by Rahul Raina
It was her confidence they were attracted to.
That evening, Oberoi tried it on first. He moved his arm from the woman next to him and edged closer to Priya. With just a casual movement, he placed his hand on the back of her stool.
I felt a shortness of breath usually only brought on by Diwali pollution. Jealousy? I was getting ahead of myself.
Priya shifted uncomfortably, shuffled the barstool forward, but Oberoi placed his hand on it again, and then he slammed it down insistently. Priya’s gaze was calm, fixed on the new drink the waiter was making for her, when Oberoi started to paw upward, up toward her thigh.
I stay out of things. I stay quiet. I stay in the shadows. But with Priya, I couldn’t help myself.
I wanted to hit him. I was going to hit him. I was going to sacrifice money, celebrity, everything I’d struggled for, Rudi’s career, every—
And then we were saved by the bell.
A ringtone went off inside Priya’s bag. She fished out a phone and pressed it to her head.
She began to smile. She’d been saved by who else? The blessed force that is the Indian wife, guardian of maidenheads, conservator of purity for countless millennia.
“Your wife, Mr. Oberoi,” she said, and finally turned her eyes directly to his. “She’s saying your card’s been declined online?”
His arms retreated immediately to his sides. The little prick completely deflated.
He took the phone quickly and wandered off.
She picked her fresh drink up off the bar. We looked at each other, and I still wanted to say something, do something, but she just smiled and raised her glass, and I raised mine.
I should have done something to help her. Not only did she have to organize everything, keep us from slitting each other’s throats, but this too?
“Priya,” Rudi said, as he tried to clink his glass with hers. “Priya. Priya. Priya.” He fell silent.
“Hey, boss,” I shouted, “look over there, an image rights contract!” I grabbed his hand and pointed across the bar.
“What the hell are you talking about, Ramesh?”
So, not drunk enough for that. I changed tack.
“Is that your friend Shivansh?” I said.
“Where?” He looked around, and then wandered off in the direction in which I was pointing.
I saw him cross the room, confused, pawing at shoulders, grimacing at faces. His smile slowly turned sour. I even felt bad.
“Wasn’t there,” he said when he returned, his eyes clouded over. He went to sit on a sofa a few meters away and started chatting to a man in a suit. As soon as the man replied, he shut his eyes and started to doze off.
“Thank you,” Priya mouthed.
“No problem.” I smiled at her. We raised our glasses again.
And then Oberoi returned from his call.
“Priya,” he said, “we were discussing something earlier, were we not? Something big.”
This time I stepped in with a conversational grenade, “Why do these film stars earn so much money?,” and Oberoi exploded with opinions, stories of being jumped in the line at a restaurant, of so-and-so’s son buying an elephant, or of someone having Celine Dion perform at their wedding, and the tension died immediately.
Someone at the bar next to us objected to his comments, some educated nonsense about how Oberoi was part of the same system, and he got stuck in an argument, allowing us to retreat.
As we left, and Rudi began to slur out his commands to me, Priya took me to one side.
“Will you be okay getting home?” she asked. Her eyes were full of concern. Actual concern. I was momentarily nonplussed. She kept talking and I kept nodding.
“Coffee? Tomorrow?” she said. “I have some ideas I want to run past you.”
“Er, yes,” I said, stunned. “Thank you. Tomorrow. Touch base,” I said, and she laughed.
I pulled Rudi up from the couch, tried to hold him up as we staggered out of the bar.
The next day, Priya and I had our first coffee date in the studio’s canteen.
“This is nice,” she said as we sat down.
“But we haven’t said anything yet,” I said. Stupid, stupid, stupid rang out in my head.
“No, just this, just being able to talk to someone without feeling hunted.”
“Hunted?”
“You know. At the bar.”
“Oh,” I said. “I wanted to do something. I would have done. I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said.
She gave me a smile and shuffled her chair closer, like we were co-conspirators.
I couldn’t help but notice her hair smelled slightly of roses and her purple earrings caught the light as she laughed and propped her chin on her hand—here I am going on about her looks, but it was her intelligence, her determination, her drive, the way she made you feel as if you were the center of the room, that her mind was fixed on every word I said.
Oh God, Ramesh, I thought.
“I don’t know much about you, Ramesh. Tell me something about yourself,” she said.
“Born Old Delhi, moved New Delhi, lucky to go to charity school, then I went into precocious child genius management, you know how it is,” I said. “What about you?”
“Born Ahmedabad, did my degree in Bangalore, and now I’m a TV producer.” She laughed. “Much less interesting than yours.”
Her parents wanted her married, she complained. “Darling, who is single at twenty-five nowadays? Can we introduce you to Group Captain Khurrana’s son?” she imitated. “There’s always some kid in finance or politics they want me to get married to,” she added. Then she lowered her voice a little bit. “All a little like Rudi.”
I laughed.
She held one of her purple earrings between her thumb and forefinger, and talked.
It was so damn nice, just listening to her slightly Gujarati-accented English, and then of course one of Oberoi’s minions ran in and barked orders about buying flowers for some fat politico’s nephew, and dealing with his credit card repayments or something, and Priya picked up her takeaway coffee cup and said, “Thanks for the drink, Ramesh.”
Later on, I would get to knock out that bhosdike Oberoi, and it was one of the best moments of my life. But I won’t get to that yet.
Hey, I was going to earn fifteen million Gandhis in one year.
I had something, I didn’t know what exactly, with a beautiful girl.
I was happy.
Eight
Maybe at the beginning, things were good for Rudi too. Maybe there was a week, or a day, or an hour, where he was truly happy: rich, feted, a celebrity, an eighteen-year-old with the world at his feet.
Whatever his mental state, on the show he was good. Contestants were charmed. He never had a line, a hair out of place.
But he slowly got worse, a lot worse, and my ass-covering began.
On the show, his lines started to slip. Sometimes he looked at the camera with glazed eyes, just for a second, and I would see his face on the monitor and I could tell that he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was, and a strange, illicit excitement would run through me, very much against my will.
One time we had a housewife from Amritsar, who had burned her arm in a boiling water accident when she was a kid, a usual Punjabi childhood incident it seemed, and Rudi just stared at her arm for ten seconds straight.
Her question had been “What’s the fourth largest lake in Maharashtra?,” one of the fuck-off-home-now questions Oberoi loved so much.
She stood there, unable to say anything, and watched as the counter clicked down, and the lights in the studio went red.
“Tough luck, tough luck,” Rudi was meant to say, and read out the correct answer, ask about her family, usher her back into obscurity.
Instead he did nothing.
He just stared at her, at her furrowed, melted skin. Seconds passed, and still he said nothing.
“Get him to say something, Kumar!” screamed Oberoi.
“Rudi
,” I hissed in his ear. “Rudi, ask what she’ll do with the money. Ask her about her husband. Rudi!” My eyes were clamped to the monitor while Oberoi spat at me from my side.
“Your husband loves you, even with your arm?” Rudi said robotically. The woman’s lips started to quiver. Moisture appeared at the corners of her eyes, and I could imagine why, the tears of a woman who had tried hard to conquer her fear of being seen in public, who had told herself that she would never cry again.
“Y-yes,” she said, “but sometimes . . .” She grabbed at her sleeve to dry her eyes.
Rudi looked totally trapped.
The audience was uneasy. Their boy was falling apart. We had to act bastard fast. If they started booing, his whole career would be done, the gossip rags would never let off. I understood the situation immediately, but Rudi, he just stood there looking terrified, his mouth ajar in surprise.
“Fucking tell the prick to say something,” shouted Oberoi beside me, breath smelling of bourbon. “He fucks up now, the show goes down and I’m completely fucked, you hear?”
“Rudi,” I said. “Say these words exactly: your husband loves you, even with your arm. No question. It’s a statement.”
Rudi said, “Say these words exactly: your husband loves you, even with your arm. No question. It’s a statement.”
Fuck.
The gods be praised, the altars be sanctified, the woman nodded. Put it down to caste-based deference, TV nerves, globalization, whatever, she nodded!
“My husband loves me, even with my arm,” she said quietly.
“Because that’s what love is, isn’t it?” I said. Rudi repeated it. He had enough sense to smile to the camera. “We take the good days and the bad together. We take the good things and the bad. No love is perfect. We all have our problems. But we deserve to be loved. All of us. From the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. That’s what makes this world go round.” The woman was still crying, but they were happy tears now, son-has-returned-from-war tears. I let myself look around the control room. Priya was gazing at me in the darkness of the booth with admiration. She mouthed, “Thank you.” I was totally lost in her, almost like Rudi had been moments before. Then Oberoi slapped me from behind and told me to get on with the bloody broadcast.
The audience had started clapping and hooting and stood in all their sari’d splendor.
“Rudi, go over and hug her,” I hissed, and he did. He nearly squeezed the life out of the woman, lifted her off her feet.
“Thank you, India, and goodnight!” I said, and so did he.
Disaster averted.
It was spellbinding, snake-charming television in the end.
“Thank fuck,” said Oberoi, but he’d use it for ammunition in his weekly debrief, when the table in front of him was stacked with whisky miniatures, the usual middle-aged cocktail of statins and beta blockers, and a miniaturized digital blood pressure monitor he’d begged some American relative to bring on their annual visit to India. Complaining about Rudi gave him a break from complaining about his bills, his mortgage, his wife’s spending, all the nonsense that he preferred to ignore.
They would never go directly at each other at work, Rudi and Oberoi. They would insult me or Priya or another underling, and compete at how dismissive and cruel they could be.
And then Rudi would come to me at night and weep.
It had been one of Oberoi’s genius ideas. He wanted to freshen things up, he wanted to avoid any more strange Rudi silences.
Challengers Week. Three kids a show, Rudi’s age, who’d all taken the All Indias that year. They would come in, try to take Rudi’s crown, and, obviously, lose.
The first four days went off without problems. The kids were all bespectacled and pure and from poorer families, and at the end of the show their parents came onstage and we gave them fridges and dishwashers. Very sweet.
But Oberoi had something quite different planned for the last day. He told us as we sat around the table for the production meeting: me, Priya, a few scriptwriters—Rudi was absent as usual.
“A real challenger,” Oberoi had said, “someone the audience will hate.”
“Hate?” said Priya. “But that isn’t how this show works. Rudi wins, but we don’t humili—”
“And that’s where you’re wrong, Priya. Our ratings have gotten soft. The people have tired of charity. They need humiliation. We need Rudraksh to crush someone. Someone rich and arrogant.”
Someone like you, I thought. I didn’t say anything. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe Rudi would look arrogant himself and out of touch. But at least Oberoi had ideas, at least he wanted to keep things fresh. Something to distract Rudi from his boredom, to change things up? It could work.
The kid’s name was Abhi.
His introductory video was very swish. Expensive cars, fancy drinks, nightclubs, lots of young women showing flesh. The audience was visibly disgusted. So far so good.
On the screen, his interview began. “I love to party,” he said. “I work hard and I play hard.”
The audience began to boo.
“I’m going to put Rudi in his rightful place,” he continued, his eyes darting from side to side. The little prick was reading. I looked over to Oberoi. He was smiling. “I’m going to dethrone Rudi Saxena, and then I’m going to be the Brain of Bharat.”
He was not exactly endearing himself to the audience in the first place. Then he said the real dynamite line.
“I’ve studied abroad, but now I’ve come back to India to show people who the real champion is.”
The audience began to boil with anger.
In the control room, Oberoi was beaming with delight.
“This is awful,” said Priya. “He’s just a child. They’re going to rip him apart.”
“Exactly,” said Oberoi, pulling at the corners of his moustache. “Think how great Rudi will look.”
I glanced at Oberoi. He was loving it. Maybe he was loving it a little too much, I thought. Probably loved getting Rudi riled up.
In the studio, out came Rudi, looking pissed.
Out came the kid, Abhi, waving shyly. T-shirt with a foreign label? Check. Designer trainers? Check. An expensively dressed sacrificial lamb.
He had a beautiful face. Youthful, toothsome, a milk advertisement face. His hair looked like it had been designed to be ruffled. His cheeks were red. His smile was innocent.
That smile didn’t survive a second in the studio.
I had never heard anything like it. The audience was ready to riot. They were shouting, “Rudi, Rudi, Rudi!” The women were howling with rage. The men were making anatomically incorrect comments about mothers. Why always them? What have they done? It’s un-Indian, I say.
Rudi had been watching the video, as always, from the green room.
He was in a rage.
He ripped into the kid, all the usual hits. You don’t honor your mother and your father. You ran away from this country. You have too much money. You don’t know what life is like for normal people. I didn’t even have to prompt him. He was consumed with anger.
“And to top it all,” he finished, stabbing his finger at the young kid stood behind his podium, “you insult all of the people watching this show. You insult their histories, their lives, and everything they have struggled against for generations. Young man, you are arrogant and uncouth and un-Indian, and Rudraksh Saxena is going to take you down!”
He was out of control. He was completely enraged. I had never seen him like this. The boy, his face, the situation, the video, everything came together just then.
“Rudi! Calm yourself!” I said. But he didn’t listen.
The audience had gone straight to ecstasy. They clapped. They applauded. They stamped their feet and the seats shook to their rhythm.
Rudi was wide-eyed with rage, his breathing hard, a rich kid who wanted to usurp him right in front of his face. He was getting out of control. I had never seen him this angry. If Oberoi wanted to pump some life into the show, if h
e wanted to avoid frozen silences, then it was working, far, far too well.
Abhi tried to respond, but he was utterly drowned out. Anti-national, NRI, traitor, foreign-resident, bad at arcane general knowledge: all the choicest insults rang out from the audience. Men stood up and shouted, competing with each other to get a close-up shot from the audience cameras that they could use as their Twitter picture, just above the bio they’d update to read, Media Commentator. Pro-India. Patriot.
“We shall see,” shouted Rudi, “after the break, who will be the real brain, and who will be the drain.” He came up with that one himself. I hold myself in no way accountable.
We went to the ad break. The audience fell immediately silent.
Priya put down her headphones, shot Oberoi a look of hatred, and went out to the studio floor. She walked up to the kid, who’d gone totally white, and gave him a hug.
“Why did you even do that?” Oberoi asked when she returned. “He has to learn someday how the world is.”
Priya bit her tongue.
We came back from the break. The audience began to scream with rage again, the dramatic shits. Oberoi tapped at his laptop, and up came Abhi’s first question.
What is the tallest mountain on planet earth?
Mauna Kea. Everest. K2. Elbrus.
“You have thirty seconds,” said Rudi. Abhi had regained some of his color. A simple question. He could do this, you saw the kid thinking. He was giving himself a little silent pep talk, full of positive thinking and the other coping strategies his therapist must have told him when he was eight.
“Go easier on him for the first few questions,” I said into Rudi’s ear. He nodded imperceptibly. Priya shot me a look of thanks. I grinned back.
And then Oberoi said, “The answer is Mauna Kea.”
I turned and looked at him like he was an idiot. On the screen, Rudi raised his eyebrow.
“The answer is Mauna Kea. Not Everest. That’s the highest,” said Oberoi. “Tallest is measured from the base, and Mauna Kea is half in the sea.”
“Sir,” said Priya, pulling her headset from her ears. “Sir, that is a trick. We cannot do that. This is the first question. He’ll be a laughingstock.”