by Rahul Raina
“Just a small nodule in the lungs,” the surgeon said when he arrived. He was straight out of a film, Jackie Shroff down from the screen. Thick black hair with a streak of gray. Prosperous-looking moustache. I’ve always been jealous of that, having only a little neck and lip stubble to call my own. “How long you will wait, who knows? Six months? A year? It will grow a little in that time, no doubt.” He looked down at Claire’s sleeping body. I knew she didn’t have that long. So did he. He saw the desperation on my face, and beckoned me into the corridor. I knew his look. Private rooms, clean rooms, did not need to be sullied by crookedness. That was for the corridors where the common people roamed. “Or I can do it privately,” he said. “But it will cost you. Three lakh. There’s nothing more valuable than health, beta.”
He smiled when I cried out that I would never be able to afford it. He put a hand on my back and told me, in confidence, that I would be killing Claire if the operation happened in the government hospital, how scalpels slipped and arteries were nicked—he knew how close I was to her, and he might have a little proposition for me.
He was rich, but he had a conscience—I knew that because those were the first words out of his mouth, “I am rich, but I have a conscience.” These richies always believe in self-advertising.
He was trying to do his part for the nation while running his private clinic for the housewives—the old India and the new, tradition and wealth, Vedic karma and Western capitalism, hand in hand. I imagine he has a charity now, with an Instagram page and many selfies with white-teethed children.
The devil always seems harmless when he appears. I knew that from long hours studying the Bible. He offers milk and honey and makes evildoing seem easy. He had been talking to Sister Claire. Claire had told him a little too much about her life, and about her charge and how special he was, how wonderful, how he had risen from nothing. Never do that, friends. It only leads to trouble.
He had looked into my eyes, red with tears, shirt collar stained yellow after a long day chasing leads, and said that he had the offer of a lifetime.
Sanjeev Verma had a problem, you see, and the problem was his son. A good boy, but lazy, soft in the head. He had the All Indias coming up. Maybe I could help somehow?
“Tutoring? I’ve never done it,” I said, and he laughed, and for some reason I did too.
“Not tutoring,” he said, and then he told me what he wanted me to do, his handsome face making it seem like the easiest, most rational thing in the world. “Just a little harmless play-acting. You only have to be my son for one morning. And the operation will be all paid for.”
So I did it.
I sacrificed my retake of the All Indias. I can do many miraculous and inexplicable things, but even I cannot sit two exams at once.
I gave up my future for Claire, just like she had given up hers for me.
I had a whole new world of things to learn for the Vermas’ idiot child. He was one of those arty children, and he was taking history, sociology, geography. So I had to take those too, on top of my sensible choices, economics and finance.
I started running late for my job assignments. Mr. Prem gave me long speeches about how I made him look like an idiot. His pride turned sour. No coming to my table to offer me extra kulfi on Fridays. The lunches from his wife stopped. The journalists became angry—their photos were never taken, their documents were full of mistakes, but I had so much to study. People looked at me and thought: How the fuck did he get hired? Bloody lower castes getting special treatment. My eyes were heavy-lidded from hours of work. I had a couple of hours’ sleep a night. I fell off my bike a few times.
I cried fat tears, begged Mr. Prem for second, third, fifth chances. I was fired, of course. I couldn’t even look him in the eyes as I collected my things.
I could imagine him in the future telling someone, “I once took a chance on this lower-caste boy. My wife’s idea. What a disaster!” and my mouth would taste of ashes and bile at having disappointed so many people.
I didn’t tell Sister Claire. Of course I couldn’t. She would never look at me again if she knew the truth. About the operation, about the money, about me giving up on the All Indias.
I cried into the night. I was stupid then, I thought the cancer had come because she had helped me, that she had sacrificed herself for me. Maybe I was right.
I did the All Indias.
I sat down at the desk each time and did the exams. I should have been at another center three miles away. But Ramesh Kumar was absent. Just another poor boy who never turned up.
I thought I’d be caught, that first time.
Did I leak sweat, that first illicit All India? Did I cry? I’ve pushed the memory down, like everything to do with those years, save Claire’s broken smile, and “God is love.”
Claire asked me how the exams had gone. Badly, I said. I must not have studied hard enough. I must not have been good enough. I wept. I held her hands and tried to make my face look honest.
“No, no, my child, at least you have your work,” she said, too exhausted to do anything but sigh. “I know you did your best.”
I came Top Thousand. That’s how good I am. Verma did as he had promised. The operation didn’t work. She got worse.
That’s karma, as the whites say. That’s how this country works, if you’re poor.
She was never the same after. Veins shining through skin. The softness of her grip turned to the hardness of bone. No more beautiful stories. Just a low, whispered voice in a dark, airless room, skin turned to leather.
At night, I read her yellowed paperbacks of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I would think she was asleep, but when I finished, she would tell me to read another.
She spoke in bursts of one or two words. When I got her flowers, all she said was “You shouldn’t.” Croissants from the French bakery in Gole Market: “Sinful.”
How right she was. I sold my soul for her, and it achieved nothing.
“She should be fine. I cannot tell what is wrong with her,” Verma said at the one-month checkup. “You can never know with these things. Did I tell you? Rohit’s doing well at Delhi University. Congratulations, young man!” He expected me to burst into a cheer. Did he mention that he had a close friend, a drinking buddy, with the same problem? Here was his phone number, just in case. He knew what a wonderful job I’d done.
I had no job, an apartment I was going to get kicked out of, and there was the future holding out its hand.
And so started my life of facts and names and arguments pouring like cement into my head, of illegally downloaded PDFs, of an unmade, sweat-soaked bed, of a room and a brain illuminated by the white-hot sear of a computer screen. Five years of it, and always in the back of my mind, wondering when I would be able to escape. Was I still going to be doing it at thirty-five? When would I start looking too old? Was I going to go back to a tea stall?
No one came to see Claire. Not her girls, not her colleagues, no one.
I fed her. I dragged her body from bed to wheelchair, so she could go outside and watch the nuns tend to their flowers. I wrapped her body with bandages. I held her head as she vomited blood. I watched her age twenty years in as many weeks. I cleaned the blood from her mattress. I rubbed lotion into her sores. I bathed her, and dried her afterward with a towel, rubbing it over her wet hair, and felt how small she had become, just skin and skull. I made her tea and dried her chin when the liquid fell from her mouth.
Sometimes she would be somewhere else entirely. She would call me by a name I had never heard before. She would call me “son.” She would weep that she had not been able to save me, she would say that she wished I was alive and with her now. She cried that she had kept all the pictures, that she had never thrown out a single one. Then she would say sorry again and again and again.
Then I understood.
That’s my fate. Always a bloody stand-in for someone else.
The last words Claire said to me, the most she had been able to say for months, like she traded
those words for a day of life, were “God always was. God is. God will be. God is love.”
What a load of shit.
She died in a government hospital, surrounded by bed upon bed of the poor she loved so much. She lasted three days after those last words, the worst days of my life.
She spent them shouting wordlessly. She would scream in the middle of the night and I would wake and hold her to me, and she would keep on screaming. I slept on a chair next to her.
I knew she was going to die when the screams turned to gasps. No need for a heart rate monitor, no sir.
Her last morning, she had a fever. There was nothing I could do to keep it down. No towel soaked in mineral water. No cold compress. She had vomited blood all over her bed, and I had run out into the corridor, searching for someone to come and help, but no one did. Then she was gone.
It’s strange knowing that the only person who cares about you in the whole world is long dead, and that she would not be proud of what you’ve become, even if she was watching.
Seven
Rudi realized very quickly that I was the only person in the world whose fate was tied up with his own. Clever boy. I got 10 percent, and in return I did everything for him. All the signatures, the boring meetings, the food shopping, the transportation, and for that he got to abuse me in public. What a trade-off!
The paise came flooding in, from the usual suspects. Bournvita, asking Rudi to be the face of its “Drink Clever” campaign. Coca-Cola, with its “Onwards India!” ads, on whose sets I got to hang out with Alia Bhatt. Hero Honda—there we met half the cricket team, got some great Instagram shots, hashtag bharatrising. Rudi got rid of his glasses and wore contacts. Of course we made sure to turn that into a sponsorship opportunity too.
I controlled his official accounts, and spent hours every day posting on Snapchat and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter, delighting the people with Rudi’s thoughts and bon mots and cultural commentary and cricket celebrations. I didn’t try to be smooth, a manicured, polished celebrity. I just had to be a normal Indian teenager. I dialed my natural intelligence down about 75 percent, and there I was. Once in a while, just to remind them I was the Topper, I would have Rudi post some pictures of French chateaus or Mauryan temple complexes, and people would comment, Such an intellectual, sir below. I was twenty-four and had the world at my feet, even if it was someone else getting the praise.
All thought of Rudi going to university had gone out of the window. Why spend years grinding away when you could make money now, more than you’d need for a thousand lifetimes? The degrees could come later.
It was beautiful. The only problem was the hangers-on, the pitchmen, the certified investment opportunity people, but I got a driver-bodyguard for that, a cheerful ex-army soldier we paid a half lakh a month. He was called Pawan. He was short, thick with muscle, unremarkable, but a dependable driver. His wife seemed to do nothing but make achaar, so every Friday he offered us an oily jar each of mango or tomato or ginger, “Very Ayurvedic, sir, very good for leprosy and gout,” or whatever combination of ailments his wife had googled that week. They piled up under my bed.
She called him as he drove us, hours of conversation a day. “How is my little pehelwan?” she’d ask him. “How is my shahenshah?” He gripped the wheel harder, fingers white, at every pet name. He would keep looking back. “Can I end the call, sir?” he’d whisper. “Can I talk to her without speaker?” but Rudi would shake his head. I realized he wanted to hear women say sweet things to their beloveds. He needed a girlfriend really badly, but that wasn’t in the contract. I was many things, counselor, shepherd, guide, but I wasn’t a sister-fucking pimp.
Most men want to hear how to get a woman, the combination of lies and bluster and magic and ritual, rather than how to keep her, but not Rudi. He wanted to know every detail, every joke, every tease about aches and pains and strange stains on the mattress. He loved it.
We had our driver. We had attention. We had money. What we needed was something to spend it on.
The first big thing he bought was a statement dwelling. An apartment in South Ex. I took a small box bedroom, intending to use it as an office, but I ended up staying there most of the time. I kept my own place, just in case. His parents had forbidden him from buying the place, and further forbidden me from moving in. Rudi told me about their fight, how his parents thought I was a lower-caste trickster who’d take all his money. Of course, I was the lower-caste trickster who’d made it for him in the first place. They stopped complaining when he bought them an Audi.
Rudi and I became flatmates without either of us even saying it out loud. I did the shopping and organized the cleaning and cooking. He littered rooms and hallways with drunken Amazon purchases and pizza boxes. It was quite perfect.
Rudi up close, you know, wasn’t a bad person. He was more than a little fucked up, but then all Indian children are. We were a good team. He was fat, I was thin, he was light, I was dark, but one thing was just the same. The anger.
Not the usual teenager anger about not getting laid enough or not looking like Dwayne Johnson, but something deeper, much more visceral.
You move into a multimillionaire’s penthouse apartment in a posh part of Delhi, and you think you’ll be spending your time partying. No. You spend it cleaning up after a teenager.
Rudi would drown himself in meet-and-greets with fans, in interviews with press, Indian and foreign, in swanky parties, in European liquor and DJ sets in posh malls and perfumed, ochred girls called Ruby and Kitty and Sweety. They would surround him at the club. He would talk to one. They would take selfies. I would take them home with us. I would sleep. In the morning, I would pick up the bottles from his room. The girls would be gone. I didn’t know how many there were. I thought he was enjoying himself.
Then one night, after dismissing another of his girls, he wandered into my room without knocking, holding a bottle of overpriced vodka, threw himself onto my bed, eyes vacant, and started talking. The search for true love hadn’t gone well, again. You’d think he could just enjoy himself, but no—he wanted somebody who wanted him for him.
“I don’t want kids, you know,” he said. He looked up at the fan. “I’d fuck them up. Too many fucked-up kids already. My parents, dude, they always wanted more. Too much. Nothing was good enough. Easier to just hide everything from them.”
He kept talking, about humiliation, about his feeling that he had never been enough, just him, an only child who had been too expensive to raise and hadn’t given anything back, and I felt sorry for this eighteen-year-old who hid his sadness so well.
“Ramesh,” he finished, “I don’t just want women. I want true love, dude. I don’t want to buy them. Fuck, sorry,” he said, and wandered off with a sigh to phone out for Chinese, something else to hide from the celebrity nutritionist.
I understood. He wanted to look in a woman’s eyes and see the one thing he could never have—that she would have wanted him when he was no one.
He wanted something real. When you’re that rich, and that famous, you don’t get real.
When he’d wake up in the mornings, he would go to one of his two bathrooms and have a shower, and it would take hours. The hot water tank would groan with overuse and I would knock to make sure something hadn’t happened.
It would have been awful for me if it wasn’t for the dump trucks of cash. Even the Saxenas tailed off on the whole fuck-me-over thing and let me get on with making them all money.
At least I was on Rudi’s side. I had a stake in his career. Many people wanted him destroyed. The gossip stories started immediately. Rudi did act like a shit. Going to parties that became orgies of ostentation and alcohol, throwing around piles of Gandhis in crowds and watching the riot unfold, messing about at ad shoots, behaving like a little prick.
I went along to make sure he didn’t get in trouble. I went to make sure he got back in one piece. I never indulged myself. I was in it for the money. No distractions, no women, no nothing. No getting addicted to d
rugs. No changing who I was. And certainly none of that falling-in-love, making-plans-for-the-future nonsense.
We were sitting in our flat when the call came, the big one, the one that changed everything. Rudi was watching TV. I was posting all the sponsored posts we’d agreed to on Instagram, all beautifully presented, all on time—I did a fantastic job for the money.
We were just minding ourselves, Rudi answering phone calls from long-lost friends and relatives—
Television. They wanted Rudi on television.
And that’s how we became richer than God himself, or a reforming, business-friendly, Davos-attending chief minister of Bihar.
A call came in. A German accent.
“Am I talking to Mr. Rudraksh Saxena’s manager?”
Yes, yes, you are.
The voice offered us more money than we thought even existed, the sort of money you see Indian cricket captains earning for sponsoring whisky, and suddenly everything changed.
I hired lawyers. I arranged meetings.
I went to Iqbal Tailors in Connaught Place and ordered a made-to-measure suit, and told them, “Something current, something stylish, something modern,” but what I really meant was “I’m meeting white people, bhai, make me something they won’t laugh at.”
A few days later, we turned up to a glass-windowed office. The receptionists were white. That’s how I knew I’d really made it.
We were on the thirtieth floor of a skyscraper, higher than I’d ever been before. I looked out of the window and saw the little people down below, straining, selling, sweating, and suddenly it finally hit me: from the moment I left this place, I would never, ever be like that again.
The lawyers with their Stanford degrees fought among each other. I sat beside one bored, angry Rudraksh Saxena for the next two hours, and drowned out everything but the money. The numbers kept getting larger. A hundred years of tea stall money, I counted, then a thousand, then ten thousand. Rudi wasn’t just going to be a quiz show host. They wanted to make him into a brand, the face of the nation’s youth, the boy who knew everything.
