by Rahul Raina
“Let us get this straight, Rudi,” I said, and I had no idea how many times I’d be saying that phrase to him over the next few years. “I’m going to be doing this exam, and your parents are going to be paying me what we agreed. Got it? No more complaining.”
My parents and grandparents and everyone back to the first generation—well, maybe not the spies or the Greeks—had been meek and mild and look where that had gotten them. I had an education, of sorts, and I was going to use it.
“Hey, sorry, man,” he said, after a few seconds of silence. He would not look me in the eyes. Children these days. “It’s just you’ve got to stop giving me so much shit.”
“I am the person doing the exam.”
“Well, yeah, huh, dude,” he said, and added many things about his childhood and ADHD and school bullying and parental narcissism that I am sure were very sad. I just wanted my money, and some more jeans, and maybe a wife at some point.
I made my peace with him. I told him I’d never see him again after he answered some of my questions about his teachers’ notes on Dutch diseases and market failures.
So dawned the day of the first exam. Hotter than a funeral pyre, sweatier than a third-class train compartment, one of those days when you think all the fires of hell have emptied into Delhi.
On my way to the test, I passed brick houses plastered in ever-present election posters, the whole year just one rolling vote. I walked past couples in parks hiding under jackets, trying to do that strange tongue-kissing, dirty kissing, firangi kissing they had seen in Western films.
The building was an ugly socialist compound from the sixties, from when Borlaug had delivered us from famine and we still had five-year plans. All around me were sweaty, terrified Indian youths, a few years younger than me, eyes betraying dreams of failure, of suicide notes telling their families they should have cared more, but also of success, unimaginable riches, of foreign lands where it rained all year round and everyone ate boiled vegetables and you could slowly stop ringing your family and forget all about them.
No checks at the door, whatsoever. It was just as Sumit had said. I needn’t have let myself be insulted by him. Every guard and official turned his head and carried on Facebook-stalking the boys who had bullied them at school. No one looked at the doctored examinations card, at the boy called Rudraksh Saxena who had a face like mine. Life did not require further complications.
I remembered my first All India.
My first time, it was terrifying.
Now? Now it was boring.
The exam started off easy.
Little children around me sniffed with tears, victims of cramming and parental hard-luck stories, all their dreams going to shit, years of hard work turning to dust.
And I had had a month.
What deeds I had done!
Little prick Rudi was going for the economics stream, so I had been squeezing my head fuller than a three-child family on a motorbike with this year’s assortment of equations, graphs, curves, calculus, and demand functions.
On the first day of preparation I had made microeconomics my servant. On the second, I had parted the waters of household accounts. On the sixth day, I had made the Black–Scholes equation dance for me, I had made a mockery of interest rate curves.
The first exam I took was the mathematics exam. Ninety minutes of multiple-choice questions. Children around me wept, sobbed as they realized they were fucked. I barely noticed. The kid was getting his future sorted. I was getting paid.
Then I did his other exams, day after day. The Americans have their puny SAT, all over in one day. The Indian way, that’s the best. Five days, five exams, teach the kids that life is a relentless parade of fear.
I finished the last one, economics, and for another year, another client, the All Indias were over. A month later, the Saxenas would pick up the combined result. No worry, no problem.
I didn’t think I even did that well. Top Thousand, definitely. Sumit would brag that he had to do badly on purpose so that he would not draw attention to himself. He used to be like that, telling tall tales, talking shit, but that was before he got beaten up.
I walked out of the hall at the end, looking at the faces of the kids around me, kids on floors, kids hugging pillars, like relatives after a train crash. I didn’t think too much about it all. One month until the results. One month until the money arrived. One month until I could coast to the next job.
The day my life changed started out like any other. I was being casual, I was keeping to myself, as I usually did. Sumit, on the other hand, had been full of wig jokes on WhatsApp, but I could tell he was suffering. He was doing fifteen students at a time, subcontracting the impersonation out to his usual mix of druggie kids, dropout kids, kids who had run away from home, from poverty, indentured slavery, and molestation, and had found their only chance of steady work in committing fraud for him. Sumit took too many chances, too many jobs. He did politician kids, gangster kids, promised the earth to them. If even one of them had one bad exam, the kameena would be in a world of shit.
I would be getting the results after 12 p.m., when they would be emailed to the Saxenas. They would call, and then, much more importantly, wire me the money.
Midday came, midday went. No call. Nothing.
I went out and ate, as I usually do when I’m at a loose end. I went to my favorite haunt, a south Indian place that smelled of turmeric and bleach.
The results had definitely come out. Families sat all around me celebrating, decking their children’s necks with garlands and stuffing their mouths with dosas. What were the Saxenas doing? Were they trying to cheat me?
The restaurant was filled with kids who had clearly spent the last few months constantly crying to their mummy and daddy, “I have failed, I know I have, I am a bad son, kill me now, I will do better in the next life!”—arrey, give me a break—and who were now crying tears of relief. A TV blared away in the corner, so family members could avoid conversations with each other—our restaurant owners know their customers inside out.
For my clients, my kids, there was none of that. No worry, no pain. They knew they would be fine, and their parents did too, because I was the best. Even on the off chance that things did go wrong, I’d be getting a thrashing and a request for a refund, all of which probably got my clients very excited because they would think they were hard-bitten go-getters who got their money’s worth rather than meek chartered accountants with rapidly expanding waistlines.
If you were rich, your kid could always take the exams again. Live at home for a year, do some fake internship your golfing buddy arranged. It was the poor who needed everything now, whose seven hollow-bellied kids needed to leave the family home as soon as possible.
One family with a crying kid was discussing their plans to go to temple the next morning. Attendance always went up a hundredfold before and after the All Indias. All those prayers, offerings of ghee and spoiled milk! I really should have gone into the religious business. You never see a poor priest, do you, and they all seem to spend their days fucking their illiterate acolytes and posting the hidden camera footage on porn sites. That part I would skip, I promise.
In the very moment that my life changed, I was in that restaurant downing nimbu panis laced with chaat masala at a dangerous rate, waiting on tenterhooks.
I was angry. I was meant to be receiving 1,300,000 rupees!
Wealth, fame, fortune! Jeans!
But no news at all.
I was getting very pissed off—march-over-to-Green-Park-and-burn-the-whole-charity-giving-NRI-infested-place-down pissed off, the Maoists in our eastern states level of pissed off—and then I saw it, in the corner, on the TV.
On the screen, I saw that prick Rudi. Fake lips Vishal. Namita in traditional sari, leisurewear discarded, namastes aplenty, fending off lusty embraces from local netas.
I shouted at the proprietor to turn the volume up.
It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. They were outside thei
r flat, every TV company in the country jostling for space, cables snaking every which way, attractive reporters in Rudi’s face, sweaty gentlemen shouting for calm, neighborhood mothers standing by, itching to marry off their daughters.
“What are you going to do now, Rudi?”
“Bill Gates is going to offer you a job, is that true?”
“How did you achieve this miraculous feat?”
The little fucker had come top.
I had come top.
Fucking top.
Of the whole country.
Well, not top. Actually second. But the first place was Iqbal somebody, and he sure as shit didn’t count. No cameras for the Muslim.
First-place Vedic finisher.
Sisterfucker.
How?
You take an exam so many times, you get good. They barely change the questions from year to year.
Also, I’m extremely fucking clever.
On the TV, I could see Rudi’s eyes were full of a new lust for life. No dreams of weed in sweaty bedrooms. Women, money, SUVs, that was what he wanted now. I could tell he wanted to eat the whole fucking world. His life had already changed completely. Top in the fucking All Indias. He did not have to do a day’s work if he didn’t want. He could coast for the rest of his life, become a member of an exclusive club, the best one possible, be in a better position than the prime minister’s son or even his mistress; a club no doubt with secret ties and handshakes and a sex dungeon–cum–clubhouse on Golf Course Road, and riches, riches beyond all imagination.
He would be the answer to a quiz question now.
Who came top in the All Indias in 1974? Which All India Topper is the CEO of Facebook? Which Topper married this Bollywood actress and gets to fuck her every night?
I checked my phone. I hadn’t heard from Sumit. Usually he spent the day gloating, posting Instagram selfies with the kids he had “tutored,” feeding them laddoos and handing them bouquets of flowers. Nothing today. Emptier than a eunuch’s underwear. He must have been furious.
“Drinks for everyone,” I shouted. There were maybe twenty people left in the little room, a cluster of sour-faced families and a few old men tutting at videos of twerking white girls on their phones. I was not exactly bankrupting myself, not with the money I would have now.
Rudi was my ticket to the big time.
I was going to be fucking rich. I had the bastard by the balls.
Four
And now, a little digression.
You must be wondering, how did he get to here from there? From well-beaten tea seller’s slave son to charming, witty, urbane man-about-town? A metro-user, a bank-card-haver, a small-business owner, a taxpayer, an independent educational consultant. How did he make it? How did this urchin bloody learn English?
Well then, now I can tell you about Sister Claire, and how she saved me.
How young must I have been? I try not to do this bastard remembering very often, but I will to get the story straight.
I was eleven. There had been trouble with our stall. Papa had wandered in late one January night from one of those sharaab joints where they distilled the demon drink straight from antifreeze.
He was bleeding more than he usually did, and had two black eyes, but only kicked me a normal amount to scold me for letting the brazier run out, so he was basically fine.
The next day he left early without a word, in effect giving me the day off. Something was definitely wrong. I played “chase the rabid, frothing mongrel dogs,” that beloved Indian pastime, now sadly lost to the iPhone generation, with some neighborhood children, and when Papa came back, he told me we were going to be getting up earlier in the mornings. No explanation.
I knew what must have done it.
He had given the wrong look to the wrong woman, for he just looked too much, my father, and his worst habit was the way his eyes never held just one thing, but all. He looked for watches, clothes, new people, waistlines, ways to make it, ways to get out.
Why hadn’t that curiosity helped him to craft a life away from the tea stall? Maybe he’d looked and found there was no escape. Our life had continued without change from the first day I could remember.
As always seemed to happen with us, a slight alteration of our course came with a healthy dose of violence. At midnight just a few days later, our front door burst open. Nothing strange about that. Papa’s drunk friends sometimes paid us visits, as did his bookmakers and loan sharks.
Papa woke quickly.
“So you fucked her, huh?” said the interloper, a man. His stance was unsteady. He had a knife, short and sharp.
Papa remained silent. It is always best to remain silent.
“My wife,” said the man. Tall, muscular, knife-wielding. “My wife. I’ll kill you. You haramzada.”
They all seemed the same to me, Papa’s women, like they were all one. They came to him, and he kissed them, once on each cheek. “One cheek is coffee,” he said, “the other is chocolate. And then we will find out where is the sugar.” That was his starting line, and my cue to leave.
“Do you know who I am?” the man said. “Do you?” Papa stayed silent. The man laughed. “I am the man who will kill you.”
Papa thought quickly. He looked at me, and instantly saw what he could do. You had to give him that.
“In front of my son?” he said. “My only child?” His voice came out entirely differently. He put such emotion into the word “son.” If I had shut my eyes, I would never have known who he was.
He got up, and held me in front of him. The tall man looked down at me. My father pinched me from behind, hard. I knew what I had to do. Deceit came easy. I began to cry. I held my hands together and said, “Not my papa, please.”
My father edged forward, pushing me toward the man. I continued crying. I added a little dribble for effect.
“My only son. The last person I have left,” my father kept saying, clawing at my shoulder.
I felt a sudden shove from behind. I fell forward, onto my knees. The man watched me with complete confusion. He reached down to pick me up. Then my father struck.
He punched the man, once, twice, kidney, gut. He kicked the knife out into the dark of the stairwell. He put a hand on the man’s mouth to ensure he stayed silent. While punching, Papa caught a little of my head too, but I didn’t care. I felt proud. I had played my part. I had helped him. Perhaps our relationship was changing, perhaps he had found new respect for me, perhaps he would fin—
He turned to me, his smile the widest I had ever seen it, and said, his words dripping with pleasure, “Remember the first rule. When you hit them, make sure they never get up.”
He punched again. He was enjoying himself, right up to the point the man roused himself and started fighting back.
Papa fought on. He got a broken rib, and a black eye that he made sure was kissed away, but he didn’t die.
What happened to the woman? I always wondered. Papa got off easy, but what did she get? Beaten? Worse? She got involved with the wrong man, a liar, thief, and cheat, and then she probably got hurt.
After Papa was beaten up, he continued to receive threats, so he decided to move our business to a place with more salubrious neighbors, to environs new, to horizons undreamt of by our family, by which I mean two miles away on the Bangla Sahib Road. Two miles! That was too much for him. It was clearly time for the younger generation to pull their weight. He made me do the cycling from that day on. Bhosdike.
Even though my legs ached every morning and night from that point on, my life changed from the day we moved. For one thing, we were in New Delhi, get-up-and-go New Delhi, center-of-the-world’s-greatest-democracy New Delhi. None of that Old Delhi antiquated, snake-charming nonsense—just homicidal drivers, aggressively corrupt police, and choking, lung-throttling pollution.
Now we were surrounded by twenty-first-century people. None of the furtive looks of Old Delhi, secret plots, arsenic poisonings, jeweled daggers in the back. We were in the modern world.
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sp; We never went back to the Kashmere Gate together. I suppose that is why I used to go past it later on, when success had arrived, to show I could, that I would not feel the same fears he felt. That is a very stupid attitude, my friends. Never share it, for it’s fear that keeps you from ending up dead or defingered.
That modern world ended up losing me my finger. And made me one tenth of very, very rich. There is a lesson there somewhere.
In New Delhi, the air reeked of gasoline and kerosene and CNG, the fumes of autos and buses and foreign cars, polished till gleaming. The smell of Old Delhi was there too, of charcoal braziers, fetid water, and undiagnosed mental problems, but hidden under construction dust and newly tarred roads and municipal gardeners spewing herbicide over grass verges.
We had set up our stall near a row of chaat and samosa sellers by the side of the road, near the public toilets. See! A place to eat, drink, and empty yourself, formed as if by nature itself, all without the nonsense of planning applications and zoning commissions. Our stall lived between a little stunted tree and a bench. Behind us was a wall, and beyond that, some planning ministry or governmental office, which would regularly belch out workers and hangers-on and small-business owners fresh from bribing their way to a better life, all of whom would descend on our stall.
But it is the noise I remember most of all. Noise, noise everywhere. Hooting cars, screaming children, masked motorcyclists, hawk-and-spit chauffeurs, businessmen screaming out deals at each other, perhaps in anger, or perhaps joy, girls being escorted by dowdy matrons to school, laughing at gawky teenage boys, white people of every stripe, backpackers, diplomats, groveling sadhus, straight-backed Sikhs, nuns.
I met her a month after we moved.
Her eyes were kind, like those of a mother or a sister—as far as I could imagine. They hit you like heat outside an air-conditioned store. She spoke Hindi nearly perfectly, but with a slight strangeness in her tongue from some foreign land.
She explained later that she had left her native France with a boy when she was twenty. He was greasy, untrustworthy, fond of the sound of his own voice, as all Frenchmen are, I am told, and had abandoned her, run off to transport drugs between Kashmir and the unwashed hippies in Goa, and, no doubt, to chase our chaste, innocent women. She had stayed in Delhi, lost and confused, got a job teaching English in language schools, found faith, and then joined the Sacred Heart Convent School.