Moot point, as the dictionary in hand says, is "an undecided or disputed point" and moot means among several definitions, "discussion; to argue; dispute; debatable". Spot on for the subject of my article this morning.

Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winner had as chief protagonist a chauffeur from a disadvantaged rural village in the State of Bihar. Balram comes into the story baggaged with poverty, lack of education, disadvantaged, orphaned and with an extended family living in dire straits, ruled by a grandmother waiting to pounce on his every earned rupee. As against him and his kind – labeled those of the Rooster Coop from the Darkness - are the landowners: rich, rapacious, given to extracting income from those in serf servility who could barely exist with the money they earned through cultivation, animal husbandry, fishing and rickshaw pedaling. Balram’s employer is the Stork, a typical Bihar landowner, who hires him to be driver to his America-returned second son, Ashok, who is liberal and sympathetic but curbed severely by his brother Mukesh – the Mongoose – who shares his father’s views on servants and the menial.

Land ownership

Are there resemblances here in this situation? Slight is what I would say. The days of serfdom have disappeared entirely from our Island. The vee panatha gave equal share of paddy cultivated on the ande basis to the landlord as to the cultivator, though previously the latter got one-third share and had to show gratitude for this mercy. He was expected to come with all humility to the landowner’s home with the kurini pettiya of kavun, unduvel and such like, to announce the grain was ripe for harvesting. He got his just dues way back in the late 1940s. Then came land reform and before that the colonization schemes which gave the landless land of their own and financial assistance to build dwellings.

So in Sri Lanka most rural people have a plot of land of their own and taxes are government imposed and will be solely thus, island-wide, with the severance of the illegal taxing stranglehold of the LTTE in the north. There is the business of kappan payment but that’s in urban pockets, isn’t it?

Education

Balram’s father would often scream at the women in the household, particularly the grandmother, Kusum. "How many times have I told you: ‘Munna must read and write!’"

But Balram runs away from school, terrified of a lizard that popped out of a cupboard in the classroom. The father accompanies him to school the next day and much against the violent protests of the son, mercilessly kills the offending lizard. He was venting his wrath against society and his helplessness in it. "My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine – at least one- should live like a man."

The father dies soon after and Munna, who was given the name Balram Halwai by his paan chewing-and-spitting teacher, drops out of school, slaves in a tea shop and then learns driving and is recruited as second driver by the landowner, Thakur Ramdev, the Stork.

We in Sri Lanka have had free education since the early 1950s and previous to that non-fee-levying vernacular schools in villages. There were ‘attendance officers’ whose job was to see that children attended school till 14 years of age. Ignorance of the benefits of education, and indifference of parents in a non-competitive milieu, kept children out of school or dropping out. Nowadays the problem is lack of money to buy the few books needed; mothers migrating for jobs; fathers catering to their addictions by having sons earning pittances or more by selling themselves for sex with the connivance of the father. In spite of these travails, and the government itself closing down primary schools due to lack of numbers of students, we don’t have complete illiterates. Child labour in the formal sector is nil but boys do slave in tea boutiques and such like and girls from a tender age are care givers to their younger siblings.

A worse fate than Munna’s prevails in Sri Lanka, mostly in the western and south western coastal belt – child prostitution and drug trafficking. These are scourges about which the government usually ostriches itself.

Servants and drivers

Most definitely the condition that prevails in this country for drivers, even cooks and gardeners and daily helps, is far better than that chronicled by Adiga. He deals with the driver of a rich man’s car who is treated most shabbily – in the living quarters given him; in the wages paid; in the respect shown him; in the enabling of him to develop self-respect and carry on his duties with dignity. "The Stork had a special use for driver number two. He had bad legs, with blue veins in them. I had to heat water on the stove, carry it into the courtyard and then massage them gently; as I did this he would close his eyes and moan."

We in Sri Lanka never treated chauffeurs shabbily. In fact they are driverer unnahes to the other servants and had a special table set for them in the pantry or the verandah of the dining room. Pinky Madam’s comments were invariably derogatory, while her husband, whose car Balram drove, was always polite and concerned. While being driven Pinky would shout out, apart from her usual statement: "What a f… joke" slander against the driver. "I told you not to bring this yokel from the village!" "At that moment I looked in the rearview mirror and I caught Mr. Ashok’s eyes looking at me; and in my master’s eyes, I saw the most unexpected emotion. Pity."

It was Ashok again who insisted that Balram get a bed and share a bigger room with the other driver. His salary is not divulged but loyally, when the other drivers enquire, Balram says he gets enough to be happy. Loyalty? The persistent slave mentality? And at the end he kills the only man who was good to him. Fate? Imbibed criminality from Delhi? A f… joke?

But there is a striking resemblance between what happens in the story and in our lovely island – the driver takes the blame, gets the rap if his master (or mistress, or offspring) drives recklessly and has to be convicted and serve a jail sentence.

The night of her birthday celebration with her husband, Pinky insists on taking the wheel of the Honda City, taking no notice of her husband’s warning she is drunk. "when a small black thing jumped into our path, and we hit it and knocked it over and rolled the wheels of the car over it…. She was too drunk to brake at once." The husband says it was a dog, the driver agrees. "No, wasn’t a dog! It was a ….." The man and driver bundle her into the back seat. "We hit something, Ashoky. We have to take that thing to the hospital." "No."

The driver cleaned the car. The next morning Ashok’s brother arrives and Balram is told he is one of the family. He is ordered to lie low for a couple of days and not to talk to anyone. Later the driver is summoned upstairs. A black jacketed man says: "The judge has been taken care of. If your man does what he is to do, we’ll have nothing to worry about."

"My man will do as he is told. He’s part of the family. He’s a good boy. He signed a confession to killing a child on the previous night." The Mongoose had bribed Balram’s grandmother and she was willing to sign as witness.

"What I am describing to you here is what happens to drivers in Delhi every day, sir" the entrepreneur Ashok Sharma alias Balram writes in his letter to the Chinese Prime Minister. Mercifully no death of a child was reported to the police and Balram was chucked out of family camaraderie.

Of course this type of thing/crime occurs in Sri Lanka. How many drivers have taken the rap when the spoilt brat of the big man illicitly takes the wheel of the posh limousine? Murders we have heard of, committed by VIP politicians or their offspring and the crime pinned on a bodyguard, servant or driver.

Politics

The closest resemblance of Balram’s home ground and driving city to our milieu and what pertains here is the similarity of politics and politicians.

In school Balram reads: "We live in a glorious land. The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land. …" We in this nation shout ourselves hoarse as the chosen country by the Buddha to preserve and practice his Teaching; our culture is much more than 2500 years old; our civilization goes back much further. But what is done in the game and name of politics? Corruption most base, murder most foul, mayhem and more.

In Adiga’s book a landowner’s son is kidnapped by the Naxals, tortured and killed. The man who was supposed to look after the boy is accused of being an accomplice. He denies it and has four of the Buffalo’s gunmen torture him and then shoot him in the head. His family is decimated one by one – killed in various ways: the men beaten to death, the women strangled, or more often, gang raped and then abandoned to die. We have heard that Bihar is the poorest state with politicians calling themselves socialists. In The White Tiger the socialist party’s emblem is the stencilled image of a pair of hands smashing its manacles. But crime is most rampant in Bihar, they also say. That may be why Adiga based the first one third of his story in Bihar.

At the very end, the successful Ashok Sharma (Balram), running a taxi service in Bangalore, reads in a newspaper "Family of 17 murdered in north Indian Village. They said it is somewhere in the Darkness near Gaya. My heart began to thump – seventeen? That can’t be right – that’s not mine… There aren’t seventeen at home … I breathed out. But what if someone’s had children…?"

Corruption

Rampant in Adiga’s novel, rampant in India for sure, and I don’t have to spell it out about our dear Sri Lanka.

Bribing is cited all over The White Tiger. The fateful bag of cash for which Balram murdered his master was intended to be given a government official to reduce taxes on the coal dealing the family was engaged in. A judge was bribed to have leniency meted out on the driver who was to be stand-in for the drunken driving wife of the owner of the car who ran over a vagrant child.

Balram himself gets into the business. He bribes the police in Bangalore and is given protection by them – to him personally and his taxi service – White Tiger Drivers.

Murder

Rampant also. Families are murdered in revenge for a menial’s transgression, most often not guilty at all. Balram suspects his entire clan has been killed by the father of Ashok in revenge for Balram’s having murdered him.

Balram says to the Chinese Prime Minister on the seventh and last day of the letter writing exercise of confessing his crime and relating his life: "I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves." Balram says he killed just one man to make a man of himself. Politicians kill in numbers and they often get bronze statues erected in their honour!