by Rahul Raina
I held my breath.
I went in.
“Pizza here, sir, pizza, sir, watch out, watch out, sir!”
Invisible.
Unremarked.
Beautiful.
But no—my way was barred.
I was unfazed. Let it never be said I have panicked in unplanned situations.
A short, muscular man with graying hair, body gone to seed, no doubt many amateur impromptu wrestling championships in his past, held out a thick arm, and said, “ID, sir.”
“Pizza delivery, sir.”
“Show me app details and delivery code, sir.”
So we were in that most Indian of situations, the passive-aggressive sir-off.
“What is your job, sir?” I asked.
“I am the independent security consultant hired by the happy family to ensure safety at this event, sir,” he said.
There it was. Wonderful. Someone just like me. Someone you could do business with.
“How much?” I said. “Sir?” The ping of recognition went off in his brain.
He measured my worth, my desperation, and more important, how much of a cut he could get of whatever I was planning.
“Two thousand, sir,” he said, with a knowing smile. I pulled out the money, and the arm was lowered.
“Sir,” we both said, and nodded warmly at each other.
Inside the door there was a shoal of shoes, of worn Chinese trainers, of sweat-stained sandals. Strange, the Saxenas hadn’t made me take mine off when I’d come before. They had suddenly become extremely pious.
Their living room was full of wires and surly cameramen. A harried female servant rushed from person to person, saving carpets from stains of imli sauce, sweeping up crumbs, picking up paper plates of samosa waste, admonishing middle-aged men for scuffing walnut side tables.
There were boxes of sweets, samosas, chocolates, and kebabs piled high on every flat surface, bunches of flowers covered in glitter, hundreds of cards, marriage proposals, advertising deals, dozens of little red envelopes of cash lying around, with the one-rupee coin studded on the outside for good luck. I helped myself to some, stuffing them inside the pizza box. The money was mine after all. No one noticed.
And in the center of it all, the man of the hour himself. Clad in a new gray suit, Armani I found out later, wearing chic leather loafers with those idiot tassels. He was being interviewed by some posh journalist, all beautiful vowels and Khan Market kurta and scarlet nail polish.
At least he had the sense to go pale when he saw me. Once in a while a man wants to be feared.
Mr. Saxena was stuck to him like a limpet. A producer was setting up a TV camera. Rudi kept looking at his father like a dying fish, and then at me. He tried to nod in my direction. He looked as if he was having a fit, the kind the rich fake to get out of jury duty. Mr. Saxena finally realized I was there. His first look was of total defeat. He did nothing, while his son kept jerking at him to get me out of there.
Mrs. Saxena was standing on the other side of the room, being asked questions from a hundred directions, busier than our civil servants are in January editing government websites to remove any mention of last year’s targets, busier than the events planner for the billionaire’s son’s London statement wedding, the one where Mariah Carey gets paid a hundred million untaxed Gandhis to sing for fifteen minutes.
Her answers for one person dripped into another’s. “Yes, he is thinking of Stanford, no, this dress is just a little something from Ritu Kumar, yes, his father has a master’s from Western Kentucky State, no, I am not doing the 5:2, I am just naturally slim.”
It looked exhausting.
Hauling bricks for a living, I can understand. Driving buses, making tea, yes. But telling lies, being pleasant, making false smiles, all day? I do not know how the rich do it.
The TV producer waved at Rudi, and the interview began. The woman asked him some questions about studying. Rudi twitched his way through them, never meeting the gaze of the camera.
“What about your parents?” the woman asked. “What part have they played in your success?”
And then something strange happened. His face took on a strange new look. He stopped slouching. He started to smile. On the TV monitor, behind the hair, the glasses, there was something new there.
He looked straight at the camera.
“I owe them everything,” he said. “Everything I am today is because of them. I honor them every day, in all that I do. Our country is built on the strength of our parents.” He smiled sugar sweet at the camera. “Am I speaking to the youth of India, Ashwini?” he asked.
“You’re speaking to everyone,” she said.
He nodded. He smiled again, but his eyes were still and unwavering. “Work as hard as you can. Then work harder. Listen to your elders. Never complain. They know best. Hold them close to you. They are wise beyond their years. Stand straight like your father, and be steadfast like your mother. That is all I have to say.”
A lot of children were going to get beaten that night.
“Rudi, thank you,” said the woman. “Who knew that someone so young had so much wisdom for our lost and disaffected youth?”
“Oh, Ashwini,” Rudi said. “Isn’t that always the way?”
Isn’t that always the way?
They went on, discussing God knows what. I zoned out.
As the interview continued, Mr. Saxena edged toward me, dodging supplicants and wet handshakes. His wife watched his clubfooted, unsteady progress, and then noticed me, her gaze remaining adoring for her questioners while her mouth twitched in thin-lipped fury. She cut short her interviews and rushed in my direction.
They shared a look, a secret, unpleasant one. They might hate each other, but they were totally united in wanting to fuck me over. I would be better for their marriage than any overpaid therapist in Greater Kailash. Another string to my bloody bow.
I did not wait for them to start their blessed jugalbandi with whatever threat they were dreaming up.
“I get a cut of what your son earns. Or I fuck you. Understand?” Short and sharp. I’d been watching YouTube videos on negotiation by sharp-suited Americans with gelled hair and Italian names. (And watching my father’s work over the years. But I didn’t want to think about that. You can’t say anything nice about your parents. That’s the first commandment of being Indian. Unless you’re on camera.)
Mr. Saxena gulped. “Oh God,” he said.
He tried to explain things to me, but the words came out lacking fire. He knew people, he said. Policemen, politicians, civil servants, real big men, men who could snap their fingers and I would be in Tihar, beaten, buggered, and broken.
“If you knew people like that, I’d be dead already,” I said.
Short and sweet! Thank you, Patrick DiMeo of New Jersey BMW Dealers.
Saxena opened his mouth and gasped in frustration. His wife kept blinking her eyes at him, hummingbird fast, to get rid of me somehow, to do something, anything. She kept quiet, trying to look elegant, unperturbed, classy, and hoped that finally her husband would prove himself to be the lion that five millennia of our dick-dominant society had told her she needed.
He realized her unspoken need. He reached back into the genetic memory of a thousand mighty generations of Saxenas, warlords, generals, peasant impregnators, gave his wife a look of total command, and dragged me past tapestries and newly discovered family members into his son’s room. No coffee table books here, no waist-high statues of dancing girls in burnished bronze, no casually strewn copies of The Economist; just the usual detritus of the Indian teenage boy. Axe body spray. A Manchester United poster. General knowledge trophies he’d won when he was eleven. I much preferred it to the rest of the apartment.
Unfortunately, Vishal Saxena’s negotiation technique was shit. He let me know too much.
“We have friends in high places,” he started. He didn’t look at me.
“Which friends, sir?” I said, speaking breathlessly, my tongue almost wagging
in enthusiasm. Tell me more about your wonderful life, rich man! Impress me, amaze me, astound me!
“Oh, too many to count. I have friends in law, in accounting, my wife’s relatives are in politics, and of course we have met so many new people through the foundation.”
“Foundation, sir?” I said, my voice soft and sweet.
“It’s my wife’s baby. Did you think we were some small-time nobodies? We host fundraisers. We invite the high and the mighty. We know people.”
“Artists, sir? Lawyers, sir? Writers? Journalists? Liberal civil society people?” I said, my voice full of lower-caste wonder.
“Of course,” he laughed, and gave me a pitying look. “All the people who matter.”
“All the people who look kindly on examination fraud, sir?” I said.
Never has a man broken faster.
“We were going to call you,” he started babbling. “We don’t want trouble, no trouble.” He shivered. He looked like a small-town accountant who had been caught fiddling both the mayor’s ledgers and his daughters. Blinking furiously, he sat on the bed, and started smoothing imaginary wrinkles on it.
His wife came in. “Jesus Christ, Vishal,” she said, noticing at once his total defeat. The respect in her eyes vanished. She slammed the door shut behind us. She gave me a withering look, the type you’d give a street child trying to wash your car.
“How did you get to him?” she asked.
“Your foundation. All your do-gooding liberal friends.”
She nodded. I thought I saw some respect in her eyes. “We’ll make you a deal,” she said.
“No deals. Ten percent. Or I talk. I wonder who came next top after your son. Maybe I’ll give him a call. Or the government. Some investigator will want the kill of a lifetime. A Topper!”
That did it. Vishal Saxena collapsed completely and began to breathe deeply in and out. Oh, they would still try to hurt me, but it would have to be done later, when little Rudi had made some money, and then dacoits could be hired, guns could be brandished, limbs could be torn off, or, more likely, angry midnight emails about expenses and overspending would be written.
Mrs. Saxena moved out in a huff, cursing under her breath, making sure to check her sari in the mirror before she left.
I was lucky she hadn’t conducted the negotiations herself from the start. If she had, I’d have been mincemeat. You could tell. She wouldn’t have mentioned foundations. But your husband does the talking, he’s the one in charge, forever and ever, that’s what this country tells you, and her husband had failed completely. Thank God!
“So,” said Mr. Saxena, picking himself up, as if this was a business meeting with tea and namkeen, speaking with the deflated voice of a man who was going to be spending every waking moment at the golf club for a long time to come.
“I want to talk to the kid. I’m going to be his manager, aren’t I?”
“Assistant,” he babbled out.
I gave him a placid lower-caste look, like a cow or a nightclub toilet attendant.
“As long as I get paid. I want to get along with you. We all want the same thing, do we not?”
I held out my hand, filthy with invisible dirt. He went out and got his son without another word.
The kid took it well. He was far more concerned about women. He told me later that he’d got five hundred Tinder matches that week, probably four hundred and ninety-nine more than he’d ever had before. Hordes of beautiful girls, flirtatious, inquisitive, aroused, all of whom had their parents writing their chat-up lines. What they wouldn’t do to have Rudraksh Saxena as their son-in-law!
Rudi did not care about a measly 10 percent. His mother shot her husband withering looks over the next few hours, while I introduced myself to everyone as Rudi’s manager.
I asked the Saxenas for a hundred thousand for expenses, just for a joke, and Mr. Saxena paid it, no questions, just reached into a pocket and pulled it out. I got myself a taxi home, a deluxe Lexus SUV with AC and a hatted driver. Green Park, what a beautiful place. It was all mine for the taking. The air was better, the people more subservient, the police nicer, and the cars drove more carefully, not knowing which minister’s son they might hit.
I began my managerial career. The Saxenas wired me the tutoring money without complaint, and suddenly I was richer than I had ever been before.
Sister Claire, I thought, Jesus, we made it. All our sacrifices weren’t for nothing. Your death was not in vain. I made something out of myself. Sorry for the blasphemy!
We made it!
Wherever in heaven you are, we made it!
Six
I tried to save her. That’s why I got into this greasy business.
Dharam Lal weaved his campaign of hatred. I could not be allowed to contaminate the school further. To remove me, he would have to break her. And so he did.
I would finish my day at the charity school at three, and went straight to Sacred Heart to work with Claire. I was five years from the All Indias, and needed to do well to have any hope of a scholarship to a college. I had started a long way behind the other children my age. There was not a moment to lose.
I was becoming cultured. I was leaving behind Hindi, and settling into the mongrel Hinglish we all speak now.
After our work for the day had finished, I sat and ate, and Sister Claire spoke of her childhood. As she talked, her hair would twist free, a few locks of white sitting on her face, and she looked twenty years younger.
She had had a normal childhood: exams, fights with her sisters, boys, paddling in rock pools, spending hot summer days eating salted caramel ice cream.
“Boys—oh, how we would argue about them, all day long. How they would tease us! We would think of all the ways to entice them, to make them chase us, and then . . .”
“And then?”
“Nothing! We would run away!” she would say, with one of her wry smiles.
I had never known girls before, so I was very interested in anything I could find out about them. I knew men and women went together and made babies. But the girls I had known were noisy and annoying. I had no idea how or why they changed into things men wanted, fought for, bled for, how they became the women my father bought.
Claire taught me about how she saw the world.
“God is love”—that was her favorite saying. She would give money to the beggars who congregated by the school gates, and she would give food at local hospitals, and maybe save a tea seller’s child in the afternoon, and would say all the while, “God is love.”
Sometimes, of course, “God is love” meant blackmailing tea stall owners and twisting them into compliance. Such are the ways of the Christian God.
I would ask her for stories about her family. Those were my favorite. She would speak of long days spent sailing, of deserted coves and sandbars and sea foam, of cousins visiting at Christmas, of the sweat rising from the huddled crowds at midnight mass, of roasted chestnuts and steaming mugs of hot chocolate with brandy smuggled in, delivered by her parents when the skies were filled with summer lightning. She had grown up somewhere called Brittany. There everyone smiled and respected and liked each other—I found it totally unbelievable that a place like that should exist.
To me, her stories were fairy tales. It seemed impossible that someone could live like that, be so surrounded with love, to be without cares, to live a life that wasn’t a struggle, day to stinking day. I knew I would never feel that.
But Dharam Lal made her life bitter. She would have to stop herself from crying around me. The nuns began to avoid her. Her classes were cut back. Parents came to her, not saying anything in words, but the message was clear. Dump the boy. He is dirty and unclean. Why are you doing this? Our girls are your first responsibility. This is India, things cannot change here. You are giving him false dreams.
Rumors had been spread, terrible stories, Claire said. She would not talk about them to me, but simply try not to cry. The room became dimmer every passing day. Her face became raw and lined and tire
d. She stopped talking of knitting and pastries.
I realized very quickly that I was the problem. I was always the problem.
“I can study at school,” I said. “I don’t need to come here every day.”
My life would be limited to my father forever. I would turn into him. I knew it. For all the brains Claire said I had, for all the talent, I knew that I was him, and that in time, I would become him. That made me weep most of all.
But she refused to let me go. She held me tight whenever I so much as mentioned it. “Worse things have happened to me before. We shall beat them yet, petit,” she said.
“Do you know how old I am?” she asked me one day.
“Young,” I said, and she rubbed my hair.
“Not with this gray,” she said. “Fifty-three. A year younger than my mother when she died. At long last, I have done some good in the world, no?” She looked at me, and took my hand as I sat eating my jam and toast, trying hard to keep it from falling on my school shirt. “I was stupid,” she said. “I thought I had done the world good simply by putting on these clothes. But that is never enough. Never.”
I nodded my head.
“I will do more good yet,” she said. “This school, we cannot go on merely speaking about service and charity while we educate only the daughters of billionaires, of judges, of the police. It is not right. There must be more children like you here. I will not rest until it happens. All the others, they laugh, but I will make them see. You were the first, but you will not be the last. You are the future of this school.”
