How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  “You want to connect on LinkedIn, dude?” he said, fingers tapping away on his phone, sliding past secretaries, eyes never moving from his device.

  We got to the office, or at least I thought we did. The boy didn’t say anything, just grunted at the door.

  Here I go again, I thought. Another stupid plan, and me at the heart of it. I steeled myself for what lay beyond. I had to get my part done. Priya and Rudi’s lives depended on me.

  I stepped inside.

  And there he was, in the flesh, Shashank Oberoi himself, looking fat and tanned, plenty of food in him by the evidence of his waistline, his hair back to black, clearly recovered from tough times, a twenty-something girl hovering around him.

  “Holy fuck,” he said when he noticed me.

  The girl screamed, her hair shining like a beetle’s shell as it whipped around her face.

  “My God,” the young man said, finally wide awake. “It’s Captain Umar Chaudhury!”

  “The James Bond of Pakistan, yes!” I shouted. “You pig-dogs, you beef-avoiders, this is the revenge of the land of the pure!” I was in a somewhat dramatic frame of mind. I grabbed my wig and threw it to the floor. Then I thought better and retrieved it. A good kidnapper never leaves his equipment behind.

  Oberoi gave me a look of disgust.

  “You, boy,” I shouted to the liaison, in control now, oh what fun! “Get inside! No hero stuff, come here.” I dragged him in, and pushed him toward the corner of the room, next to the girl. “Stop screaming! Just stay here, and this will all be over soon.”

  I shrugged off my backpack, reached inside, and pulled out a gun.

  Of course it was not a gun. It was a cigarette lighter shaped like a pistol. Very popular with our undersexed young men, no doubt. Thank goodness for Amazon next-day delivery!

  “Don’t move, or I start shooting. And when Umar Chaudhury shoots, he never misses.” I placed the gun in my pocket, then took out a length of rope and some rags and threw them at the boy. “Tie her up,” I said, “and then yourself.”

  Shashank Oberoi didn’t wait around. He took his chance. He got up, pushed past me, kneeing me as he did so, and ran into the corridor.

  “The terrorist is here!” he shouted. “He has a bomb. Call the police, he has a suicide vest, he is going to blow—” Unfortunately he did not get a chance to finish, as I tackled him into the wall.

  In the hallway, secretaries scattered, janitors threw their mops and fled, probably begging Kali for intercession against this circumcised interloper. Oberoi expected me to die in a hail of bullets. Instead, everyone just ran away.

  “See,” I said, grunting as I wrapped rope around his hands—I was not letting him escape this time—“see how your grand plans never work out? And I must add, this one was especially culturally insensitive. Pakistan is a land of varied delights and cultures. Come on, get up.”

  We shuffled down the corridor, my hand around Oberoi’s neck.

  “It’s your fault,” I said. “If you hadn’t wanted money and Rudi and me dead and gone, none of this would have happened. Your damn fault. Stop weeping.”

  In the reception, papers littered the floor. Everyone had cleared out. I seemed to be having this effect on the many places I went, like a Dalit family moving into Hauz Khas, or a black one into a white American suburb.

  A few armed guards were stationed just outside the door, shouting into their walkie-talkies.

  “Shoot him!” shouted Oberoi, spittle from his mouth landing on my hands. “He’s a suicide bomber, shoot him or he’ll blow you all up!”

  Unfortunately, he was too persuasive. None of the guards leapt into action. Kids to look after, bribes to be collected, pay too low. No point. They weren’t even allowed in the building normally—couldn’t have them snooping on you looting the state, could you? They might want a cut! They thought no more. They dropped their guns and fled.

  “You really are an idiot, Oberoi,” I said.

  We walked into chaos. Everyone was running around like chickens in a pit fight, over lawns, across sprinklers, some of them barely aware why they were panicking, with no idea where they were running to.

  We walked through without a fuss. Well, Oberoi tried to run, but I kicked him and he thought better of it.

  The policemen at the outer gate had no idea what was going on. They carried paper plates of papri chaat, their guns swinging uselessly at their hips, and waddled around trying to impose calm through the heft of their bodies, slapping their chunky forearms into men and women and shouting in shrill voices, “Arrey!” “Hey!” “Ruko!” “Sir!” “Madam!”

  Outside the gates, journalists, peons, politicians, street accident aficionados, Twitter like–needers, and wannabe cutpurses ran around like madmen.

  Oberoi looked around and shouted to someone, anyone, that he was being kidnapped. Help him! Him! Didn’t they know who he was? He was famous! He was on TV. He had two hundred and seventy-four thousand followers on Instagram. He had been all over the news, he had been the news, for the last three days. Someone shoot this man holding him! Someone!

  Everyone was too busy saving their own hides.

  It was quite pathetic. Of course, no one had cared about him. It was Rudi and Pakistan they cared about, and the idea that they had been duped and made to look like fools. Some dumbass TV producer wasn’t the story. He never would be. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t prime time. Some people never are. Like me. But I knew it. I was at peace with it. He wasn’t.

  And that was the real tragedy of Shashank Oberoi.

  That and being a prick.

  I pushed him in front of me. We jumped and ducked past janitors and peons until we reached the main mass of the crowd spilling out onto the road.

  The crowd whirled around us, pressed into us, made me lose my breath, squeezed my andas, my chest, my everything. One arm was stuck fast around Oberoi. The other was pinned uselessly at my side. I was reminded of Karkardooma, of the sweat, the feeling of being crushed by your fellow man, not emotionally, like in our families, but actually fucking crushed to death by some obese chutiya sweatcloth civil servant with bad breath and erectile dysfunction.

  I finally caught sight of Bhatnagar parked up ahead, and pushed Oberoi in the right direction.

  Bhatnagar threw me a parental I-knew-you-could-do-it-when-you-were-pushed look, and helped me shove Oberoi into the back of her car.

  I heard the crunch of knees breaking, children wailing, rickshaws collapsing, stalls being overturned as people ran, sirens, Bhatnagar trying desperately to move people out of the way.

  “Are you okay?” she shouted from the front.

  “Very good, Anju! Just drive, please!” Oberoi was kicking at me and screaming. I gave him a few back, and thrust a dirty washcloth into his mouth to stop the noise.

  We were soon racing to the studio, our siren clearing the traffic ahead of us. Bhatnagar drove like crazy, mowing through intersections, grazing rickshaw drivers, until she realized what she was doing and slowed, her teeth gritted in concentration, her eyes distant, breathing loud and hard, thumbs dancing with a mad rhythm on the steering wheel.

  I kept my head down and prayed that Rudi and Priya were okay.

  I had survived so far. How much further was up to the gods.

  Twenty

  We got to the TV studio. How, I don’t know, but we did.

  At the gate, the guards, the very same who a few days before had so failed in their duty, their expressions still much chastened after their lack of success in catching the Pakistani agent, bombarded Bhatnagar with questions.

  “I’m a senior investigator from the Central Bureau,” she said. “Here to get to the bottom of the matter.”

  “Ma’am, we have to do a thorough sweep,” said a turbaned guard with a wounded expression. “Ma’am, we have had a little trouble—”

  “Does it look like I care?” said Bhatnagar in her best American. She had her sunglasses on, and stayed very silent. The guards started to panic, their bravado broke, and
they let us through.

  My finger stump throbbed with pain and excitement.

  “Damn guards,” Bhatnagar said from up front. “Like everyone in this country, sticking their noses in your business. My bosses. My family. Everyone.”

  “Isn’t that the truth, ma’am?” I said.

  We parked at the back again, next to Bhatnagar’s Lexus. Bhatnagar moved ahead and checked the corridors were empty. I pushed Oberoi and he stumbled forward.

  “Back home,” I told him.

  Wasn’t it just our luck that the place was entirely empty?

  We walked to the broadcast room, where we found Priya at a computer figuring out the details of how exactly we were going to make this go off without getting killed.

  She was always the smartest of all of us, always on the case.

  I pulled out Oberoi’s gag.

  “Well,” he spat, “all the fucking traitors in the same room. I’m going to get you. All of you, especially you,” he said, shouting at Priya’s back. “I gave you a chance. You’d be nothing without me.”

  I grabbed the back of his shirt.

  “Fucked her, eh?” he said, his mouth showing too many perfectly capped teeth. “I fucked her, the first week. She is very clingy, I warn you.”

  “You asshole,” I said, and without thinking, I punched him with my damaged hand. I swore with pain. I kept going. No one stopped me, not even Priya. Maybe once upon a time she would have objected to violence, but that was before she had had the ill fortune to meet me.

  I dealt with Oberoi. I was happy. I was proud of myself.

  When I was done, he sobbed. He wept. He crawled across the carpet, trying to hide under a desk. He begged for his life. Did he honestly think I would kill him? Who did he think I was? Him?

  What a story he wove.

  The old Indian one. He’d done it for his children.

  “They will never have a future in this corrupt country. I have to make money to get them out. My salary was nothing. You got hundreds of millions, Rudi, and I got nothing.” He spat blood at regular intervals. The makeup women would have to work extra hard to get him ready for his starring role. “All my classmates are crorepatis, and me? I don’t have two paise to rub together.”

  “Your Instagram says otherwise,” said Rudi.

  “All false, all false! Rented houses, cars, lies! Our backers wanted to fire me. Every day they said, cut your overheads, Shashank, cut your prizes, Shashank. How I fought, how I fought. I gave money to the poor, that was my job. I was not a TV producer, I was a social entrepreneur.” He went on. I stopped listening.

  Oberoi was one of those men who became less impressive the more you talked to him. Wealth, taste, forcefulness, hair, teeth. But slowly you saw there was nothing there, and one day you were amazed you had ever found anything worthy about him at all and wondered at your own stupidity.

  He spent the morning under the desk, chin red with blood, his expression blank, no longer a danger to anyone. We all went out onto the floor of the studio because we couldn’t stand being in his sniveling presence.

  I walked over to Rudi. He was preparing his lines. He had printed them out and was memorizing them, practicing his gestures, his pauses, the faces he would have to make.

  “Broadcast of a lifetime coming up, eh?” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “Absolutely, my friend. Maybe you could give what I have written a look, clear up any mistakes,” he said, holding out his script.

  “No need,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve done a good job, Rudi.”

  I left him with a touch on the shoulder.

  Priya spent the afternoon working on Oberoi’s computer in his office. She printed out screenshots of everything incriminating. She’d found a bunch of burner phones, all unlocked, in his desk.

  “He didn’t even try to hide anything,” she said. “He just thought he could fuck you and no one would realize.”

  “Well, if it had not been for my quick thinking and charm . . .” I said, and kissed her.

  We brought Oberoi out from his home under the desk. It was a shame. It suited him. We put him to work, hunched over a telephone in the control room, ringing all the staff we’d need for our impromptu broadcast. He pretended he had important news, that he was starting production of a new show. They should have known he was lying—his voice was so pleasant, so many gilded and honeyed pleases and thank-yous.

  He was just getting them in for a few hours, their jobs were going to be renewed, it was all going to be okay. They hadn’t seen him for a few days? What was this about Pakistani agents? Nothing! All would be explained when they turned up at five.

  We would be on air at seven.

  All we had to do was hijack the broadcast.

  Four technicians, one room, one door. Bhatnagar would do the barricading. We might get ten minutes if we were lucky, before someone at the channel’s main production building in central Delhi figured out how to take our pirate broadcast down.

  Our show would look like shit, but we didn’t need music or lights or an audience, we just needed to get our message out and hope that India stopped rioting, stopped stuffing their mouths with chole bhature and saffron horseshit, and believed us.

  “We are putting these people, your colleagues, in some danger,” said Bhatnagar before we began, a general in jeans, “so our first priority will be their safety, and to get them out in case of any emergencies. They come first.”

  We nodded. We were all serious, for the first time ever, it felt.

  They started coming in at five, our hapless guests, a parade of boredom turned to surprise when Bhatnagar and I grabbed them one by one and led them into Rudi’s dressing room to be told what was going to happen. Rudi handed out food and drink, tried to explain the situation, and confiscated their phones.

  Call-me-Nik and call-me-Sid looked like stunned sheep, spit leaking out of their mouths.

  “Really?” they breathed. “Really? Really, dude?” they asked.

  “Yes, dude,” said Rudi.

  We had ten of them, cameramen, video people, one harassed makeup lady who kept weeping about her children. “They deserve to grow up with a mother. You are bad people, very bad people,” she wailed. “I cannot believe I gave you my homemade murukku.”

  Rudi walked between them, attempting to give them pep talks. He looked exhausted, nervous, upset.

  “Everyone really hates me,” he said quietly when I turned up to the control room an hour later with snacks from the vending machine. I had been guarding the door between our section of the studio and the rest of it. The place was mostly deserted, apart from Bhatnagar out in the satellite room. “They were all just pretending to be nice because I was the boss.”

  “Arrey, boss,” I said. “Pretend is such a cruel word.”

  “Shit,” he said, “if we don’t get viciously murdered in the next few days, I am going to have to be nicer to people.” He gave a vigorous thumbs-up to the passing call-me-Sid.

  It was all going well. Thirty minutes to the broadcast. Priya was busy scanning documents into the computer. Call-me-Nik was making graphics on Photoshop and weeping about how he should have applied to law school in North Carolina instead of coming back to the godforsaken mother country.

  On the news channels, there was nothing about Delhi International Studios. We might be able to pull it off.

  At five minutes to seven, we were all in position. On our monitors, the announcer said a repeat of Children Dance Dhamaka was about to start, then the screen went to black and he apologized for the technical difficulties.

  Bhatnagar had managed to stop the repeat. My phone rang. “Ready to go,” she said. I tapped a grim-faced technician in front of me, who flipped a switch. The monitor went white, and suddenly Rudi appeared on it, standing in front of a green screen.

  “People of India,” he said seriously, “I have been a victim of a conspiracy enacted by our former producer, Shashank Oberoi, to kidnap us for money. These lies about fraud and Pakistani spies are just tha
t, lies! I will now tell you the truth.”

  On the green screen flashed graphics, overlays, graphs. Pretty professional for two hours’ work at lathi-point.

  Rudi was great. He radiated sincerity, and that old housewife-melting charm. His face a little gaunt, the softness around the edges gone. He looked good. A perfect little son in the shit, begging his mother for help. Women probably sat weeping in their living rooms, calling their friends to tell them to get their husbands to switch off the cricket and start watching channel 114. That kid was on it, Rudi, and he was telling the craziest story you’d ever heard, that little sweetheart, didn’t you just want to smother him to death, Maneka?

  Real honesty bores people, but honesty that’s just on the line between truth and falsehood? The world is built on it.

  Rudi laid out our case beautifully. He stuttered a bit, and his hands shook, but he said everything that needed to be said. He was good.

  We were so close. He was about to really turn on the emotion for the final push, and I was shouting, “Nearly there, boss, nearly there, perfect” at the monitor.

  Unfortunately, the show came to an end after six minutes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of India, I, Rudraksh Saxena, the Brain of Bharat, beg you to believe me. I have always told the truth. I have done the best I could with my limited tal—”

  And then the channel feed went dark.

  Our transmission had been blocked.

  “Do something!” I heard in my ear as Bhatnagar shouted at the technicians. Priya was a blur of action, scrolling through the computers, leafing through technical manuals, rooting through servers and code, looking for a way to restore the broadcast.

  “Just one more minute,” said Rudi, sighing in front of the cameras. “That’s all I needed. I had them. I had them.”

  There was nothing we could do.

  It was all over.

  Rudi sat on the floor. He was empty. Priya shut her computer and placed her hands in mine.

  “I have no idea what comes next,” she said.

  Then we heard the loudspeakers.

  I raced out to the studio’s reception.