The White Tiger: a quintessential India book

The street and residents who live around Asha, the place I volunteered.

I read “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga the other day. This is considered the book about India, the one the guidebooks tell you to read for insight. Of course I didn’t read it before going over, or even while I was there.

Anyway, I wish I’d read it first, because there are also things in the book that would have soothed me on those days when Delhi was driving me mad. This passage had me laughing out loud, and reminded me of the time I got lost looking for a nearby restaurant. 

More local residents

“The truth is that Delhi is a crazy city. See, the rich people live in big housing colonies like Defence Colony or Greater Kailash or Vasant Kunj, and inside their colonies the houses have numbers and letters, but this numbering and lettering system follows no known system of logic. For instance, in the English alphabet, A is next to B, which everyone knows, even people like me who don’t know English. But in a colony, one house is called A 231, and then the next is F 378. So one time Pinky Madam wanted me to take her to Greater Kailash E 231. I tracked down the houses to E 200, and just when I thought we were almost there, E Block vanished completely. The next house was S something.”

This next part explains why I ended up wandering in circles so often:

“Every road in Delhi has a name, like Aurangazeb Road, or Humayan Road, or Archbishop Makarios Road. And no one, masters or servants, knows the name of the road. You ask someone, “Where’s Nikolai Copernicus Marg?” 

And he could be a man who lived on Nikolai Copernicus Marg his whole life, and he’ll open his mouth and say, “Hanh?” 

Or he’ll say, “Straight ahead, then turn left,” even though he has no idea.”

And this passage conjures up so many images from my walks and rickshaw rides around the city:

“And all the roads look the same, all of them go around and around grassy circles in which men are sleeping or eating or playing cards, and then four roads shoot off from that grassy circle, and then you go down one road, and you hit another grassy circle where men are sleeping or playing cards, and then four more roads go off from it. So you just keep getting lost, and lost, and lost in Delhi.”

Yep, that last line just about sums up my time there perfectly.

Every Friday the street I took to walk from work to home turned into a market.