Re-reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
A man leads me to the back of the smoke shop, where he tries to sell me pre-rolls of weed. He is a confident man, with an accent I’m unable to identify and a salesman’s tough earnestness. In this Greenwich Village glass-pipe operation, he is in his element, pitching truth to me as though I were a premier from China.
It is a quiet night. No chimes from the door. I’m out of cigarettes and I’m looking to buy a pack.
But no, no, come now. He knows what I need. I sense he has plenty of time and I am in no hurry to leave.
I am also under the impression that he is practicing, sharpening his skills. New York has legalized weed; its first licensed recreational dispensary has yet to open.
This smoke shop man is well stocked. I recognize the dusty luster of ornate silvers and brasses, the necessary metals and the soft crinkle of plastic baggies.
He tosses some baggies away as trash, foolish trifles. Some baggies are fragile, others golden nuggets, a high from the heavens. Not these, but these.
He jokes, he chides, he cares about my mental high. He shows me a baggie of special purple bud that his wife swears by. For what, I don’t ask. Every bud has an origin, a story about its dankness, what gives this bud the gall to traverse oceans? With it comes a high that endangers lives and enlightens the most burdened souls.
“This,” he slaps the vacuum-pack bag of bud, “this shit broke backs when it was harvested on mountains; it’s that pure.”
There it is: the amplification of suffering to legitimize the nugget’s value. Backs broken, his missus in eternal relief. For what the weed causes and cures, I have only his word for either and he speaks with authority. I stay at his counter, rapt.
This dynamic brings to mind Balram Halwai, in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, addresses the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, with a similar certainty that he has information worth hearing.
Balram has heard on the radio the premier is interested in Indian entrepreneurs. Balram was once a servant and is now an employer; he presents his success as a qualification to grandstand his trajectory. He is jokey, aggressively assuring and heavy in his “remember the days when people got stoned and—” nostalgia. I find him captivating.
Yes, yes, you are in the right place. Balram tells the premier things the men receiving him at the airport would prefer to leave out, and he expects this to be appreciated.
Bourdieu’s “feel for the game” describes a practical familiarity with a social setting and its possibilities, acquired through participation. The smoke shop man vibes my mood, my preferences, my receptiveness to his recommendations. He does not touch me, but he mimics the wall I’ve put up, peeks over it, cracking a smile, gauging implicit boundaries with the way I grasp my purse or tilt my head. I have scarcely said a word.
He asks where I get my weed. Before I can answer, he tells me that anything I buy anywhere else is hydroponic dogshit.
“Would I push dogshit onto you? What kind of man would I be?”
He sounds personally offended. He has known me since I asked for cigarettes. I am caught off guard, but we laugh.
I think of Balram and Ashok catching each other’s eyes in the Honda’s “little rectangular mirror” as they look at a woman crossing the road in a tight T-shirt. Balram describes master and servant as having become one body, joined in horny communion. His employer’s arousal is his explanation for his own. Still a servant in Delhi, he pays for sex with a woman with golden hair, discovers her dark roots and slaps her. Later, as an employer in Bangalore, he ranks women by nationality and describes buying sex in five-star hotels as morally preferable. His education in consumption includes a sense of what his money entitles him to.
I enjoy the smoke shop man’s indignation and Balram’s implausible innocence. The smoke shop man and Balram are persuasive even when their shills are transparent: that the man would never sell dry weed-shake rolled into jumbo joints for indiscriminate students in the Village; that Balram requires his employer’s example demoralize women. Both speak with the ease of men who expect little but will settle for a little understanding.
At his insistence, I smell the weed, roll a pre-roll between my fingers to test its density. I act impressed and discerning. Under his tutelage, I become a connoisseur.
Balram knows the practical details of service: who carries the money, who pays the police, who is expected to accept responsibility when the employer’s family runs someone over. When Pinky Madam hits a child with the car, Ashok’s family prepares a confession for Balram to sign.
He studies the people who humiliate him. The servants in his Rooster Coop have studied them too. They understand the danger to their families if they disobey, and they enforce obedience among themselves. The coop is “guarded from the inside.” The threat of retaliation against their families remains part of that obedience. Balram describes the coop hierarchy with the assurance of someone familiar with its rewards and punishments.
The suffering he recounts is part of his qualification to advise the premier; his escape is evidence, in his telling, of an exceptional intelligence.
How much does the coop’s apparent inescapability support his claim to be a White Tiger and his justification of murder?
Balram murders Ashok, takes his money, and starts a business. He knows his family may suffer retaliation. In Bangalore, he bribes the police and employs drivers. He recounts the coercion he endured and the violence he committed; his business does well.
At the smoke shop counter, the man’s judgment of a customer and his ease in conversation are skills useful in a competitive business in a big city. I wonder what else he knows about business.
I admire his gravitas more than his persistence. I want to tell him that the large neon pipe in his window, casting blinking colors into the shop and onto the sidewalk, is a kind of chandelier. Balram has one in his office. The smoke shop man has yet to tell me the price of his back-breaking halo-brimming marijuana fertilized by God’s smegma and holy tidewater.
He says, plainly, “This is not bullshit. This is sexy shit.”
He tells me the price, his r’s rolling, his gums shiny. I tell him I’ll think about it, and that I’ll tell my friends too. He is pleased. I shake his hand, a newfound confidante.
He doesn’t forget my cigarettes, which I wedge into my purse. He palms me a mini-Bic, enveloping my hands in his before I push the door, my fluttering to the loud chimes. Our final goodbye is terse and deliberate. (I never smoke the cigarettes; after a few weeks, I leave the unopened pack on the railing of a construction-covered staircase jutting from a vacant building. I assume someone smoked them; a block over, a woman sits daily with her books, smoking discarded butts, tapping ash into her 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.)
A handful of years later, that smoke shop still stands, while others have been raided or shuttered. I wonder how he conducts himself now, with the licensed dispensaries open. Customers can consult lab results, potency figures, health warnings, employees with health insurance – but they won’t walk away the same way.
Do they crave that gut feeling that tethers them to a man with shiny gums? Do they need assurances of bliss, or else it’s all panic and sweats? When is a mere transaction not enough? Who is qualified to sell a moral high?
The smoke shop man has his audience of smokers whose pleasure is made more euphoric by the romance of a pitch. With this man’s smoke, we inhale the narrative of true, earned suffering. We transcend upon exhalation.
In Bourdieu’s account of linguistic exchanges, the value of a speaker’s competence depends on the market in which it is recognized. I wonder what this man’s assurance is worth now, and who stays to hear him out. Who is in the coop and who is outside of it, who shovels chickens’ shit and who eats their flesh?
Balram ends with a chandelier and twenty-six Toyota Qualises, calling himself a man who sees “tomorrow” when others see “today.” I envision twenty-six smoke shops for the man rolling r’s in the climax of his pitch. Every window flickers a neon coil advertising truth, the assurances of purity hidden under counters, ready to be smoked.
