THE NARRATOR and anti-hero of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, is an opportunistic charmer who pens a rambling, irreverent, and highly entertaining “letter” to a Chinese leader who has come to Bangalore to witness its famous entrepreneurial spirit up close.

As Balram Halwai takes it upon himself to enlighten “His Excellency, Premier Wen Jiabao of the Freedom-loving Nation of China,” we learn how this orphaned son of a rickshaw puller clawed his way out of poverty to become a taxi company owner—an accomplishment he’s extremely proud of. By his own lights, Balram has literally taken the wheel, wrestled it from the hands of fate, and changed the course of his life.

His Horatio Alger tale begins in a dusty Indian village in a region he calls the Darkness (i.e. all of rural India), where he seems doomed to a life of menial work breaking coals and wiping tables. But after sneaking into the good graces of a rapacious local landlord, Balram becomes the family chauffeur and ends up driving the landlord’s Western-educated son, Mr. Ashok and his wife, Pinky Madam, around the gleaming buildings and shopping malls and frenzied traffic of Delhi.

Very early in his one-way correspondence, Balram confesses to a dastardly “act of entrepreneurship.” Namely, the murder of his employer. In bits and pieces, we learn how a loyal servant, a generally decent guy, could slit his master’s throat and make off with a bag full of bribe money, even when he knows that a terrible vengeance awaits his entire extended family as a result.

It’s a testament to the author’s storytelling talent, his satirical wit, his seething sense of social justice, and Balram’s own engaging voice that we can almost conceive of this act as a brutally radical form of income redistribution. Or as Balram writes, “I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making—the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga.”

Of course, before showing us the roadside murder, the author wisely gives Balram enough redeeming qualities (humor, compassion, unsinkability, raw intelligence, limited moral scruples) and his victim enough detestable traits (indifference to the death of a homeless child run over by his wife, spineless acceptance of his family’s illegal activities, blinding sense of entitlement, limited moral scruples). Given this context (a context almost as complex as modern India), we can understand, even if we cannot accept, Balram’s enterprising excuse: “All I wanted was a chance to be a man—and for that, one murder was enough.”

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