by Rahul Raina
And then he started ramping up the drugs.
I should have kept an eye on the drugs. At ad shoots, while I sat at the food table (very socialistic, the same food for everyone, just like at the gurdwaras), he would barely be present. Lost, zoning out, ordering alcohol on apps for me to pick up later.
Wandering about the flat at night in a daze.
I really did want to help him, but how could I? People have to want to save themselves.
Ratings were still high, the mothers were still tuning in, I was still making money, temples and convents were still being donated to, but Rudi had to develop a drug problem, didn’t he, joy of joys, so as to make the Western rock star parallels even clearer: India is a land of intellectuals, so our pop stars are quiz show hosts.
When did the little shit start doing coke regularly? Who did he get it from?
Maybe he did it because people put him down.
“What is this Rudi nonsense?” husbands read from their newspapers. “What’s wrong with the good Vedic name Rudraksh?”
“Does he do anything on this show other than give small amounts of money to orphans and unemployed middle-aged women?”
“What is he hiding?”
Maybe he did it because he had no real friends. Me? I wouldn’t have stuck around for free.
I found the envelopes of powder and threw them away. I found others, filled with strange Chinese tablets, and threw those away too. More appeared. I wanted to take him to a doctor, but I didn’t.
Why?
I don’t know.
I felt guilty. I was carrying on some Romeo romance, and I wanted to go easy on him, but I knew he was a liability.
I tried to make more time for Priya, for our lunches and coffees, but Rudi consumed more and more of me. I could not do without her. It was the first time I had felt like that about anyone.
Soon I had to look after him full-time. We returned to the flat in the early mornings, after nights out, and then I had to babysit, and deal with his life, and worry about mine, and how I was finally going to tell Priya the truth, for I had to, I’d realized. I had to, or she would find out, and she would never forgive me. The thought of losing her made me start to feel distinctly uncharitable toward Rudi in particular, and Indian teenagerdom in general.
I started watching the daytime soap operas while Rudi dribbled in the background, bucket placed delicately, artfully, at just the right location under his wretched maw, at just the right angle to catch the jet of projectile vomit.
In the boredom of daylight, even I began to drink. Just a little, now and then, but it was still too much. The smell of alcohol. Feeling sorry for myself. Being useless and not doing anything about it. I tried hard not to think that I was turning into my father.
Parental supervision was thin on the ground, shall we say.
Rudi’s parents had disappeared entirely. They’d Indian-parent-blackmailed him (we have done everything for you, sacrificed holidays and SUVs and our blood pressure for your future, and you do nothing for us) into setting them up an expense account, and they were on some Italian lakes vacation, no doubt filled with languorous spa trips, swinging, Dolce & Gabbana–branded everything, and many surgeries and fillers and lipos, and that was just Mr. Saxena.
Before they left, they had actually tried to get rid of me one final time. I’d gone to my old place, which I visited once a month, crossing back into the shit side of Delhi—nice to see you again, Mother Yamuna, still full of chemical foam, are you?—and found an envelope among the mountain of crap in my letter box. Inside, a printed note, in a newspaper-ransom-style font, seriously, like it was the seventies and Pran or Amrish Puri was behind it all. We know your secret. Leave now. Leave him. It was so pathetic, I knew it had to be them. They weren’t sharks. He was a mid-level accountant and she ran an ethnic designs fashion label. It was just what you would expect.
They gave up entirely after that, on me and the kid.
In our flat, the dishes and the plates and the bottles piled up. Our cleaning woman stopped coming, claiming demons inhabited the place. The landlord knocked on the door in his jogging gear, white hairs creeping out of the neck of his polo shirt, and told us we were being “very bad sports.”
We had bricks of money under beds, inside statues of gods, in the fucking fridge, because Rudi had seen it in a gangster movie.
We said yes to anything, any shoot, any ad, any mall opening, we got paid, and life went on. I tried to remove the bags of powder, and said nothing more. Maybe I worked him too hard, but I had to keep him earning money. If the truth came out, if Anjali Bhatnagar got to us, what then? The threat of the CBI was still being held at bay, for now, by our lawyers. If he became unpopular, what then? What would happen to him? What would happen to me? There was nobody waiting to catch us if we fell. I didn’t have any family, and, well, Rudi didn’t either. We had each other and that was it. I didn’t want to think about that at all.
One day, a few weeks later, on the street outside my flat, Sumit approached me.
He looked different. Or maybe it was me who had changed.
At first I thought he was an autograph hunter, or a fan in need of a favor, one more of the thousands who had deluged me and Rudi, who turned his Instagram into a sea of requests for donations.
But no, it was Sumit, coming to me, coming to beg.
“Brother!” he said, his smile a little too manic.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, because he’d never been nice before.
“A little trouble,” he said. “Nothing big. A client. He’s demanding his money back.”
“And what can I do?” I said. I moved toward the waiting car, and Sumit tried to look honest and pathetic at the same time, but couldn’t. He’d never had to before.
“That was all in the past,” he said. “You can help me. I will be forever grateful. The past is the past.”
“Is it? I’ll always be small, Sumit, no matter the brains I have. I could have all the money in the world, and I’d still be small. Isn’t that what you said? No, brother, I cannot help you.”
And then I left.
Rudi and I went to TED Talks, because that was where Rudi said all the hot, posh, uninterested girls were—his favorites. Tire-necked ministers interviewed him at after-parties about the secret of his success, and he said, “Always listen to your father and your mother. Work hard, harder than a dog, harder than Hanuman when he moved the mountain to bring that herb back to Ram,” and the ministers nodded and said that we were nothing, nothing without culture and tradition, and the newspapers said, “See Rudi’s Surprising Secret to Topping,” and uncles and aunties in family WhatsApps across the land scolded children for not going to temple enough and then bought ever more products with Rudi’s face on them.
Meanwhile, Oberoi was growing fatter on the success of Rudi and Beat the Brain, and what did the prick do? He decided to go into politics, and that meant getting into bed with the People’s Party.
It started small. Wispy tweets about Vedic traditions, then bam! a second later he was appearing on platforms and bowing and screaming about intellectual elites and cosmopolitan vermin, and the title on the TV was calling him a “thought leader.”
He dragged us along to one of his functions, because even if he might have hated Rudi, his name opened doors.
We were felicitated. Golf club, south of town, new money, bunting, garlands. One of the pre-Diwali celebrations that stretched earlier and earlier into the year.
The right-wing saffrons were out in force, back-slapping with cube-clinking Johnnie Walker in hand, one-upping each other with offhand comments about the poetry of the Upanishads and the sanctity of the Indian language.
Oberoi made a speech, right up on the platform, with a fat crowd of People’s Party ministers sitting behind him. The usual nonsense, “Our country is strong today, stronger than it has ever been, and that is down to one man, the prime minister,” and at that everyone clapped. He was so excited with himself. Everyone was watching him. He was i
n the limelight for once. He couldn’t be stopped. He could see his political career stretching out before him. “This is a country going places, this is a country on the up, a country where a humble producer like m—” He had the breath knocked out of him as a huge hand thumped him from behind.
“We should hear from him,” said the big man, a government minister, his voice deep and gong-like, drops of sweat on his temples, his collar translucent with perspiration. “Never trust a politician”: that was what Claire always used to say, and I never have.
“Who, Mr. Minister, sir?” said Oberoi, as the fear on his face fought with the hatred.
“Rudraksh Saxena. You are very interesting, Mr. Oberoi, but we are here for him tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” said Oberoi quietly. He sat down on a chair, whiter than a Western panel on racial diversity. I hid my laughter in my drink.
Up went Rudi, unsteady after too much whisky and coke.
“We are the future, I am the future, this man,” he said, grasping the minister, whose name he did not know but whose body fat percentage showed importance, “is the future, aren’t you?” He started jabbing the man’s stomach, and kept repeating, “Aren’t you, aren’t you?”
Then he jumped off the stage, crying, “Waiter!” Everybody applauded him. Even Oberoi did, with a grimace.
There were more speeches from members of the People’s Party. Oberoi stayed onstage and tried to grab the microphone, but was always brushed away by somebody more important, more powerful, more fat. His moment had passed. Speaker after right-wing speaker insulted NGO libtards, saying the titans of postwar Indian history had been too secular, too liberal, too Muslim-friendly. Money had been given generously, by Oberoi, to the prime minister’s religious toleration foundation.
For most of the evening, Oberoi stood around looking hopeful and small, hands clasped near his crotch, like a prisoner before delousing. He kept going after people, big people, asking constantly for business cards, introductions to investments. He kept badgering them for selfies. All the money, all the importance he had, and he still wanted more.
I spent my evening shadowing Rudi, making sure he didn’t get into any trouble, didn’t drink much more, didn’t offend people who shouldn’t be offended.
All my days were wasted, on the show, and making money for Rudi, and keeping him occupied somehow.
All my nights were wasted too, be they in clubs or restaurants or bars, making sure he didn’t get drunk or hurt or worse. Making sure no one saw him behaving in a disorderly manner. Making sure he was never caught out, that the newspapers would never expose anything, so that his fans—India’s housewives—could keep buying whatever he was advertising in order to keep our economy going at 7 percent a year.
I should have been with Priya. I should have been living my life. I kept meaning to carve out more time for her, but Rudi was at a critical point. He was on the edge and had become a real risk. We were coming up to the festival of lights, but for Rudi, things seemed only to be getting darker.
I dreamed my idiot dreams, of running away from everything, from free drinks and free money. That never helped.
So I had to have fun somehow. In my own way.
At work and in bars each day, I handled stupid questions from roomfuls of sweaty writers. We’d had to hire them, to keep Rudi’s jokes fresh, to make him really shine, to make sure he always had something to say, to make sure he never froze again. There were tens, hundreds of millions of rupees riding on him. He wasn’t just a boy. He was a business. He had to be kept in peak condition.
All the writers had idiot names like Siddharth-call-me-Sid and Nikhil-call-me-Nik and idiot Western educations and similarly idiot Western problems like being ghosted by women or receiving the wrong order at a coffee shop. You heard these terrible, terrible rumors about them—that they used electronic cigarettes. Indians. Electronic. Can you imagine? What has India become, that all our problems must be sorted by people with American master’s degrees?
I would launch into rants, just to fuck with them. “When I was a boy, all we had was carrom boards, with plenty of talcum powder to make them go fast, and if you ran out God help you, and our fingernails bled from it.” Sometimes I would tell them that my only friend had been a stick called Pramod.
Priya told me in our calls and texts how Oberoi treated her. At meetings he’d say “fat Gujju bitch,” “dhokla eater,” all of the usual insults.
He was getting worse, she said. She tried to do everything he wanted, and still it wasn’t enough.
I kept my mouth shut and my fists clenched beneath the table. In the India of twenty years ago, I would have punched him and that would have been that. Now we have Western morals and complaints procedures and nothing ever gets done.
How she took it, I’ll never know. I learned from her what strength was. Poverty, that you could escape, with luck and brains and insulting everything that dared to move. Being a woman, in this country? You could never outrun that.
All I wanted to do was to spend time with her, and I never got the chance.
Part Two
Ten
So there we were, Rudi drunk, disheveled, covered in vomit. Me lying by him, a bottle in my hand, miserable, overworked, stressed. Both of us with the world on our shoulders.
We were ten days from Diwali. Rudi was under pressure to be top of the TV rankings at the most profitable advertisement time of the year.
And then we were kidnapped.
Bang! The door burst open, I started to shout out, but I could hardly make myself heard.
I saw that face, the yellow eyes, the bead necklace. I saw the man move over to me, laugh at my useless protest. I tried to reach out for my phone, but he kicked it away. He laid down the pair of folded wheelchairs he carried, and kicked our Diwali gifts, our boxes of free samples and bribes and flowers out of the way.
Bang! A stick smashed into my face. Bang! Rudi and I were bundled into the wheelchairs. The man wheeled me out into the corridor, and into the lift, and then he returned with Rudi a minute later. It was as if he had all the time in the world. We were insects he could just pick off at will. It was extremely humiliating.
Then out into the shor sharaba of the street, turmeric-fingered fellows abounding, young men just hanging around doing nothing—we are a country of young men, with the attendant problems. The West is too old and fat for revolution; here we are but a single humiliating loss to Pakistan away.
I screamed uselessly into my surgical mask, gurgling a little blood in my mouth, the sound lost in the noise of paan spitters and autos. A face came down close to mine, those yellow teeth again, the wet buffalo stink of halitosis. “Better keep quiet, or the kid gets it, okay?” He didn’t need to do anything to Rudi, he was out of it. He didn’t need to be beaten up. He had already done that to himself with the drugs.
This guy was all business, none of the talking like a movie gangster that Rudi did to the writers when he wanted to scare them. “I’ll fuck you so hard your children will feel it,” that was his favorite, and then it was grandchildren, mothers, fathers, all future progeny, all past ancestors, as he got angrier with the Niks and the Sids, peppering his insults with high-class words, thesaurus words, advanced English vocabulary words, because he was the Topper and he was an intellectual and they were nothing.
We were thrown one by one into a battered Maruti van with some hasty red crosses painted on the side.
I looked at my captor’s eyes up close and knew there was going to be trouble.
Eyes like my father’s. Hungry eyes. Born-in-the-shit-but-never-going-back eyes.
He smiled and took out a roll of tape, and wound it round and round the top of my head, a few more times around my hands, and over my mouth. “Going to be a bitch to take off,” he said. “Might just have to cut all your hair off, like when you were a baby.” The smell of his mouth was like a bubbling sewer. The smell, the fear, that was bad enough, but the tape over my eyelids, that was the worst part. Every time I moved my head I wa
s in agony. I tried to stay as still as I could. It did not work.
We moved off with the squeaking of gears, metal on metal. The air around us was thick with noise. I could hear the Audis of bankers’ wives, street kids selling plastic-wrapped Paulo Coelho at intersections, people squeaking dirty rags on your car, either blackmail or cleaning, you couldn’t tell. It was the perfect time for a kidnap.
The tape started to give me a migraine. My head was on fire. My wrists too. My spine was stiff with the effort of sitting still. I was hot. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was having a stroke.
We drove on. Swearing came from the front as turns were missed, mashed acceleration, sudden braking, reversing, nothing like Pawan’s sleek driving.
The heat made me melt. Driving without AC is hell. How do people do it? You lose half your weight each journey, and a whole bunch of IQ probably. If all Indians had air conditioning everywhere, the gap between have and have-not would disappear. All that ball-scratching and moaning turned into valuable GDP-raising work!
If my mouth hadn’t been taped, I would have made conversation.
“Nice breath you have there!”
“Do you do this kidnap stuff freelance, or are you on a long-term contract?”
When he finally woke, Rudi tried money. The driver hadn’t taped his mouth. Typical.
“I can get you anything. Money, women, women made of money, money made of women, anything, just let us go.” No response. Barely ten minutes later came the cry of every Richie Rich everywhere, “Don’t you know who I am?,” and then, God help him, “Please, please just let me go. Diwali is coming soon,” at which he got a few laughs.
A few hours later, the car stopped. We were dragged out, one by one, and pushed across sandy dirt. You simply had to admire the man, doing this all on his own, a Westerner would say. It was a hot, grimy early evening. If I’d been able to see, maybe I would have seen an endless expanse of earth, the soil out of which we Delhi dwellers all spring. If I’d been a farmhouse owner, maybe I would have enjoyed the country air, the freshness; instead, all I could smell was fear and sweat and my own misery. I felt my feet stumble over earth, stone, marble, my sides bumped against walls and doors and tables. I could hear nothing. That was the worst part. No traffic, no men and women shouting their way through life, no vendors, no sellers, no merchants. Nothing but silence. It was like I was dead. No wonder American suburbanites are on so many medications.
