The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)

The sun was just beginning to lean westward, casting long amber shadows across the cracked pavement of the crowded Indore bus stop. She sat on a green metal bench, her dupatta neatly pinned, bag clutched tightly on her lap. From its half-zipped opening, a corner of that morning’s Dainik Bhaskar peeked out like a nosy observer. In her hands was The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, open at a page that had made her raise an eyebrow.

It wasn’t just fiction anymore—it was fuel.

Around her, life was its usual chaotic self: auto-rickshaws bleated, vendors argued over lemon prices, a distant radio played Kumar Sanu crooning about lost love. But she wasn’t lost. She was watching.

A boy dropped his bag. A man with a briefcase stood suspiciously still. And on the wall behind the tea stall, a chalked message:
"बाघ अब भी ज़िंदा है।"
The Tiger still lives.

That message hadn’t been there yesterday. And it wasn’t street art—it was a signal. A code. Her heart skipped.

She wasn’t just reading about Balram Halwai anymore. She had become him.

For the past two months, she had been following clues like breadcrumbs—hidden in articles, underlined passages, graffiti. It had all begun when she found a marked copy of The White Tiger in a secondhand bookstore. No name, no receipt. Just dog-eared edges, cryptic underlines, and a phone number scribbled beside a quote: “You can’t trust your own family. But you can trust a man’s desire.”

She dialed that number once. A robotic voice answered: “Welcome to the cage.” Then silence.

Now, here she was. Clutching the bag not because it carried her lunchbox, but because it held a flash drive—the last piece. The real tiger, the man who ran this network of whistleblowers and rogue journalists, was watching. And she was ready.

The bus wheezed around the corner, and she shut the book slowly.

“Balram wanted to break out of the coop,” she murmured.

She stood up. So would she.

Behind her, a chaiwala glanced at the bench. Where she had been sitting was a folded newspaper with a single line circled in red:

"Justice smells like kerosene."

And just like that, she was gone.

Into the bus. Into the city.
Into the hunt.