How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  What else? Me?

  There’s no point even describing me. I was small and had big brown eyes. Today I’m larger and I have big brown eyes. Back then I wore seventh-hand jeans with holes in the crotch, and walked on plastic slippers around the edges of which my toes curled. Got it?

  My father and I lived in a one-room concrete shell, down an alley, then down another, and another, from the place the Western tour guides said was the real India, the one with piles of spices, women in mango-colored saris, men who smelled of hair oil and incense and dragged cows behind them, stately and fat; the one where the whites got out of their AC jeeps and said how overwhelmed they were by the sights and the sounds.

  This India, my India, smells like shit. It smells like a country that has gone off, all the dreams having curdled and clumped like rancid paneer. It smells like the inhabitants have drugged themselves with cannabis and alcohol and incense, and exist only to turn wheat and corn and rice into babies and shit. You drink, you gamble, you watch cricket and bet money you don’t have, you lynch Muslims, you beat your kids, and they grow up and do the same.

  Papa and I went to the temple every morning. I’ll give the limp little lund that. Always very religious, one of the only things I’ve made sure to inherit from him—well, now I go as often as I can.

  Every morning he rang the bell by the entrance of the temple (other parents would hoist their kids on their shoulders to do it—did mine?), and we removed our shoes and hoped they’d be there when we returned. Papa hawked a few paise into the collection box, a miserable amount even back then, before India was hit with inflation and McDonald’s and kids with American accents at the malls. A quick bow before the goddess, dark and triumphant as her tigers crushed the life out of demons and men that tried to look at her tits. I prayed for a farewell to slaps, for money and escape. Papa prayed for chai-related success, that he wouldn’t get syphilis, and that his only son might not be such a fucking dumbass when fully grown.

  At least we prayed for something real, something tangible. Better than the tens of millions of rupees people spend every day wishing for their kids to be good people and TED Talkers and have fulfilling marriages or other rich-people shit.

  Then the tea-selling began. Crack of dawn. Near the money-changers bilking the Western tourists by the Kashmere Gate. We wheeled our little tea stall, paint cracking and discolored, down narrow streets filled with polluted fog, distant nightwatchmen and milkmen and washermen shouting out like ghosts, advertising, threatening, joking.

  My father did the cycling, legs straining as we splashed across potholes, every muscle working in tandem, so he looked from skull to sole like one great machine that turned alcohol to money. I followed, trotting behind like a rabid dog chasing a bag of meat, looking up at the overhead power cables tangling and untwining, at the planes coming down to land at the airport. By the time we got to our designated place, worked out by my papa through subtle negotiation and some of those famous backhand slaps, I always had to scrape my legs of the muck that in a million years would be compressed to petroleum.

  We were right on the edge of Old Delhi, where the medieval gave way to the modern. On the road, impatient moustachioed men taking shortcuts zoomed past on Hero Hondas held together by tape and prayers. Women watched their purses and held their keys like knives to scratch any man who got too close. Children my age, five to a rickshaw, were carted to their schools, uniforms blue and gray and green, noses snotty, hair slicked back with oil, clutching plastic lunchboxes filled with chapatis and vegetarian curries made by their loving parents.

  That was their world, an India that seemed a century away from ours. That was all I saw of it, just a brief glimpse, twice a day. I would never be part of it.

  I was lower lower middle class. My father owned a business, it’s true, one I was set to inherit. We weren’t starving, we weren’t Dalits or homeless, but we were not going anywhere either. The great social movements passed us by. Independence, socialism, capitalism, everything was the same. My life was grinding spices for tea.

  Even now, a decade after that last day, when I told my father to go fuck himself, I can still remember the mixture. Three parts green cardamom, three parts fennel, two parts clove, two parts cassia, half part peppercorn, half part black cardamom. Ground every day, every hour, every mind-melting minute, fresh to order, by yours truly. Heaven help you if you made a mistake. You should know by now what the reward for that was.

  I had a stone that I used to pulverize my spices, far too big for a kid, fat and heavy and dark gray with little veins of white running through it like cellulite on a politician’s thighs. I spent my days hunched over behind the stall and beat those spices into dust, my back in painful little knots by the end of the day. At night I had nightmares that I would turn into a hunchback and tried, in the pitch black before my father woke, to stretch my back straight, reaching with hands and feet to China and Pakistan, like Westerners doing dawn-light Bikram yoga to solve their lumbar issues.

  “No shop-bought powders here, sir!” my father would shout. “All done fresh by my little runt of a boy down there. You, rat! Show the gentleman your muscles! Ha ha!” Sometimes a few insects, a little dirt, some spit found their way into the mixture, by accident, of course.

  My hate could have made India the world’s leader in renewable energy.

  “Hot chai! Fresh chai! Ginger chai for the ill! Milk chai for the depressed! Garam! Garam! All day, every day!” Papa shouted for hours on end, his voice never growing hoarse, singing out movie songs when business was good, praising the gods, praising India, talking about how the People’s Party would lose the next elections, how all our cricketers were fat and useless, doing his best to drown out his million competitors. I imagined they all had their own sons filled with hatred, and that one day we’d gang together and cut our fathers’ throats, and turn the buffalo milk red and drink deep of the patricide chai.

  Every day Papa stood behind his discolored copper pot, the Bunsen flame warming his balls, boiling the milk, watered down just enough that no one could tell. I still cannot stand the smell of scalded fat, nor the sight of milk froth erupting. I handed him bashed, broken, wretched spices at five-minute intervals. I carefully passed over the sealed jar of granulated sugar, clumped by moisture—slap, slap, too slow, “You dropped it, the bugs will get in now!”—sucralose for the newly corpulent rich, cups, mugs, jugs, the various tea mixtures . . .

  We had six. Each jar had stuck on it a little newspaper picture of the god or goddess responsible for its auspices. One promised you wealth, another health, another many boys to be produced from your loins, another love, affection, womanly favors from that plump secretary at the front desk who you wanted to fuck on the side. You’ve already guessed they all came from the same pot. To the love chai we added some fake rose petals just for some color. We charged 50 percent extra. Fifteen rupees a cup! Can you imagine? Daylight robbery! Nobody ever ordered it, but even so! Better us, though, better our little harmless fraud, than the Chinese cutting up tigers to make Viagra tea or cutting up farmers to steal their corneas.

  Every day, dawn to dusk, stuck behind the stall. I could have been out exploring Old Delhi, running through shadowed alleyways and abandoned havelis, thick walls no match for British cannon, stealing moldy books from the market, overhearing the plots of robbers and thieves and hijras, learning mystical secrets in verse from dehydrated-looking Sufis, betting grubby rupees on cat and dog and rooster and men fights, and instead there I was pounding spices all day long, and getting beaten.

  At least my fingers smelled like the potpourri you get in all the finest houses nowadays, Fantasy Orient or Ethnic Adventure they are always called. That was something.

  Some days I had a holiday. Not one of our government-mandated multicultural holidays, but one of the days Papa got drunk and I failed to rouse him. You had to shove him hard, try as hard as you could—a whole day of work missed because you couldn’t wake him up? Oh you would get it extra hard then.


  On those days, I went to school. I learned about the world outside Delhi. I learned to read and write. I was a good little boy. I lost myself in books. A charity could have taken a photo of me and put me on their posters, the ones where knock-kneed children have their problems disappear and are “utterly transported from their miserable lives” because they read four pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

  Business was good, but where the money went to, I don’t know. I never had a pot to piss in, and my papa certainly didn’t. The front doors of his enemies’ or loan sharks’ houses were his preferred commode, or on their faces, he said, when at night he was drunk and the boasting began, about women charmed and necks broken in his glorious youth.

  He did plenty of womanizing. He did nothing around the house. Who did my laundry? Where did we get soap from? Food? I rarely saw my father cook. Which housewife was charmed? Which working girl gave her evening meal to us?

  Where was he born? I don’t know.

  What’s become of him? You’ll see.

  No television. Every two-paisa family had something black and white, at least, but not him. Just a radio that squawked cricket scores so he could bet. Tendulkar gets out, Ramesh gets beaten. Sehwag gets out, Ramesh gets beaten. Dravid, he never got out. I liked him.

  No kitchen. Just a little gas burner, on which my father would deign to cook chapatis when the feeling took him, which mostly happened to be when a woman was around.

  The cheapest, meanest room he could find.

  It was 2005, but we could have been living a century earlier. In 2005, the Americans would have been sitting in their Floridian subprime housing masturbating to Jessica Alba, not realizing the future was going to be black and brown and yellow. Even a few kilometers from where we lived, idiot Indian teenagers would have had iPods and listened to Blink-182, but what did we do?

  Nothing. We had no money. Not starving, no, but . . . What a life that was. Never an idle moment. Always doing something: buying tea, selling tea, moping, crying, pounding, living a life that would never lead anywhere—my nightmare was that I would literally become my father, my hand clawing up like his, my chest sprouting with dark hairs like his, my eyes and face and brain turning into his. Maybe I would have. I would be like him today, angry and nothing and poor . . .

  But this isn’t a story about poverty. This is a story about wealth.

  Two

  Where were we? Oh yes, I was committing yet another year of examinations fraud. Little did I know Rudi was going to be the client who changed my life.

  The second meeting with the kid was no better. He was pissed off that I had not brought pizza. I was pissed off that I was getting so little money. (One point three million Gandhis and I was annoyed! My God, you could buy whole Bihari villages for that, mothers and fathers and little boys and girls, and do whatever you wanted with them, and there were probably people who did.)

  Ten years before, I would have been the kid’s tutor. We would have matured with each other, grown to recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses and all sorts of Western nonsense. I would have ruffled his hair when he brought me news of his academic exploits. He would have given me flowers and chocolates.

  Now I was pretending to be him. That’s what they mean by progress, I think.

  We started with his wardrobe. Just a little con, telling the parents that every detail mattered: “Do you want a minor thing like wearing the wrong clothes at the exam to cause trouble?” It got you a few more thousand rupees at the end of the day in expenses, clothes, shoes. Nobody ever checked clothes, but the parents would swallow anything. All my clothes had memories, of a job well done, of a child sent on to a better life, of another set of greedy parents conned out of a few precious paise. When the results came out, the family were so grateful that for a few days you could make them sign off on any receipt, and you had maybe a week before they started getting avaricious again, for the car, the house, the summer internship at Google.

  Rudraksh. Rudi. How do I describe him? Before the money, before the Armani suits, before the whitening-cream adverts and the diet advisers straining against the junk food and coke bloat?

  Totally unremarkable face. Very north Indian face. Uttar Pradesh face. Hundred-million-of-you-in-villages face. No-matches-on-Tinder face. Rejected-for-arranged-marriage-after-first-meeting face. Oily in the T-zone. Probably sticky hands, but thankfully I always avoided touching them. Only sport played—table tennis. Badminton too athletic. Street snacks after school, stomach and testicles and blood full of golgappas and raj kachoris. Parents buying diet books for Diwali.

  His hair was the usual long, greasy, unkempt mop of any self-disrespecting rich teenager. If I had still been doing wigs, it would have been easy. I kept a dozen of them in different lengths, all real hair, never shampooed or treated with soap, fifteen thousand rupees each. I had never asked where the seller, a worried-looking man in a flea-bitten shop in east Delhi, got them from.

  But these days I kept the disguises for the exams simple. I’d stopped hamming it up. I had gotten a reputation. People thought I was being dramatic, pretending to be a film star. My fellow educational consultants rattled off dramatic seventies movie dialogues whenever I came near.

  Rudi had spent his teenage years slacking off. Too much gaming. Too much frenzied midnight masturbation. When you asked him what he’d been studying, he’d sigh. If anything, he was even more annoying back then, before the fame, the money, the women, before he was Mister Number One, the Brain of Bharat, the Man Who Knows, the Nawab of Knowledge, because back then he was just another middle-class Indian kid, and they can drive you to suicide with one roll of their eyes.

  First I had to spend three days with him, to figure out what he knew.

  Those three days were torture. We went through his textbooks, barely opened, spines still uncracked, free of the usual Indian marks of virulent underlining and ink-run from tears and food stains from midnight cramming.

  Every five minutes I had to tell him to pay attention to my questions about his work, about his syllabus, anything I didn’t understand.

  “Your parents are paying good money for this,” I’d said, which had worked with kids five years ago, but he just moaned and kept flicking through his phone, the GIFs and YouTube dreck reflected against his grimy spectacles.

  He had a guitar in the corner of his room that looked like it had never been touched, resting against the wall of the dark-colored wardrobe that you find in every Delhi bedroom, rich or poor, full of old shawls, moth-eaten wedding dresses, out-of-fashion salwar kameezes, and hard-shell suitcases from 1985 that no one wants to throw away, because however much money you have, Indian history has taught us that everything can turn to shit at any moment, and you might have to run away. Or maybe we’re cheap. I don’t know.

  Piles of dusty Western DVDs crowded the shelves, crap some relative had probably hauled over from Canada back when that had been impressive, something you could show off to your neighbors, how life was so wonderful for our family in Amrika. That was before social media, when we could all see how stupid the Americans actually were, in real time.

  Rudi was sweating heavily, and all he was doing was answering questions. There was a dark stain across his breasts. The fan, roaring above us at decapitation speed, did nothing but move hot air around. A new air conditioner rested on the ground, uninstalled no doubt due to some arcane labor dispute.

  “Arrey yaar,” he would say when my questioning became too much, or my displeasure showed. “Stop busting my balls, man. You know how much work this is? Dude, just give me a break.”

  Busting balls? Dude? He should show some respect to his elders. Only by about five years, but still. I was twenty-four and deserved respect. How our morals had eroded since the advent of smartphones.

  Then he went back to nose-picking, muttering, surfing for music videos and girls he thought had shown too much skin on Instagram.

  “Look at her,” he’d say, in horror and delight, when he found some friend of a friend
doing those duck lips on a Thai beach. “So immodest!”

  It was extremely clear he had never touched or talked to a woman.

  The Hanuman-sized mountain of work slowly came into focus. The little shit hadn’t done any bloody studying at all. He couldn’t tell me anything, couldn’t give me any help whatsoever.

  The parents had described him as “a good boy who needs help” and don’t I know a lie the size of “the British are only setting up a trading post” when I see one. The prick was brain dead, a duffer, and whatever else Indian parents called their kids in films. He loafed around listening to Nirvana and emo music and didn’t have the balls to take up marijuana or Marxism like any self-respecting kid would have in his situation. I had never felt the urge to smack one of my clients more.

  I should have gone into yoga. Just spout mystic bullshit about chakras, book some rooms in a farmhouse outside of Delhi, hire a call-center type to be the receptionist, put up some just-bad-enough Web 1.0 site to lure in the suckers with my humility and lack of modern know-how, and away you go. White people’s money up to here! They get diarrhea, you just tell them it’s part of the process of enlightenment and letting go of the self.

  After those first three days, the real work began. I got to studying. I had four weeks to prepare. Just enough time.

  I lost myself in the books, as I always did. Hours went by. I remembered everything I read, as if it was burned into my eyes like the owner’s brand into a street cow.

  Back in my apartment, I’d lie back for a rest, let the fan whip dust and SO2 across my face, sleep for three dreamless hours, and carry on, powered by coffee, Thums Up, and aloo parathas smeared with thunderously hot achaar from the stalls outside.

  I fought an endless battle against mold and falling paint. I did the cleaning myself—just because I was a self-made middle-class businessman didn’t mean I was going to lose my humility and get someone else to do it. The universal Indian floor, speckled stone, collected dirt like it was going out of fashion. The extractor fan in my bathroom was broken, so the whole place smelled of moisture and rot, mixed in with my cheap deodorant and weapons-grade bleaching toothpaste.