How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  Rudi was doing bad cop, it seemed, so I decided to play nice.

  “We can make things better if you talk,” I said, in my most obsequious lower-caste voice. “Please, beta, tell us your cares.” I could have added, “Live long. Be happy. Jeete raho!”

  The kid was about to say something. He looked at me with a strange expression, a growing trust, I could tell. I had broken through to his soft interior.

  “I told my father we should have had you killed,” he said.

  Maybe not.

  “Hey,” said Pratap, unable to hear our words but knowing they wouldn’t be good. The kid scrambled back like we were lepers and slammed the door shut behind him, and thus ended the training session for his ascent to Western corporate life, or was it supervillainy?

  “What was that Aishwarya nonsense about?” I asked Rudi, after I’d failed to scrape our food off the floor.

  Rudi sat with his back against the wall, eyes closed, sweat beads on his cheeks, world-weary. “Sounded good, didn’t it?”

  “Sounded strange really, boss.”

  “Oh,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes I don’t know the difference, dude.”

  Two days passed. We did nothing. Once a day we were led out into the corridor to use a bathroom next door, and then thrown back inside. No showers. The room smelled of terrified young men. Very hygienic.

  The drugs continued to move out of Rudi’s body. He tried not to let it show, tried to turn his face away from me. I could see the muscles of his jaw clenching, I could see his spine twisting and flexing in pain, I could hear him punching himself and swearing in the middle of the night when he thought I was asleep.

  I tried not to worry about him, the situation, about Priya, about the Bhatnagar investigation, but I could do nothing but.

  Regular meals, delivered by Abhi. He was still angry. I was too tired, too bastard hot, too worried about Rudi and Priya to try bridge-building.

  “Roti again? Don’t you have any gluten-free options, you little fuck?” said Rudi.

  I started to fret.

  Two days. The deadline had passed.

  The moneymen hadn’t come through. I could imagine Priya, her hair tied up, pen and phone in hand, making principled arguments for paying. I could imagine her calling the uncle she’d told me about, a cop, an honest cop! What a strange family. Far too virtuous to be in-laws to the likes of me.

  I could imagine her fighting for me, and I nearly felt good.

  I knew that if anything happened, they wouldn’t touch Rudi. It would be me on the chopping block. I remembered the look in Pratap’s eyes.

  It was fair to say that by the night of the second day, I was shitting myself. No news. Nothing. All the production company had to do was pay the damn money. Simple. We’d make them double the ransom in chapati ads alone. They could start a phone-in contest, and the winner could get Rudi’s tear-stained shirt, or maybe I could take their kid’s exams.

  When the door slammed open that second day, near midnight, I hadn’t slept at all.

  Pratap strolled in, face lit by moonlight, his gaze fixed only on me.

  Rudi woke quickly, looked at Pratap’s face, and realized something was going to happen to me. A little danger had quickened his instincts. I hand it to him. He grew up in that moment.

  He stood up. He squared up to Pratap. He raised his fists. Pratap feinted one way, and punched him in the stomach. Rudi didn’t fall immediately. He tried to stand up. He raised his hands again, the fool. His softness was no match for Pratap’s wiry, corded muscle.

  Another punch, Rudi groaned and collapsed.

  “No money,” Pratap said. Then he turned to smile at me. “I wanted to do this from the minute I saw you.”

  It must be my face.

  He walked over slowly, slowly. I saw his yellow little teeth, I saw his red eyes grow larger and larger. I couldn’t look. My gaze shifted downward, to the prayer beads knotted around his neck. I scrambled backward, hit the wall, started to rise up it, slipped slightly. He punched me in the stomach. I doubled over. He put my arms in a lock, my face pressed to the floor, tongue licking dust.

  “Which one?” he said.

  “Which one what?”

  “Which one shall we cut off?”

  I started to shout. Rudi wriggled like a worm, clutching his side. “You touch him, and I’ll fuck you harder than I fucked Miss India,” he said.

  Look at you, Rudi, I thought, look at what you’ve become. I felt so proud, even though I would have changed the phrasing.

  He crawled over to us, over the grimy marble floor, straining every ounce of energy he had to save me from my terrible fate—then Pratap gave him a kick in the groin, and Rudi grunted with pain and stopped.

  “No more comedy from you, Brain of Bharat,” Pratap said, “or you won’t be doing any fucking ever again.”

  He grabbed my hands. I tried to struggle, but he simply sat on me, driving the air from my lungs like the pollution on the ITO intersection. I saw the glint of something in the corner of my eye.

  A knife: not a small one, but long and lethal, one of those half-knife, half-saw things they use to cut tomatoes and aloos when you get a pav bhaji, working-man’s knives, razor sharp, cheap, the knives that have won the evolutionary race above all others to be the tools of Delhi’s poor for cutting food, for committing crime, for solving all life’s problems.

  “I think the little one. You won’t miss it, will you, boy? My master is being too soft, and that never gets you anywhere, does it?”

  And then he cut my bloody pinkie finger off.

  It was over in less than a second. I wish my finger had put up more of a fight.

  I saw the knife cut through skin. That was bad enough.

  Then it went through muscle, then cartilage, then through the curve of my knuckle, and up and out, through muscle and skin.

  So simple. One fluid, relentless motion.

  Blood spurted out of the hole, thick and alive and finally free of its prison of flesh.

  I screamed out in pain. I looked down, and on the floor lay my finger, the nail bruised and jagged, the skin creased from bending and beckoning. It looked pristine, untouched, for most of its length, until you got to the bottom, and out peeked perfect white bone, and around it a pool of blood.

  Pratap yelled in triumph, his voice rumbling, thick with pleasure. I felt faint. I saw a blurry image of Rudi vomiting.

  I felt wet all over my hands. I saw Pratap grab a cloth from his pocket and wrap it around my fingers. He gave me another kick.

  “Better hope they pay up this time,” he said.

  The next few hours, I was totally gone.

  I just about remember Rudi’s face. Lots of tears. Very touching. I remember the smell of antiseptic, and a bitter liquid I tried to spit out, tablets and water being forced down me. I screamed my way to sleep.

  I woke when it was morning. The floor around me was brown with dried blood.

  Rudi lay in a crumpled pile in the corner. My fist was bandaged. Poorly. There was a roll of tape by Rudi’s hand.

  I counted the fingers.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Shit.

  I shouted but no sound came out. Mouth fucked, dry, raw, like I’d cried and spat and pissed my body’s entire supply of water.

  In that moment I thought about Sister Claire, about all the money I’d made, all the pride I’d had, these stupid dreams, trying to make myself a . . . What? A businessman? An entrepreneur? A man-about-town? And for what? Where had my dreams brought me? Missing one finger and who knew what else tomorrow. If I got out of this, I’d start a school, I thought in those sickening hours, for orphans or slum kids or American children from Ohio who were addicted to opioids, and never think about Gandhis again. I’d certainly never live in Delhi, or anywhere near it. Me, far away in the south, verdant green, backwater streams, coconut milk in every fucking meal, or abroad, fuck it, me and Priya. I really needed to be serious, to think about our future, where we were going, and God kno
ws, if I was lucky, maybe I’d end up like a Westerner on my knees in a five-star restaurant with a ring and her saying yes yes yes.

  Enough of kissing and holding hands and doing all of the actions without saying the words. Enough of coyness, Ramesh! Enough of cowardice! Be a man. Make it official! Tell the world!

  No! Leave her out of it. Let her be. Enough! That was my other voice. The one that had only doubts, the one that told me always to run and hide away from the world, the one that said that I was in this game only to make money for myself, and that nothing else mattered, that all this love business was a useless distraction that would get me killed.

  Be truthful, for once, Ramesh. What did our future look like if we ended up together? I’d spend the rest of my life hiding the truth, worrying what would happen if she found out about me. I would be lying to her every single day, telling her one cheek was coffee and the other was chocolate. I would be no better than him.

  This was all in my head. If you had looked at me, you would have just seen quiet, dry weeping. I gather that most philosophers throughout history have been quite similar.

  Everything came to me vividly, like a movie dream sequence. Time slipped away as smoothly as kebabs down the gullets of toothless nawabs.

  I thought of a time when I’d been happy, maybe that two-week period in 1998 when I was three and we’d had nukes and the Pakistanis hadn’t, and then, fuck, they’d done their own tests and we were back to level pegging.

  I thought about all sorts of strange stuff.

  Sex and death and history and family.

  I thought about the Chor Bazaar, where for centuries all the stolen stuff in Delhi had washed up to be sold, about the Qutb Minar, soaring into the sky like the erection in some amateur scandal video, the ones that got leaked and whole families killed themselves out of shame. I felt myself slipping through history, through all the burnings and riots and empires, the Ghaznavids bringing death from their Turkic abodes, the pleasure gardens of the Mughals burning in 1857, the streets wet with blood after the riots of Partition.

  It was some very, very posh shit.

  Then I dreamed about my father, how he hadn’t turned up. I’d expected him, like a rotten rupee. Must have been dead. Or rich. I tried not to think about that. Otherwise Rudi would definitely have found him and got him on the show, just to see the look on my face. Other people, rich kids in clubs, complained about their parents, their suffocating closeness, that all they did was complain and cut off expense accounts and ask when they were getting married. I was alone.

  I started thinking like Rudi, that everything in my life, everything in the soil and the air, had led to this moment. My mind searched backward in my life, went through each turn and twist to find a place where I could have avoided this fate. I wiped out all memory of Priya, and then Rudi and Claire and my father, searched for the point where I could diverge and be saved, but found only darkness and blood.

  There was no way out.

  I had to save myself.

  I got up. Rudi said sorry a few thousand times.

  We sat and talked, and pledged eternal loyalty to one another.

  “I’ll clean up,” he said. “I have been a mess. You have been my sole friend, my only protector. I have treated you abominably.”

  He said he’d clean up. That was something, okay?

  I found a way out.

  The memory of my helpless dream made me search through everything in that room, turn everything inside out. It was all very metaphorical. Pain had made me extremely high-class.

  The solution was in the wardrobe.

  It was filled with dozens of mildewed paperbacks. Robert Ludlum. Sidney Sheldon. Wilbur Smith. Textbooks of Vedic mathematics, science, and English. Third-place trophies for school sports days.

  I suppose I had also needed something to distract me, anything to stop me looking down at my right hand. I had been throwing books around, stepping on them so much that a parent would have given me the thrashing of a lifetime. Rudi had gotten into it too.

  I saw the instrument of our deliverance hidden behind all the crap, wrapped in newspaper. I pulled it out, long and hard and heavy and perfect.

  A cricket bat. A cricket bat!

  And not just any bat. I looked at the black scrawls on it, names of heroes to every Indian boy and girl, just not me. I whistled to Rudi, who was cheerily ripping book covers in half. “Goatfucker,” I said. He turned and looked at the bat. His face broke into a deranged smile.

  The pain from my finger made me shake. The bandage was colored with spots of brown-red like it had been invited to some avant-garde, MBA-type, single-color Holi celebration and the rest of me had not.

  I handed the bat to Rudi with a wince. He gave it a few swings through the air. We nodded to each other. Nothing else had to be said. The next time someone came in, we’d make them pay.

  How exactly, we didn’t know. But the ransom clearly wasn’t coming. There was nothing to do but act.

  We moved to our places on the floor and went back to crying and being pathetic. Rudi hid the bat behind his back and made weird moaning noises.

  “You don’t actually have to make any noise at all!” I whispered, and the moans quietened to a bizarre fucking meowing. He grinned like an idiot, blind to danger, like a soldier before a battle thinking only of loot and pushing the thought of death out of mind.

  There were no words said between us, no grand plan. Maybe we should have made one.

  We only had to wait a few hours. Abhi. That stupid idiot.

  He came in with the plates piled high, probably wanted to repeat his dropping of the food, maybe more theatrical this time, but one look at the bloodied bandage around my finger and he turned white with disgusted pity.

  He laid the daal and chapatis down in front of me, trying not to get too close, nearly bowing as he did it, probably thought he was doing some charitable service, like the stuff kids lie about on CVs to get into Stanford.

  “Hey, kid, could you push the plate closer? My hand, my hand. You did this.” I started to wail. Overdramatic, yes. Effective, yes. He came closer. He was avoiding looking at my face and that missing finger of mine.

  “Closer, beta, closer,” I said. He hadn’t even come with Pratap. The dumb bastard. He was going to get an education from the Kumar Family School of Educational Abuse.

  I saw Rudi rise beside him, gripping the bat.

  “Hey, kid,” I said. He was close enough to kiss. “Don’t move.”

  He gaped at me. “Why? Can I help you? I’m sorry. I—”

  “No, because Rudi’s behind you with a fucking cricket bat.”

  “All right, bhosdike,” said Rudi, holding the bat above his head, “out we go. Start shouting. Loud. Put the fear of God into your papa.” We needed him to make noise. We needed his father to fear us for the rest of his life. Well, we needed him to give us the car keys. The two were much the same.

  Abhi realized he’d been tricked. He gave me a look of sheepish betrayal. Then his eyes turned very cold. I’d made him a man in that moment. He wouldn’t be trusting anyone again for a long, long time. I’d made him just like me. Outstanding.

  “Help, help,” he wailed.

  “Louder!” said Rudi, poking him with the willow as we walked out into the opulent greenery of the courtyard. The Americans have it right. Green is the color of wealth.

  “Help! Help! They’re going to kill me!” the kid said. He looked at us with complete disgust. Rudi nodded, pleased.

  The kid seemed more bewildered than angry. His good intentions had backfired spectacularly. He wasn’t going to be bringing food to future kidnappees ever again. “Last time, Dad, I promise,” I imagine he’d say. I wondered how much he’d get beaten later; maybe not at all, actually, and that really made me sick.

  The rooms around the courtyard came to life. I heard doors slam and people swear in confusion.

  Our captors came out. Abhi’s father was whiter than a funeral shroud. Good. What an idiot. Bringing us to his hous
e. Letting his son run free. A rich man trying to play a poor man’s game.

  “Abhi! Leave him alone!” The maharaja’s voice was hoarse, his clothes in a state of hastily buttoned disarray. His eyes were wet. Not out of concern for his child, I realized, but because he’d been tricked, he’d been made to look small in his own home, and worst of all, his son, his prize asset, his future TV princeling, was being stolen right from under him.

  I held Abhi close with my left hand, gripping his polo shirt by the waist. I held my bandaged right hand to my side.

  Pratap was behind his master, wearing a moth-bitten vest. They hissed about something. Pratap moved forward, his sharp little teeth wet with spit.

  “Let him go,” he said, “or I’ll cut something else off.” He held a knife, dull and gray, probably another one from his collection. He didn’t have to restrain himself now, didn’t have to convince his employer about harsh methods. He could do whatever he wanted. He was in heaven.

  “Fuck off,” Rudi said. “Or the kid is getting brained with this. Which genius decided to keep us in a room with a cricket bat? We’re going to take your son for a little ride.” See? The plan presented itself.

  “No!” shouted Abhi’s father. “I’ll give you anything. Stop! My boy!”

  “Fucking idiot bringing them food alone,” said Pratap. He gave his boss a venomous look. Abhi’s father looked like he wanted the earth to swallow him whole, Sita style, away from earthly cares into the warm embrace of the earth goddess.

  No such luck, my man!

  I pushed Abhi over to Rudi, holding him like a shield, and shouted out to the maharaja, “Tell Pratap to put the knife down, madarchod, or I’m giving your sweet rasgulla one in the balls. Or the face, maybe? Don’t worry. I’ve heard they can do wonders with jaw surgery nowadays.”

  Abhi’s father stood paralyzed by anger.

  Pratap said nothing, just edged forward, slowly, softly.

  “Tell him to put the knife down,” I said.

  “Put the knife down, Pratap!” said the maharaja.

  Pratap shook his head.

  “Okay, Rudi,” I said, and he understood, swung the bat over his head and into the kid’s ribs.