by Rahul Raina
I celebrated with a glass of champagne, and looked at my own face in the bathroom mirror afterward, and was amazed I still looked the same.
One point five crores. Fifteen million blandly smiling Gandhis. That was my cut. (Take that, Slumdog Millionaire.)
I never met the men behind the scenes, the Swiss trying to get in on the biggest TV market in the world, a place where ten million people watched a normal evening program. Even their investment of several million dollars wasn’t worth spending time in India for, it seemed.
I didn’t care. I saw their cash and I saw what they built, and it was beautiful.
The car came to collect us in the morning. The driver even saluted.
The journey from our flat took an hour, but we didn’t notice at all. Rudi and I didn’t even talk. We just looked at each other and tried not to laugh at what had happened.
An executive met us at the gate, a suit I never saw again.
“Your corner of Delhi International Studios,” he said. A corner? It looked like a palace.
He showed us the makeup room, the control room, a production room full of coffee, cigarettes, and the entrails of people’s lives, all separated by a few corridors from the central studio commissary.
“All very impressive,” said Rudi, acting very nonchalant-MBA-haver.
But even he gawped at the studio.
The suit knew it too. He paused outside the door, and turned to us and said, “Welcome to your new home, Mr. Saxena. I think you’ll be very pleased by what we’ve made.”
He opened the door. At first, all you saw was a dark cavern full of cords of wiring, a bank of seats for the restive, sweaty audience. A gush of air came out, so hot you felt like you were inside a tandoor.
We moved inside, closer to the stage, and everything revealed itself.
Pink lights, pillars, heavy drapes, faux marble, electricians, cameramen, running this way and that. A buzz of activity. They understood India, those Swiss men. They would have had dancers and item girls if they could, with the usual tasteful near-quasi-nudity, all in saris, just a little closer and lower cut than usual.
Beat the Brain.
What a fatherfucking joke.
Live on TV, live, live, live, for added masala, added pressure, the you-just-have-to-watch-it water-cooler conversation. Hundreds of starry-eyed contestants demographically selected from all over India appeared every month, and all they had to do to win the twelve-crore megaprize (chosen for numerological reasons; the Swiss had been told that twelve was a number with huge cultural importance to us) was to answer twelve questions and beat the Topper. And me and the production assistants in his ear telling him the answers.
We had two weeks of prep before the show actually started shooting. We had the money deposited in our account, fifteen crores a year, and Rudi was surrounded by an army of people panting to do his bidding. We spent the morning of the first show in the writing room, a bunch of arse-lickers and producer’s assistants coming up with the jokes Rudi would tell that evening, and he had a photo shoot for coconut water in the afternoon with a bikini-clad starlet.
“Ramesh,” he shouted, at any and all times of day. I would be finalizing questions, working out contracts for ads, perfecting every little detail of his life, and I would hear the screech from my walkie-talkie and I would go.
“Yes, sir, boss,” I’d say when I reached him.
I’d started calling him boss in public. It was my cross to bear.
If the people around him, lund-lickers, makeup artists, Ayurvedic quacks, girls in sunglasses and pink lipgloss, enjoyed it, all the better.
Did he care that the only reason he was here was because of me? Did he thank me? Did he strew petals in my path?
His complaint this time was about tea, that filthy, life-quenching stuff.
“This chai is fucking cold!” he shouted.
“Okay, boss,” I said quickly, “I’m on it. Whatever you want.” I grabbed his tea, but he held his hand around the cup tight.
“Let it go, bewaqoof,” I said quietly. He clutched it harder. The cup crumpled explosively as I snatched it out of his hand, dousing me with lukewarm liquid.
We stared at each other.
He smirked. I promised myself that the next time he came to me in the night and wept, I’d accidentally post it on Instagram. Let him become a poster child for mental health and watch his career implode.
He could do anything he wanted to me, he had realized. What could I do to punish him? If he fell, I would fall too, and no one would be offering me fifty million Gandhis to appear on Bigg Boss in two years’ time when the scandal had died away.
I went to get his tea, as I did his French fries and condoms and whisky. I went out of the door without looking, trying to pat myself dry, and ran into a woman coming into the room.
She was carrying a bundle of papers and books, an earpiece thrown casually over her shoulder. I remember it so well.
“I’m, er . . .”
“I’m Priya. I’m the assistant producer. You’re Mr. Kumar, right? Mr. Saxena’s manager?”
Mr. Kumar? It was the first time anyone had ever called me that, apart from at restaurants and in taxis. I didn’t know what to say for a few moments.
“Er, Ramesh, yes. Manager, yes. You’re right. Not assistant. Never assistant. See anyone calling me an assistant, shoot him, okay?”
“I might do that anyway,” she said, with a conspiratorial wink. She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear and moved in closer. I tried to take a step back, and failed. “And I have so many other targets on my list too,” she whispered.
“Bad day?” I said, and I didn’t know why I was making conversation. Ramesh, I thought, you’re here to make money and fetch chai and get out with your soul and your heart intact. Jesus, don’t talk to this woman, she’s much better than you, and my God, you’re smiling. Why are you smiling like that, Ramesh? Because she’s smiling?
“I’m just trying to avoid the boss. Like every day,” she said. “Oh dear! Goodness, you’re covered in tea! What happened? Can I help you?”
“No, er,” I said. “You’re busy. Please go. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? I’m going to be working on the show, so we should touch base. Here, take my number.” She handed me a business card and then waltzed off, hair smelling like roses, balancing two books and a stack of paper in her arms.
Touch base? Who did she think I was? Some college boy with career aspirations? At least someone had given me their number. At least someone wanted to know who I was.
As soon as Priya started working with us, her biggest problem soon became my biggest problem too. We had a shithole boss.
His main issue was that he was a prick. Everything followed from that.
There wasn’t anything that made Shashank “Shash” Oberoi happy, not his C Class Mercedes, not his ex-model wife, not trying to fuck the interns, not being surrounded by boot-lickers, nothing. Had he ever been happy, or had he started crying the moment he left his mother, and kept going?
At least Rudi could be pleasant when he wasn’t drunk and abusive and chasing skirt. Oberoi was like an eternal conflagration of rage in a button-down shirt.
“Writing not funny enough, Rudi not charming enough, stupid, un-buzzy un-happening questions, camera angles unimaginative, lights wrong color, coffee not here, sound bad, Ramesh a fucking quasi-untouchable, bastarding unions, lazy Dravidians, sambar for lunch again, fucking Priya, fucking inflation, if only the Britishers were in charge again, fucking democracy.”
He would say these things to us in production meetings while tearing strips from pieces of paper, rolling them into little cones, and picking his earwax with them, and saying things like “India is such a dirty country. Thankfully Modi is cleaning it up.”
Whenever I said anything, he always gave me that look of surprise that all the rich lunds deploy when they realize I speak English.
Oberoi’s favorite activity was putting Priya down in public. “Is that the best
idea Ms. Bangalore University BComm graduate could come up with? Not very fucking good, is it?” he would say in meetings. “Are your parents dead? Because your inadequacy would kill them again if they were. Don’t have kids, do you? So it’s your uterus and your brain that are fucking barren.”
She would sit and take it. It would require every ounce of strength she had not to stand up and walk out, but she would take it.
Oberoi was very proud of his master’s from Southern Illinois University, “a very prestigious institution.” We love that word. Prestigious. All American places are prestigious. It is very important that they are prestigious for the marriage ads and dating sites, otherwise how else do desperate parents sell their hairy, unwashed thirty-two-year-old sons who work in lower middle management? I think it’s code for “Everyone’s heard of it. You haven’t? Fucking anpadh hick.”
Oberoi made an easy job difficult. The show was a hit from the first day we aired. All we had to do was not fuck it up.
Every day we discussed each contestant, weeded out the frauds and the fakes, and picked the genetically noble, the truly deserving. It might be a washerwoman from Benares who’d lost her son in the Kargil war.
“How much do we give her?” a production assistant would ask.
“How many awards did her kid win?” Oberoi would say.
“None for gallantry,” the boy would reply, facial hair failing to crawl up from his neck. “Er, just a second, sir, er, two for wounds. Died in a helicopter crash. Friendly fire.”
“A hundred thousand,” Oberoi would spit. A thousand US fucking dollars. Then he’d go back to posting Instagrams about his children and their prestigiousness, their school reports, their horse-riding lessons, their drama performances, although they never seemed to take a photo with him, along with shots of every five-star meal he ate, every cup of coffee, like it was 1995 and people were still impressed by that, every film ingenue he ever awkwardly posed for a photo with at a party and pretended was a close intimate. Just catching up with, he’d write, as if anyone believed him.
We would arrange for a camera team to go out and shoot our contestant in all their seeping filth, get clips of their hopeful little eyes reflecting dying fires, slow motion of their thin, gray-sweatered children covered in flies, get the audience weeping. Indian television doesn’t do nuance. Neither does the West, though, does it?
We would go through a day of contestants, taking breaks so that Rudi, who was in the room in body if not in spirit, could take questions from reporters and gossipmongers calling on his phone, or take shots of the team at work, me in the background, just an obscured head popping out of a forest of arms and hair and MBAs, trying very hard to never be photographed, a holdover from my former career.
Rudi took a million selfies, at the drop of a hat. He’d be talking, and then he’d say, “Ramesh! Selfie!” and I would hand him his phone, and run in the opposite direction. Never be photographed. Never be seen, ever.
When we came to film, a few weeks later, we finally saw our contestants, these denizens of middle India who’d just been hard-luck stories on our production notes.
I’d be in Rudi’s ear, feeding him questions and biographical details.
“She was born on the night of the 1980 solar eclipse. Ask her about her star sign.”
“You were born on the night of the 1980 solar eclipse. What is your star sign?”
Jesus. That was the first few weeks.
Thankfully he got better.
At least he never left any silences, and always, always he had that thick, cloying charm, the one he turned on in nightclubs and in front of TV cameras, the one I’d seen in his first interview the day he’d become the Topper.
He could pretend he was someone else now. He could perform. He was no longer Rudraksh Saxena, annoying Indian boy-child, but Rudi the Mental Maharaja, who bent knowledge to his will. He could behave however he liked, and someone would make a YouTube video about how it had contributed to his unlikely rise.
Of course he hadn’t done anything at all. He knew that.
All I knew was that the audience loved him.
“Your son is a pilot? Ma’am, you are one very lucky mother. You know my own mother says to me, ‘Rudi, why can’t you be a pilot? Why do you just make these TV programs?’ Ho ho, mothers, we can’t live with or without them. Hail to the mothers of India!” Then he would flash his recently whitened teeth, and all over our great country, bosoms would heave.
Women over thirty, lower middle class and quickly rising, were his best demographic, the country’s too. Some of them made up the studio audience; some of those were housewives, in bright makeup used to cover the strain of long, hard hours of work. They all strove to look and smell their best. Rudi wasn’t an idiot. He turned up early and told them jokes. He stayed afterward and took selfies and signed pictures, and then disintegrated in the corridor outside, away from the cameras, and I pulled him together and sent him home. There he would swipe away on his phone for hours, text, and check his messages.
They bought shit, these women sitting at home watching the show, chapati flour, oil, washing machines, saris, back massagers, makeup, a deathtrap family car to replace the aging moped, the first Filipino computer, these wives of a hundred million office workers whose fathers had been farmers and who had been lifted from millennia of unchanging rural existence by American pension funds chasing high returns wherever they could get them.
These women wanted to give birth to him, to squeeze his little chubby cheeks, to pet him, all at once, probably.
These women had never had a competent man in their lives. Fathers who never talked to them, husbands who never listened.
Rudi listened. Oberoi would bark in my ear, scream for “tempo, tempo, tempo,” and Rudi would stand and listen to the stories the contestants told him. He would ask for their opinions, their favorite shows, the movies they had seen.
You could sense their sighs as he genuflected to aged contestants, or did a speech about the new Indian millennium.
You can make a lot of money in this country by being the perfect fat little son.
Rudi played with the audience. He did these piercing looks to the camera when the contestants were talking about their wretched lives, and he was good at delivering our monologues about the strength of the nation, about parents and brotherhood and bloody Pakistan whenever we could.
Maybe other countries can produce quiz shows without bringing four thousand years of cultural tradition and seventy years of poisonous geopolitical rivalry into it, but we don’t.
Rudi tried to sneak off during ad breaks. To do what exactly, I didn’t want to know.
“This is so boring, yaar,” he would say into my ear. “More boring than when my parents got obsessed with religion when I was ten, and I spent hours doing the musical accompaniment on the fucking tambourine to the Hanuman Chalisa.”
After our first week’s programs, we went out to celebrate at a pan-Asian bar-cum-restaurant in Khan Market. Rudi was stopped for autographs and selfies outside. Inside, all the sushi pizzas were covered in truffle oil, which I could not taste, and all I could say was “Divine!” Priya looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. She asked me if I wanted to get a drink at the bar. We left the table and elbowed our way through the wannabe film stars, lawyers, and oil executives. The VIP crowd congregated in places like this, which some in-flight magazines had deemed “Brooklyn chic.” No one knew what it meant, but they showed up all the same.
We will do anything to impress foreigners. We have a story of Indian cooperation for any nationality. American? Isn’t your President X just the best? Oh, you voted the other way? I preferred the last one too. Russian? We were such friends in the Soviet years, we’ve always been allies, look at our MiGs. British? Easy. Israeli? It’s just you and us against the Muslims, huh?
Priya and I were ordering mojitos when behind us we overheard an accounts executive say to his associate, “You know, you Indians know how to keep your women under control. Not like t
he West. We’ve grown soft and decadent. The consequences of the sexual revolution have been a disaster for the human race.”
I looked at Priya, my face breaking into embarrassment. I was about to say something, anything, when Rudi and Oberoi broke through the crowd and picked up our drinks. “Order another round,” Rudi barked at me.
Rudi tried to hold court, but Shash Oberoi was not having it. He was the boss. Rudi was just the star. Neither knew who was more powerful, and they butted heads trying to find out, spent the last six months doing it every day.
“I was just thinking about buying a house in Defence Colony,” Oberoi said, his voice dripping satisfaction as people clustered around him. The resemblance to Sumit, Mr. Paco Rabanne, Mr. “Ramesh you have no ambition,” but with more fat and fewer steroids, was quite pronounced. The underlings would ooh and aah.
“Defence Colony? Yah, maybe if it was 1985. Ha ha. Only joking, Shashank,” Rudi said.
Oberoi went red, tried to calm himself, put an arm around the back of a girl who suddenly appeared, a girl who’d been standing behind him the whole time. She looked around, anxious, uneasy.
This unfortunate competitiveness between Oberoi and my dear master would later prove, how do the Anglos say it, “problematic.”
I wish I had paid more attention to it. I could have tried harder to broker peace.
But I didn’t, for the only person I had eyes for, over Rudi’s criticism of Oberoi’s choices in clothes, houses, whisky, and women, was Priya.
Oh, I had it bad.
She controlled that first evening out, without saying anything at all. We ate where she wanted us to. We drank where she wanted to. These men thought they had the power, but they would have been nothing without her breaking her back for them.
She had to organize a birthday party for someone, a farewell party for someone else, anything and everything to keep the show and its staff going.