by Rahul Raina
Dedication
For my family, who were terrified this
book was going to be about them.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part Two
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
One
The first kidnapping wasn’t my fault.
The others—those were definitely me.
I was lying in a haze of brown bottles. Rudi was on the floor, face streaked with a little vomit. I was meant to be looking after him. Rudi had been doing coke, a disgusting Western synthetic drug. What was wrong with our drugs, the genteel natural Oriental ones like opium or khat?
That posh shit.
The statue of Saraswati was watching us unkindly from the corner. I could smell the stink of the camphor incense I’d bought to cover up the stale funk of beer and sweat and turmeric-laced street food.
Rudi’s flat was—how do our elites say it?—uber classy. Flat-screens, silk carpets, modern art on the walls. Tasteful recessed lighting. We were ten days from Diwali. The place was cluttered with presents from hangers-on, advertisers, politicians. Hampers of food, boxes of sweets, flower arrangements, Japanese electronics, greeting cards stuffed with money.
It was one of those wet, warm afternoons where everyone was scratching their backsides and our great nation’s GDP was failing to hit the World Bank’s targets.
I wasn’t usually the one drinking. But hanging around Rudi as much as I had recently, trying to watch him, cover for him, keep the papers from seeing him like this, had taken its toll. I was feeling guilty about it all, feeling annoyed because I couldn’t spend time with the woman I loved—well, that situation had had its effect. The one damn day I needed to be completely alert, and I wasn’t.
It was one in the afternoon. Three hours until the car was supposed to turn up to take us to the studio. Four hours before Rudi would appear, glowing, made-up, before all of India, on the number one game show in the whole damn country, Beat the Brain.
I was trying to reach for another can of something to sharpen up. I had just found a drink as warm as cat piss when the door exploded inward. Arms reached into the apartment and tried to remove the one hinge clinging to its frame.
I heard uncouth shouting. I scrabbled around, trying to get to my feet. All I did was throw my arms and legs in the air like an upended buffalo.
“Rudi! Get up! Someone’s try . . .” I whispered. My throat was dry, barren, useless.
The door finally gave up, groaned like a fifty-year-old at the gym. I tried to shout again. My lips flapped uselessly.
A man walked in, dressed like a hospital orderly, carrying two folding wheelchairs in his arms. He smiled at the mess of the two of us on the floor.
Whack, whack went the cosh.
I screamed, and again when I tasted blood. I had a surgical mask strapped around my face. I gurgled uselessly into it. I didn’t fight back. I didn’t do anything. I was grabbed up and strapped into a wheelchair.
I saw his yellow teeth, a necklace of black prayer beads like shrunken heads, and heard a voice say, “Quiet, or the fat one gets it.”
Was that meant to be a threat? He had misunderstood our relationship.
Rudi never even woke up.
That was back when I had my finger. I miss that little thing. Later on, they had to show proof of life, and what better than the servant’s little pinkie?
They hacked it off with the kind of knife used to cut vegetables at the dhabas; one of those blades used to trim great bunches of coriander at the market stalls. There was a lesson in this for me: you try to blackmail a kid into giving you a cut of his riches and you end up getting your bloody appendages cut off.
I miss that finger. It was a good one.
Fucking Delhi. Fucking India.
Now this isn’t like one of those films, you understand, the ones that start out as comedies, where Shah Rukh and Preity are friends at university, and then after the intermission everyone starts getting cancer and mothers start weeping about family honor until finally there’s a wedding where everyone dances their troubles away. There is no tragedy here. Just me getting my finger chopped off. And a series of kidnappings.
No mothers to guilt-trip you. No tears. No emotional business, ya? Just a total khichdi from beginning to end.
It had all started so innocently.
One million three hundred thousand rupees. That’s all I got. Four weeks of frenzied, sweat-soaked studying, fourteen hours every day, so that spoiled little brat could get into the university of his parents’ choice.
Now, you think, 1,300,000 rupees, Ramesh, that’s a lot! You’re earning more than 97 percent of Indians, at least according to the tax office; why are you complaining?
It’s because I pay my taxes. I know, it’s very stupid of me.
And because I live a mile-a-minute existence where every year could be my last, where I’m constantly on the edge of discovery, where every knock on the door might be the police, all for a gnat’s-arse 1.3 million Gandhis—fine, fine, I’m complaining because I like complaining, it’s a Delhi boy’s birthright and I intend to honor it.
I met the kid thrice—no, three times, for thrice is not a word, never was a word, and never shall be, as Claire would have said.
I hated his name from the minute I heard it. Rudi. Rudraksh. Fucking Rudraksh. Who calls their kid that? White hippies from the sixties. It sounds like a movie star’s offspring—one of those kids with a million followers on Instagram and a Louis Vuitton addiction. It sounds like a glue, or a floor cleaner: mighty, all-powerful, the housewife’s friend, only forty-nine rupees.
Rudi’s parents had a nice little flat in Green Park—not the most desirable neighborhood, but getting there. Aspirational location, the realtors would say, for those on the up. The cars were Hondas and Lexuses, no German ones yet.
For my first meeting, I carried a bag that said DeliveryFast—no questions at gates, no holdups, just waved through. I was pretending to deliver pizza. Very Continental. Very chic. I was getting above my station, as the Britishers say in those old films where they beat coolies for making eyes at their virgin daughters.
Rudi’s father was fat and wore a shirt advertising his golf club. He was rich. Of course he was. If you’re fat and Indian, you’re rich; if you’re fat and poor, you’re lying. It’s only the West where the rich are thin and vegan and moral. His wife wore the usual tight pink workout clothes. Their home was filled with lots of stone, medieval tapestries vaguely Mughal, ostentatious prayer room by the front door, Mediterranean porcelain statues, marble goddesses in rutting poses. Three bedrooms, four crore on the market.
I hated the boy immediately. Overbite, greasy face, piggy little eyes. Nothing like the real Rudraksh, the fearsome, all-knowing, all-beheading avatar of Shiva.
I’m being harsh on him. You know what my real issue was with him? Absolutely nothing. He was normal. Forgettable. Eighteen years old. I had seen a hundred of him in the five years up until that point.
“So,” Rudi’s father said. His eyes were rotating round his pi
g skull, full of masturbatory fantasies of how low a fee he could bargain me down to.
“So,” said Rudi’s mother, as if anything would be better than this: discussing the state of her marriage with her mother-in-law, or doing that yoga the whites do where you sweat out the Ganges (The Ganges? Such airs I’ve adopted), or worst of all, talking about my hopes, fears, and aspirations.
Thank God the foreplay was fucking brief. I went immediately into my spiel.
Ramesh Kumar—Educational Consultant. That is what my business card says.
You want your little darling to get 99.4 percent and become an IITian and lord it over the rest of us? You come to me. You want your little rasgulla to top the state boards, start his inevitable march to the corner office on Wall Street or in London or, God forbid, if everything goes wrong, Bangalore? I’m your man. Any examination, any subject, four weeks. Or your money back. And they all try to, every single one.
“You got 0.1 percent less than promised.” “He only got into Vassar.” “Rupa aunty’s boy did better and he actually did his exams himself.” I’ve heard it all.
I am one of the best exam-takers in Delhi, and so I must be one of the very best in the world. The Chinese are my only competition. There must be thousands of me over there, advancing the careers of the chubby children of communist officials, always fearing the bullet in the back of the head, or being packed off to one of those reeducation camps they’ve put the Muslims in, or worse, being sent to make iPhones in the Shenzhen factories with the suicide nets.
Fuck, those guys really know how to make people work. They really are the future. The Western rich, or the Indian, if their children fail, they become social entrepreneurs. The Chinese? Their children fail and become lunch.
We consultants, be we brown or black or yellow, are the side product of the Western arsehole meritocracy. We have to exist. We grease the wheels. We make this dog-eat-dog world work. We are where Fulbright scholarships and visiting fellowships and grants are born. We are the handmaidens of the brown takeover of the world.
I usually sit in my little second-floor office-cum-flat in New Delhi and sweat and sweat, and out of my balls giants of industry are born, future world leaders, presidents. I create them out of nothing, we all do, the armies of us all slaving away. Maybe one day we might have something too, kids of our own we can bribe to success, our own family name that inspires fear and kneeling and scraping.
Of course I do not tell my clients that. I tell them nothing of my dreams. They tell me what they want. I set out my rates. I tell them how little a few lakh rupees is against that future cushy job at McKinsey or BCG, and their pinprick eyes glaze over with lust and trembling, all very pornographic, and then they always lowball me, like I’m their village-born washerwoman who hasn’t received a raise in fifteen years, rather than the man who holds their child’s future in his hands.
They wouldn’t fuck with me if I wore suits. But they would have to be Italian ones, or French. You wear an Indian suit, they’ll smell it, and they’ll fuck you even harder.
Suits. That’s what I was thinking about as Rudraksh’s dear father, Vishal Saxena (strong family name, manly name), eyed me and dreamed about how little he could get me for. The food courier thing was getting old. I was thinking of rebranding. I needed to talk to a tailor, soon.
“Rudraksh,” Mr. Saxena said, and at that the boy snorted a little, woken from some daydream.
“Dad, you know I don’t like that na—”
The father eyed him, silenced him, just like that. Indian parents, huh? Still got it, even if a generation ago he’d have been slapped for daring to open his mouth.
Mr. Saxena had fat lips, red lips, movie actress lips, very incongruous. His wife had none at all, and after being married to a man like her husband, who could blame her? Her lips had probably been pursed from the day she was married.
She butted in like she wanted me out quickly, so she could get the servants to fumigate the squeaky, plastic-covered couch I was sitting on. “Rudi wants Silicon Valley, a career in venture capital,” she said, in the way that told you the kid didn’t want that at all. “We want the All India Examinations Premium Package. Top Ten Thousand or your money back.” She pronounced the words slowly, the syllables echoing one by one around all that tasteful marble and Khajuraho-inspired woodwork, like I was fucking illiterate.
I nodded, nice and slow. Let her think I was subservient if she wanted to.
She had the sort of face you’d expect. Condescending. The “We shop in malls now, not Palika Bazaar. Who goes there in this day and age, cousin, seriously? You and your husband? Oh” face. But you knew what she was capable of. Her face told a story of effortless upper-middle-class superiority. There was an honesty to her disdain. In this country, you should be very wary of faces that are one thing when they should be another. You ever see a concerned, kindly police inspector, or a helpful civil servant, you know you’re in the shit.
The All Indias are the big one, the ones that everyone takes when they leave school. There are other entrance exams all year round for everything, one for law schools, one for the army, one for fucking toilet inspectors, but the All Indias are the cream of the crop, my biggest earner for the year. They are the gateway to the best universities, the brightest futures, the whitest lives. I had a complete All India package, the five component exams all done by me. I offered the common exams in English and Hindi, even though a duffer could pass them. Beyond that, mathematics, economics, finance, the exams that helped you escape India, those were my speciality, but I also did whichever combination you requested, arts subjects, science subjects, no problem, all given whenever and wherever you wanted.
If you got Top Thousand, your future was assured. The McMansion in New Jersey awaited, along with the Chevrolet SUV and the kids’ violin recitals you never attended.
Top Hundred finishers had their faces plastered on the buildings of the schools that had produced them. Their teachers got interviewed on TV, like they had overseen successful Siamese twin separations or Arab–Israeli peace talks. They’d jack up their prices and roll out their fucking educational apps.
Top Tens? They were instant celebrities.
You had to pick your clients carefully. If they were crooked and didn’t pay, the whole year’s take was ruined.
These guys, though, were too obviously greedy to be harmful. The people you need to be careful of are those who start talking about traditions and dharma and calling you beta and all that shit. They’re the ones you run from. I had bitter memories of that assistant mayor’s kid. Lots of screaming, very unpleasant. No more politicians.
My form was thorough. Social security number, Aadhaar details, income, legal and illegal, school history, who they’d been referred by. I paid a contact at the income tax office to run checks. All my clients had the usual background of middle-class petty larceny. A few bribes paid here and there for construction permits, to private schools for exam-less admission, to the government to pass off their kids as low caste for the quota admissions, the usual scum shit that makes this great country what it is, like the pesticides in the milk that give your children character, grit, and lifelong behavioral problems.
Everyone knows what makes India great. China has the communists in charge, Xi Dada and his cronies, Europe has piazzas and art galleries, America has beef and tits and money. We have democracy. We argue, endlessly. We speak eight thousand different kinds of shit, we insult each other, we make things happen. This is the country of deals. This is the country of talk. Every brick might be half-baked, every building might be missing the inside, held up more by belief than cement, but it gets done, at half the price, in half the time.
We signed the contract. I took a pile of the kid’s textbooks. I was thrown out the back door. I went home, ready to spend a month filling my brain, eating junk food, and grinding my way to a better life for myself and the generations of Kumars to come, so that they’d build statues to me and call me their auspicious ancestor at the prayer servic
es, the man who made the family fortune and brought luster to the family name.
In fact, to really explain how I got into this chaotic, fingerless mess, I have to go further back, even further than Rudi, to my origin story. My family was poor as long back as we could remember. There were the old rumors that every family has, that once we used to be poets, or that we were descended from conquerors, Greeks, or the British or the Russians, and that our poverty was merely temporary. Somehow it had become the sort of temporary that was extremely permanent.
Our business was tea. For generations we had sold that beautiful fragrant herb, that bewitcher of men and moguls, to anyone who would—
All right, we did actually end up in the tea business, but it didn’t begin that way. My father had been in road construction. His back had gone bad, and he’d burned his hands to hell before I’d been born, probably from falling dead drunk into the flaming buckets of tar they use. We don’t have gloves in India. I remember the way he tried so lovingly to flex his fingers as he tucked me in at night . . . Okay, he used to beat me, all right. He did the backhand slap that India is famous for all over the world, but his hand, stuck in a reverse claw with the fingers unable to curl, the muscles shot, the skin shiny with scar tissue, made the slap harder, caused me unimaginable pain, like it wasn’t his hand at all, but a specially designed instrument he could summon at will.
A perfect start for a life of intermittent torture.
I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to me, and my father had nothing good to say about her. One day I had annoyed him somehow, lost a peppercorn, or the milk had boiled over, maybe, and he’d said, “He’s stupid, he is, just like his mother. She had cow’s eyes and long lashes. Should have known, shouldn’t I?” and his customers had laughed and he’d hit me extra hard that night, so that it made his hand hurt even more than usual and then he could hate me with a little extra venom.
Usually the tea stalls had names, Singh’s or Lalit’s, but ours didn’t, so I used to think that was what it was known for, The One Where The Guy Hates His Son, you know, bhai, the one by Kashmere Gate.