Balram's job as driver isn't getting easier in Delhi (marked on the map): the houses are not sorted by numbers or letters and even the inhabitants don't know their streets names. That's why he gets lost in the city every now and again. While Mr. Ashok defends him, Mukesh Sir and Pinky Madam are charging him. In a conversation between the brothers, he hears out that their father, the Stork, is trying to distance himself from the Great Socialist.
When he's waiting in front of a shopping mall for his masters, a driver with a skin disease starts talking to him. He gives him some basic tips on how to survive in Delhi & tells him about a magazine called "Murder Weekly". It is very popular reading among all the servants. It tells a story of a murder killing an woman and getting busted by police, but no one wants to be like him because he is constituted as an idiot. Balram asks him about an office-building and he tells him, that his master's daughter starts working there at 8 p.m., leaves at 2 a.m. and is earning there a lot of money.
As the three leave the mall, Balram drives them home to their apartment in the Buckingham Towers B Block, which is a noble and new apartment building settled in a location with other noble and new buildings. Balram sleeps in the servants' quaters in the basement of the building. He has to sleep in a room with all the others and they hoax him because of he said something stupid. He doesn't like to sleep in there and because of there's an other room where nobody wants to sleep so he switches in the second night.
The next day he has to drive his masters to the Congress Party Headquarters and after that to the President's House. In a conversation afterwards, Mr. Ashok says to Mukesh Sir: "We're driving past (a statue of) Gandhi after just having given a bribe to a minister."
Slide-in: Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi was a Indian lawyer and the political and spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement, which caused the end of the british colonial rule with his non-violent withstood.
When Balram drives them home, they chat about the bad situation of the traffic system in Delhi. As they arrive at Buckingham Towers B Block, Mukesh said he's missing a rupee. He blames Balram for stealing it as he can't find it. He drops one in the car and gives it to the master and his mood changes.
Later in the apartment, noone wants to eat something except Ashok and Balram has to cook some food for him. As he looks at Ashok, he is on the verge of tears. As a driver you never see the whole picture of your master, so he knows something must be wrong. His opinion is prooved, when he has to drive Mukesh to the railway station. From now on, Ashok is his only master.
Pinky Madam wants him to make a tea and while he starts, she shouts at him because of his bad condition: His head is spinning from last night's whiskey, his teeth are covered, rotten & black of red paan and his clothes are dirty, all in all he looks fucked up.
The next day he drives Ashok and Pinky Madam to the mall and watches, how a poor man is stopped in front of it because of his condition and Balram recognizes that he's in the same one. At night he goes out to the market and buys himself some new clothes and his first toothpaste. Later he thinks about why his father has never stopped him scratching his grain or made him using toothpaste. "Why had he raised me to live like an animal?...If only a man could spit out his past so easily (as toothpaste)."
The next day, when he drives with his master to the mall, he goes with an a little insecure feeling into the mall. He has no problems with coming in because of his new look. As he goes back to the other drivers, he wants to tell them about this, but there is an other driver who got a phone from his master (which might be something more interesting) and he keeps it to oneself. Back in the apartement he hears from the text room, how Mr Ashok slaps his wife and Balram goes downstairs to the servat's quarter. Just an hour later he is ringed by his master to drive him and Pinky Madam to the city. They end driving at a nightclub and Balram has to wait outside. They come out when he was already sleeping and wake him up, both are drunk. On the way home, Pinky Madam wants him to stop and leave the car because she wants to drive. Mr Ashok sais nothing to stop her and she drives away leaving Balram. A short time later when the car has done an illegal U-turn, it comes back and Balram gets on the backseat. They make another U-turn and Balram watches this helpless, both others are having fun. As she goes really fast, a black thing jumped on the street and they hit it. She comes to stop a few hundred meters later and starts screaming. Mr Ashok puts one hand on her mouth and moves her to the backseat, while Balram enters the drivers seat and drives them home. He cleans the car a few times because it is full of blood and flesh. Later, Mr Ashok comes down and tells him to say nothing to anyone and Balram waits till the next evening in his room, when Mukesh calls him up. He sais to him that he's a part of the family and the same, Mr Ashok already has said to him. An hour later he is called up again and this time, there is an advocate waiting for him with Mukesh. They say to him, that he has to sign a letter on which he confesses to be the only person at the car and to hit that person.
Balram tells Mr Jiabao, that prisons in India are full of servants because they're taking the blame for their masters, that their masters own them and adds "... we all live in the worlds greatest democracy (India). What a ... joke."
My opinion:
Balram makes at this point another change: he distances himself from his past ("If only a man could spit out his past so easily"). On the surface he's doing that with toothpaste and stopping using paan, but in depth he's more and more distancing from his family and Laxmangarh and gets more into his new life with working for Mr. Ashok.
Links:
- http://www.mkgandhi.org/bio5000/bio5index.htm (A page about Gandhi)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paan (about paan)
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