by Rahul Raina
It had to be done.
“Sumit? Guess who?” I said when the call went through.
I was taking a chance. The last time I’d seen him, I’d turned him down. I’d cast him away.
Sumit stayed quiet for a long time. “Motherfucker,” he finally said, laughing. “I thought I was rid of you. Everyone is looking for Rudraksh. Have you seen that kidnap video with the terrible music?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “You know those contacts of yours? Mafia dons? Undersecretaries? Samosa wallahs?” I said.
“Do you want my help or do you want to insult me?” he shot back straightaway.
Good question. I knew I was pushing my luck, but I didn’t want him to know how much I needed him. I needed to watch some YouTube videos on interpersonal relationships.
“I need to contact a Himanshu Aggarwal. Builder. Big guy. Let him know we have something that belongs to him.”
“What have you gotten into?” he asked. “Do you know who that is?”
“Can your people get the message to him?”
“Give me a few hours,” he said.
“Thank you, Sumit bhai,” I said, and didn’t even feel dirty at being so nice. I hung up. Maybe it had been too easy, I thought. I spent the walk back worrying if he was going to fuck me over.
I grabbed a newspaper, and was glad to see that we—well, Rudi—were front page, top center. I was on 10 percent commission, remember. I picked up some Westernized boy-snacks, full of cholesterol and sugar, Gatorade and milk shakes, Maggi noodles from one of a million stalls. Maggi with soy, Maggi with chili, Maggi with egg. A few honest cheap rotis for myself.
It was a different India out here. I’d only been out of it, living the high life, for a few months, but I’d gotten used to the other side, even though it was, what, five miles away?
Air conditioners, drivers, armed guards at storefronts, and gated apartment complexes. The shops were freshly purified heavens, filled to the brim with helpful staff, even sweeter for their total falseness.
This was my India. Foul smells, butchers cutting chicken necks in front of you, the little cluckers squawking as they died, elbowing and scratching your way to counters to be served, unexplained noises after dark, potentially poisonous smells, screams of pleasure and pain.
And this was a nice part, a lower-middle-class striver part of Delhi, on-the-up Delhi, half-filled-metro-hole Delhi, a place I had slaved for three years to rent an apartment in. I wasn’t even talking about the really foul parts, where even I’d never been to, where people lived like gnats on a lemur’s ballsack, where everyone was missing teeth or organs or legs and nothing got better even as the GDPs and the HDIs were going up, up, up all over United Nations PowerPoint slides.
Rudi and Abhi were trying to talk when I got back to the apartment.
Well, they were sitting and staring at different sides of the room. Rudi kept attempting small talk. “What do you want to do when you’re older?,” “What’s your favorite YouTube video?,” “I’m sorry for shaming you in front of hundreds of millions of people.” You know, that kind of thing.
At least he was making an effort. I gave him a little thumbs-up.
There was just one thing I had to do first. I had to be hard.
“Abhi,” I shouted. “Get up!” He moved without a moment’s hesitation. “Up against the wall.” His family had tried to fuck me over, and I was going to repay a little of that tender care and attention.
I took out the phone I had bought earlier and opened the camera app.
Abhi started trembling.
“Say what you did,” I said. “Say it, or your pretty little face is going to get hurt.”
Rudi looked at me with confusion. “Ramesh, what are you doing?”
“Just a little extra insurance. Start talking, Abhi, into the camera, say what you and your father did.”
It was over in a matter of minutes. A nice little video file saying exactly who had kidnapped us. I made a copy onto a memory card, just for insurance, and stuffed it into a pocket.
Abhi was silent after that. He sat on the bed and sulked.
Rudi kept on talking to him.
“In all honesty,” he said, “I know that what I did was bad. I will make it up to you.” He glanced at me, and I winked my approval. “I was not fair. I did it for ratings. I made them hate you.”
Abhi kept staring at the wall. I knew that feeling. I too had spent many hours staring at that wall feeling a general animosity toward Rudraksh Saxena. But that was in the past.
“I can give you anything,” said Rudi. “You want to be a politician? I can do that. You want to be famous? You want to drink Bollinger? You want the best table at Indian Accent? You want to date starlets? Tell me what you want, dude.”
What an authority! How words and opinions rolled off his tongue. He was a seasoned man of the world, a man who could get a table at the best restaurants in town, a man who had access to film stars. Better than being addicted to drugs, but my God, what an annoyance!
But then his voice changed and another Rudi entirely emerged.
“I know you hate me. I want to help you. I fucked up. I am a fuck-up. I’m only famous because someone else took the goddamn exam for me. I know I’m no good. But I have money now, and I can help you. Just let me help, please,” he said.
Abhi shifted around to face us. “There isn’t enough money for you to fix what happened,” he said.
Rudi looked as if he was going to cry. Not good for a kidnapper.
“Food!” I said, because that usually made things better. “Eat. Sleep. Enjoy yourselves, live a little, both of you.” I threw the mountain of snacks on the bed. “My contact will call in a few hours.” I didn’t mention Priya, or the paid ransom.
I logged into the computer and Rudi made one last effort to get the kid talking. We watched videos. I handed out glasses and plates like I was running day care. Twenty-four years old, and this was my life.
It was midafternoon when Sumit rang. The kids were sleeping, the adrenaline having long since abandoned them. Rudi had been talking about Marvel shit. Abhi had answered him only monosyllabically, but at least that was something.
They should have gotten on well. Same age, same complaints about parents and vast childhood emotional abuse, boring, boring, boring. I wished I smoked, had something to take my mind off the sweat and my fatherfucking finger.
“So you kidnapped Himanshu Aggarwal’s kid?” Sumit said, over the phone.
“Had to do something.”
“Takes balls I didn’t know you had.” He sighed. “I’ve set up a meet. I’ll take you to the father. You hand the kid back. Everything’s good.”
“Tell him I know exactly what he did,” I said, thinking about the ransom, but unable to say it out loud in case Rudi woke up. I didn’t want him to know. He was already under enough pressure as it was. “Tell him no more double-crossing or I’ll expose what he did. We’ve made a video. We’ll release it everywhere if he fucks us. Where do I find you?”
“Two hours. Karkardooma metro. Ticket hall.”
“We’ll be there. You know, Sumit bhai, I was wrong. I could use a go-getter like you in the future. How about it?”
“Sounds like a plan, brother,” he said, and hung up.
I woke the boys. Told them to shower. Abhi looked like death.
“Back to Daddy soon,” I said. He nodded, still shit-scared, angry, and confused. He deserved a peaceful life, youthful enthusiasms and foreign trips, and then in a few years he’d turn into his dad and hate himself until he died. You know, the normal life cycle of the upper-class Indian male.
After my call with Sumit I went out to the shops once again. I had a genius idea and I knew just where to go to make it happen. “Something for the fuller-bodied lady,” I said, shivering with laughter, unable to contain my delight, and I could tell the shopkeeper pitied the wife who was married to this.
The kids had showered and shat by the time I came back.
I threw my packag
e at Rudi.
“Open it,” I said, and then went into my wardrobe to look for a woman’s wig of long black hair that I’d bought on a whim a few years before. I’d be wearing a man’s, medium long, like a seventies film star.
“I am not wearing this,” I heard Rudi shout. I reappeared just to see the look of shock on his face.
He was holding a super-value bright pink sari set.
“You’re the most famous man in India,” I said, and threw the wig at him. “Think of it as a compliment.”
Abhi started laughing nervously.
Progress, finally.
Twelve
We pulled up in a taxi. A huge crowd of harassed-looking office workers was pouring out of Karkardooma metro station into the welcoming embrace of a sea of rickshaw pullers. Bored drivers of battered cars from 2005 awaited their middle-management masters. Men and women rushing this way and that, desperate to make a little more money before the Diwali holidays. It wasn’t even rush hour yet, but there were a thousand people coming out of the station. Karkardooma metro station was where Sumit chose to screw me.
The outside of the station was composed of a sheer wall filled with advertisements for catering halls, festivity gardens, elephant rentals, dressmaking—all the paraphernalia of the wedding industry, pumped up even more at that time of year, the industry that single-handedly keeps our economy growing. Weddings for paupers, weddings for billionaires, every day in Delhi a hundred—you could dine for free all year round if you possessed a good suit and the ability to blend in with a crowd.
We walked from the taxi toward the building, past paan spit on the pavement, toy-hawkers eyeing young children, coconut water sellers, diesel fumes, CNG tanks that could explode at any moment. Everyone sweaty. I thought of my father’s obsession with crotch rot. He’d have had a bottle of talcum powder out before you could blink.
Rudi was furious, but he looked wonderful, soft and sweet, like your dream daughter-in-law, or Hema Malini in a dance number just before it rains and everything turns transparent.
Inside the metro station was a vast steep pyramid of stairs, endless fucking stairs. I pushed Abhi up the steps, up an escalator, and into the ticket hall. “Not long now,” I said. “It will all be over soon, as long as no one does anything stupid.”
“That is what I’m worried about,” he whispered back, eyeing Rudi and me.
In his polo shirt and slacks, face expressing terror, he looked like he had just accidentally beaten his boss at the golf course. Rudi in his sari, tripping over the dupatta, got many admiring gazes from shortsighted elderly gentlemen. I was in my wig, the fringe settling just above my eyebrows. What a strange group we made, trooping up those stairs to the ticket hall, which was failing to be cooled by giant groaning ACs.
Upstairs, I saw Sumit standing on the far side of the hall, near another set of escalators leading to a platform. He was alone. Where were his armies of followers, dressed like bad copies?
We walked over. I took Abhi by the shoulders and pushed him in front of me. Rudi followed, batting away the hands of strangers trying to graze his waist, pinch a bit of his flesh. “Fuck you, fuck you,” I heard him say every few seconds, either to me or the gropers, I knew not which.
“Sumit,” I said as we stood in front of him, surrounded by the hubbub of a million gray, wet-armpitted shirt-wearers milling around us.
“Who’s the lady?” was the first thing he said. He looked very tired. And very pleased. Too pleased. I saw an expression of victory cross his face. I saw the creases in his shirt, the way it hung off his body. He didn’t smell of Paco Rabanne. He smelled of metro station.
He looked hungry. He looked poor. He looked like a young man who was about to make a killing. He was not the Sumit of old. No flunkies, no money, no perfume, just pure desperation.
Oh shit.
He smiled, then pulled out a knife, a little three-inch thing. No one around us noticed. Men shouting, pointing, making threatening gestures? That was just rush hour on the Delhi metro.
What do you do if someone pulls out a knife in public? No clever stuff.
“He’s coming with me,” said Sumit.
“You ullu ka pattha,” I said. “You tees maar khan double-crosser.”
Sumit laughed. “Do you know how rich his dad is?” That was the sum total of his explanation. What other reason do you need, really?
“You fucking prick,” I said.
That was a mistake. I blame my lack of practice at getting in touch with my emotions.
“After what you did to me, brother?” said Sumit. “The way you turned me down? I had nothing, but now I have this kid. And once his father finds out, I’ll make a fortune.”
Rudi started to panic, his face pinker than his sari. Abhi started to stutter. Sumit squeezed past me, dodging the rotund bulk of a nearby office worker, keeping the knife to my ribs.
He took Abhi by the hand. He looked at Rudi’s face, for just a second too long. He crinkled his eyes, then shook his head.
Imagine if he had recognized him then. Our stupid little plan, destroyed by Sumit, of all people. I never would have gotten over that.
“Better luck next time, Ramesh!” he said. “Now you’ll find out how my life has been these few months.”
Abhi was weeping again. If he was going to take over his father’s business, he’d really have to toughen up. I watched his miserable face as he was led into the crowd and dissolved like sugar in tea.
“What the fuck do we do now?” said Rudi, right in my ear.
My finger throbbed.
Great fucking question.
“Let’s see where they’re going,” I said, squeezing through the crowd. Rudi ran after me, surprising salarymen with his gruff voice and his clunking Adidas trainers squashing their feet.
I heard a wail to my left and saw Abhi waving frantically to us on the escalator. Men were shouting and toppling against each other as Sumit pushed them out of the way.
“Escalator,” I shouted, and Rudi and I sprinted through the warren of wet, fat flesh, a maze constructed out of body odor and sweat. My fingers grabbed shoulders, I made a thousand apologies, I smelled stomach acid and bad breath. I had eyes only for the escalator.
We forced our way through, and charged up the ascending, bleating line of people. Abhi had vanished onto the platform. I could hear the high electric whine of a metro train pulling in.
“Get out of my way,” Rudi shouted in front of me, slapping people aside and trying to keep his sari together at the same time. It was quite a feat. Out we charged, vaulting over the ticket barriers, onto the platform—just as the metro doors slammed shut. We saw the ghost of a crying, chalk-white face, and off the train went, thirty seconds from stop to start, thank you, Delhi metro, thank you, government, thank you, civilization, fuck fuck fuck.
I bumped into Rudi from behind and he nearly fell onto the electric rail. How ignominious that would have been, how perplexing for the news, Rudraksh Saxena’s blackened body in women’s clothes, and in east Delhi of all places, what a terrible ending for a multimillionaire.
“Now?” said Rudi. The wig hairs were glued with sweat to his ruddy face.
“There’s a very angry construction magnate out there with a twice-kidnapped son and an extremely psychopathic underling. And we’ve just lost the one thing they care about the most—the one thing that would have saved us from ending up dead and disgraced.”
I looked at Rudi.
“Oberoi?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered.
We both thought, why not land him in the shit too?
And off we went.
Thirteen
I took all the money out of the bathroom: 192,000 Gandhis in crisp, pink two thousands.
We needed to get out of the flat immediately. Rudi was complaining about his clothes. Too hot, too tight, and he was upset about the pinching. I told him the next sari would be the color of his choice.
We hailed an auto on a market corner two streets away, and head
ed for Gandhi Nagar.
Gandhi Nagar is the sort of place Delhi dwellers go to get lost. That and to do their shopping at the clothes market, one of the last places not filled with white girls buying hippie harem trousers. In the films they go to Paharganj, but now that is sadly rammed full of drug-addicted backpackers looking for material for their novels.
I chose a hotel at random. The Geeta Rest House, the proprietress a middle-aged Sikh lady with an unreadable face.
She looked at my pink-veiled, freshly shaven bride, and I could imagine her thinking: not really a looker, but at least she’s paler than him. She took the money for three nights. I handed her a little extra. “No cleaning,” I said. She pocketed it without pause. That was how I liked people. Straightforward, rude, and morally flexible.
Behind her, a TV was blaring out something about Pakistan, about terrorism, followed by Shah Rukh and Aishwarya at Cannes, and Oscars and white-man films.
Upstairs, in the room, I made my plan of action. Another one, considering the last one had been forcefully shat on. Rudi jumped on the bed, tore off his wig, and started scratching himself. If a man had owned the hotel, we probably would have been on camera for his future masturbatory needs, and therefore entirely fucked.
“We need to get to Oberoi,” I said. “The only way I can see is Pawan. He has our car, he can smuggle us in. We can’t just wander into the studio. Aggarwal and Pratap aren’t idiots. They’ll have someone watching. And once they find out about Abhi, we’re done. We have to use Pawan.”
Our secret would come out, and then my life would be over. I’d be eternally reviled. No Priya, no fat little children, no future.
The Brain of Bharat took a moment to think. “Why Pawan, though? He was a good driver to us. He could get into trouble.”
The kid had a point. I clearly looked unimpressed, because Rudi seemed totally confused by my expression.
“Fine,” I said. “We get to the studio. You hide, I pay off the people at the gate. We get to Oberoi. He can bribe whoever has to be bribed. We’re back in the money and—” Rudi tried to interject. I put my hand up. “Only for a few months. Then we can become sadhus or yoga instructors or whatever.” He gave me an aggrieved glare. “Yes, we’ll examine our lives. I promise. No more being kidnapped, no more being kidnappers, no more Bhatnagar investigation. We make our money and then we leave. All right?”