by Rahul Raina
In my dreams, I thought of money and what I’d do with it. Kebabs. A blowout meal at Moti Mahal. Everything dripping with ghee. An air conditioner. A new motorbike. A few dates, splurging at some Connaught Place restaurant and failing to get into the sensible polyester underwear of a junior relationship manager at a multinational.
I saved my money. Sent it straight to the bank like an idiot, an A-grade vella. Saving for what? Could have made a fortune in construction or China or Bitcoin, said Sumit, “But I guess you just don’t have it. So many of you don’t.”
What can I do? I am a follower of laws. I am careful. I plan for the future. Or I used to.
My life wasn’t all work, though.
I went to the temple every day. Force of habit, force of slaps. Made sure to give twenty rupees; not much, but I had no ulterior motives and no greasy wishes, so it counted ten times extra. The metro ride into central Delhi was a dahi Bhalla of men leaking flop sweat and giving off looks of frustrated sexual longing for perfumed young women, even at five in the morning when you should be well girded against such thoughts by your wife’s cooking.
I always went to the gurdwara too. Popped over, the British would say, as the late-dawn sun glinted off the golden dome of the Bangla Sahib, the smell of ghee and coriander making you choke as ten thousand servings of daal and gobi and chapatis were prepared by grunting Sardarjis dripping with effort.
Then a metro ride into Old Delhi, if I felt like it. I went past the Kabutar Market, where they sold thousands of multicolored budgerigars, cages stacked up, all shitting upon each other. Who bought them, where they ended up, no one had any idea. And not just birds, of course. Cows, goats, rows and rows of motorcycle helmets embalmed in plastic, a dozen shops selling the exact same Chinese suitcases, barks and ambers and potions and pastes from central Asia that could cure any ailment, girls in alleyways who beckoned you on to doom and destruction. Very close to what one finds in a mall, really.
I walked around a little, watched the Australian tourists counting their money in public—can you believe?—and then came to the church, the one by Chandni Chowk, quieter than anywhere else in Delhi. Most of the Christians had run away long ago, realized that they’d get less discrimination in the West. All that were left were the elderly, a superannuated wrinkled priest, the stink of mold hanging around him, a nun with thick glasses and worn rosary beads who reminded me of someone I had known long ago, the dream of the Christian Raj reduced to wasted muscle and worn bone.
I even did the Jama Masjid once a week. Educational consultants can do with all the goodwill they can get. Never on Fridays, when the place would be filled with twenty thousand wails to Allah about daughters and sons corrupted by modernity and whatever the saffrons were planning next (the young men who were the devout soldiers of our internationally popular government: maybe a pogrom, or a sterilization drive, or a lynching by those who thought every Muslim was trying to corrupt their sweet little girls through the love jihad). You’d go on a Monday or a Tuesday maybe, when little huddles of hungry-eyed men would fall silent if you passed within a dozen paces.
I’d say hello to my favorite beggar, Ram, who sat, legs and arms unmoving, just outside the Kasturba Hospital. I’d drop him a note of any denomination, and he’d say, in his beautiful deep voice, as if he had never seen me before, “Young man, you are going places! I was, too, when I was flying jet fighters in the ’71 war,” and then tell a long story of how he outclassed the Pakistanis in their American F-104s, and I always gave a little more, even though it was bullshit.
I’m not all charity and selfless do-gooding, of course. I needed him. I’ve lost my Old Delhi ways. I need my eye on the street now that I am middle class. This was how I kept in touch with things, the way I kept my feet on the ground. Home is home, I am who I am.
“Any information?” I’d ask, and his cunning eyes scanned the length of the road, watching the silvering on the veil of the young housewife, noticing the whisper of rust on the bottom of the coconut seller’s bicycle, and the play of light on the faces of the passersby.
“Not a single bloody thing,” he’d say.
I kept him on, for appearances. Maybe one day he’d be useful.
Then the street children clustered round him and pretended to be planes and they grabbed at my trousers for money and I gave it to them and tried to stop them fighting each other for it afterward.
Then breakfast, a mutton pastry in a café, and home to study for eighteen more hours.
Old Delhi seems real in a way that New Delhi doesn’t. It is sedate, it is hidden, it is precapitalist. But it is all a sham. Depending on who you ask, Delhi is eight cities, each conqueror building on the corpse of the last; or two, the rich and the poor, as the Westerners say; or one, where all of us live arse cheek to arse cheek; or thirty million, once you factor in the underpass dwellers, victims of the famines in Bihar that the government says don’t happen.
Me? I say Delhi doesn’t exist at all, rich, poor, old, new, Mughal, British, Indian—it’s all just money in, money out, buildings up, metro down, fingers off, fingers on. It’s a mirage. It’s a bundle of streets and blocks and enclaves that happen to exist next to each other.
The markets. The cafés. Chandni bloody Chowk. These were not the haunts of my youth. I only saw these places once I’d left the tea stall. I never had free time before. Get up, temple, haul the stall out, make the tea, listen to customers complaining about the wait, their weight, their marriages, their children, go home, sleep. On a free day, a blessed free day, maybe go to school, chase dogs, feel miserable. That was my life.
All because of tea.
I cannot stand the stuff. It gives me headaches and palpitations like Indian American parents get when they hear their kid is dating a black girl. I find it difficult to socialize with the colleagues I have in this wonderful business. They drink nothing but tea. Slurping it, spitting it, inhaling it as fast as possible, like it’s a sport. Not that they’re worth talking to about most things, sons of whoresons, but they leak exam papers like nobody’s business, and you never know what else you’ll find out: which policeman to avoid or which exam center is doing an anti-corruption drive. It is one of those thin spots in the earth’s crust, where all the heat comes gushing out of the underworld.
So once in a while I ventured over there, to the alleys of teahouses in the warrens behind Karkardooma, where every scandal-fleeing ex-teacher in the world has congregated.
East Delhi: the place looks like a gray smear on Google Maps, with little sunburned parks where the fountains have run dry since 1994 and no cricket game ever follows the white man’s laws, and it is no better from the ground.
East Delhi, most polluted place in the world, as the New York Times or the WHO will tell you, so polluted that it goes off their puny little three-figure scales and breaks their equipment. Pollution I can stand. It’s the stink of spices and cow’s milk boiled together, the smells of my childhood, that I hold my nose against so that I can barter and trade.
East Delhi, the place I call my home.
Let me describe the man there I knew best, if only because I got to beat him later.
He was one to watch out for, was Sumit. A shark. Thin, razor-sharp cheekbones, hungry eyes, an entrepreneur, a world-beater in waiting, one of him in every tea stall, in every back room in every shop in India.
You smelled the perfume first. Like grapefruit left too long in the heat, and starting to go soft and brown with rot.
“Still ordering wigs, huh, Ramesh?” he laughed when I came in, as he did every time.
I had ventured over that day to ask some questions about the government’s new exam security proposals, and to keep my ear to the ground in the fast-moving world of educational impersonation. Western professionals go on hotel mini-breaks. I went to Sumit.
“Huh, Ramesh?” said one of Sumit’s chamchas, his hangers-on. They wore muscle shirts with the sleeves cut off, just like their lord and master. They always had large transparent bottles in front
of them, full of creatine or some other Western concoction. I’d seen Sumit’s selfies. Working out in a mirror-walled gym in Vaishali built in some family’s basement, where all the talk all the time was of Marvel actor workouts and hair-loss supplements. His social media was workout selfies and idiotic phrases: “Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail,” “A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step,” the stuff you start saying when you hit forty and the girls start calling you Uncle.
And they all smelled of that bloody perfume, like a giant preening cloud with hair-gelled edges.
Sumit noticed me sniffing. “Paco Rabanne. You want to buy some?” he said, and somebody pressed a bottle into his hand out of nowhere.
I rolled my eyes.
“Business doing well lately, brother?” he asked. “You should come work for me, Ramesh.”
“Why? You in trouble? Need someone to run the organization for you? Not making enough money from counterfeit perfumes?”
“Ha! Ramesh, Ramesh, Ramesh,” he said. “Always with the comedy.”
Sumit looked exceedingly proud of himself, as always. He basked in self-satisfaction. He knew exactly who to grease, which sub-inspector wouldn’t ask questions, which indebted civil servant would leak the syllabus, which exam marker could be gotten to. He faked driving exams, entrance exams, job interviews. He would probably start faking Tinder profiles next, for all the romantically uninclined of Delhi, the moped Romeos, the fuckless hair-oiled swathes of men who gathered in each coffee shop and street market.
He collected his hangers-on, the ones who’d failed their government exams, where ten thousand people apply to get one place as a clerk in the works department or a ticket inspector or a sewer cleaner, and drifted out into our world. They were clever, but one in ten thousand? So now they took exams for eighteen-year-olds, ones they could do in their sleep.
They modeled themselves on Sumit, doing all the outside things so the inside would follow, like how our government builds bullet trains in the hope that we’ll become like Japan.
A phone call would come in and Sumit would too loudly answer, “Only twenty thousand, Uncle? I usually work in much larger quantities than that,” and they would all whistle at his prowess and his imported cigarettes.
He continued to insult me at a breakneck pace. “I can never understand, Ramesh, how you run your little business. You are so stuck in the past. Do you even have a Twitter account? Join me, and you could make fifty thousand a month, easy.”
“Fifty thousand!” said an underling.
I was a little annoyed at all this self-congratulation.
“Fifty thousand, ha! I’ve got these pricks in Green Park paying me one point three million. So you can take that and your jokes about wigs and stick them up your fucking lund.”
“I know powerful men. Money men. Men who can snap their fingers and destroy your whole life.” Sumit composed himself before he started to rant, like he’d been reading a black-market copy of a book on mindfulness.
“Sumit, a kebabchi could destroy my life with a rotten mutton galouti. I know thousands of them.”
“I am trying to be nice here,” Sumit said.
“I don’t need your niceness, Sumit. How is it, I wonder, faking driver’s licenses for thirty thousand Gandhis a go? But it’s all these people to order about that you enjoy, isn’t it?”
The underling winced. His little eyes took in Sumit’s Casio, his jeans, his Samsung. He started to dream. Big trouble. Imagine surrounding yourself with so many desperate people. What a terrible business model.
“How many clients did you have last year? Two. Next? Two. You have no ambition, Ramesh. Here you are, year after year, doing the same thing. No matter the money you make, you’ll always be small. All those brains God somehow gave you, and what have you done with them?”
“One point three million Gandhis. Pays better than all those fake ration cards you do. Now, Sumit,” I said, adopting a more professional demeanor, “I came to ask about the new security checks the government has been talking about. Just tell me what to expect, O Grand and Mighty Assistant Undersecretary Knower.”
“Only a fool like you would take the government seriously, Ramesh bhai. Security checks? Do you think they have the time to care?”
We spent a little more time insulting each other, trying to draw out information, deals. It was the only way we could communicate.
There were hundreds of thousands of men like us, young and carefree, old and broken, trying to make it, horse-trading, knifing, trying it on, in any one of ten thousand tea shops across east Delhi.
He was stupid, young Sumit. Thought having hundreds of clients was some genius move. Thought getting involved with gangsters and goondas was smart. I knew better. The more clients, the more trouble. The more young, hungry men around you, the more trouble. I was independent, I was high quality, and I was happy with my life.
Why I carried on living in Delhi, I didn’t know. I spent my whole life complaining about it, the bitch heat, the bitch sweat, the bitch traffic, and never did anything about it. I should thank Rudi for changing that, at least.
Delhi isn’t saffron. Delhi isn’t spice. Delhi is sweat.
Eat. Work. Talk shit when I got bored. Those were my days before Rudi and I struck it rich, the days when I had all my fingers, and was not hated by every housewife and househusband for two thousand miles.
Until the exam day, I worked. I bled for that kid. I worked as hard as every Indian parent claims they did in the 1970s, when there was only one channel on TV, when they had to walk five hours each day to school, dodging landmines and pedophiles, when there were no snowflakes and millennials crowding the WhatsApp group chat of their imagination.
Every day I ate junk, chanas and bhel puris and golgappas from the hawkers outside, and didn’t put on an ounce of weight. I argued at cafés about politics, the metro extension, traffic, the beggars from Bihar, exam questions, and, of course, the pollution. What other topic is there? Not even cricket gets talked about as much. I was mocked for my wigs and my affectations and my soft, gora, pampered clients.
I listened to film songs about moons and stars and destinies, and at night I bought imitation Levi’s for fifteen hundred rupees from Alibaba. No more the polyester shit of my youth! No more cast-off Barcelona shirts from some spoiled kid in England or Spain! I was assured my clothes came from the same factory in Chongqing, the very same!
And then I took the exam, and my whole life changed.
Three
I met the kid again, a week after our last meeting, to check in on some finer details, and this time the parents cornered me. They had been having second thoughts.
“You see . . .” said Mr. Saxena, and tailed off. He stroked his hairless chin, trying to make his silence seem wise instead of pathetic.
“Oh God, Vishal, get on with it,” said the wife. When she moved, I caught drifts of her perfume, expensive, roses and jasmine. She folded her arms and waited for her husband to do his socially ordained duty and tear into me.
His lips were fat like a Hollywood plastic surgeon’s. His eyes furtive, red, like my father’s, but without the yellow tinge to them. “So, uh, Rudr—Rudi, yes, sorry, thinks that you are not worth the money. We are thinking we are pay—yes, hum, yes, darling, I am getting to the—”
I stopped him right there.
“Sir,” I said, most pleasantly, really rolling out the word, lots of R, “sir, you knew what you were doing when you hired me. You are a man of taste, of discernment.” He was totally disarmed, like Pakistan after a war. “I was told about you by the Sharmas. Remember them? Their boy is in New York now. Thanks to me.”
Vishal Saxena’s resolve crumbled. Dreams of Manhattan filled his eyes. Hot dogs, Times Square, Gordon Gekko, women with enhanced breasts and reconstructed hymens. Mrs. Saxena, his wife, began to grumble.
“I know what I am doing,” I continued. “I am as tough as your parents were with you, and look how you turned out. This beautiful house. Your charming wife. I a
m using tried and tested methods. You have paid a fair price.”
I could have gone on. I could have extolled their interior furnishings. Their coffee table books of art and photography. The medieval temple carvings on their wall. How hard they both must have worked. How our children were becoming soft, no match for the Chinese. How they themselves had crawled to school, no doubt, for days, until their limbs had been stumps, how they had been beaten mercilessly and never made a sound, not like these children nowadays. But I’d done enough.
The husband deflated. Mrs. Saxena trembled, thunder before the rains, oh that look, how I knew it. “You bought a Hyundai? Your mother is staying for how long? Your bonus was canceled?”
“God fucking dammit, Vishal,” she said.
“Namita, he says that he is very cost effect—”
“Rudi said—”
They started arguing with each other, about career and life decisions, and that time someone slept with someone, how could you, Vishal? For God’s sake, Namita, it was only once, you were being a rea—
I slipped into the kid’s room.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, skin unwashed and dull with grease. “Have they fired you yet?”
“Not so fast, fat boy,” I said.
He gulped.
He had those glazed, blinking eyes. We Indians are the horniest people on the internet, as any comment section on any video will tell you. We crowd around women, we beg for attention, we will even ask nymphs in sixteenth-century frescoes for their phone numbers. Maybe we’re just needy. Maybe I’m just being overly negative about him, which is not uncommon for me.
But maybe, just maybe, we know that we desperately need our sperm to go into the waiting uteruses of our women, so that we may outbreed the Chinese, so we can swamp them with numbers, for gods help us, there is no other way we will win against them, and here is this feckless boy throwing his patriotic juices into tissues and toilets. Disgusting.
