step in the preparation of paan; in the small square space below his stall sat another man, boiling milk in a vessel over the hissing blue flame of a gas stove.

It seethed, and spilled down the sides of the stainless steel vessel; the small, shrunken man smiled—he provoked the boiling milk with a spoon—it became frothier and frothier, hissing with outrage.

On a Sunday, though, there is something more: if you keep pushing through the crowd that is always there, go past the men cleaning the other men's ears by poking rusty metal rods into them, past the men selling small fish trapped in green bottles full of brine, past the cheap shoe market and the cheap shirt market, you will come to the great secondhand book market of Darya Ganj.

Never paying anyone a single rupee, flipping through books for free, I kept looting bookseller after bookseller all evening long!

Even the eyes had been gouged out.

The city has corrupted your soul and made you selfish, vainglorious, and evil.

I knew from the start that this would happen, because you were a spiteful, insolent boy.

I had come to the edge of the precipice.

I saw the bewildered look in his eyes: Afraid of a lizard—a grown man like my uncle!

Vijay chortled.

I told him if he didn't pay, we'd screw him and his father and his brother and the whole coal-pilfering and tax-evading racket they have.

I was looking for the key for years… The smashing of the bottle echoed through the hollow of the parking lot—the sound must have reached the lobby and ricocheted through all the floors of the building, even to the thirteenth floor.

He went back to reading his newspaper—but I caught a gleam of cunning in his eye as he went over the English
print of the newspaper.

In the railway station, thirty-three minutes later, the colored wheels in the fortune machines were coruscating.

Between his fatigued parents, this little thing was having the time of his life, playing with the water and splashing it on passersby.