How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  “Aargh!”

  Only that wasn’t him. That was me. Rudi had hit my bloody hand.

  “Bakchod, Rudi!”

  “I’m sorry, dude,” he said. “Sorry!”

  I kept a good grip on Abhi with my left hand, even though he wriggled hard and my injured finger hurt worse than a goat biting my lund off.

  “Try to get him properly this time,” I spat out. “Five, four—”

  “Pratap, put the knife down,” said the maharaja. “Immediately!”

  Pratap looked at him with hatred, then laid the knife on the floor and kicked it away, his prayer beads falling out of his vest. He would no doubt be going on Amazon later and doing some retail therapy in the Lower Caste Maiming Implements (Blade) section.

  “Keys! All of them,” I shouted. I looked out of the gate. Three cars outside. The Maruti we’d come in, a jeep, and an SUV.

  Abhi’s father shouted out for keys, and some bloody servant came hobbling out from somewhere with three sets, tried to avoid my eyes, handed them to me, and scuttled off.

  Everyone was keeping quiet throughout the screaming and the kidnapping up to this point, I thought. Just like I would have done.

  “Anyone move, the kid fucking gets it, cocksuckers,” said Rudi, swinging the bat windmill style like Dhoni, really getting into the violence, drawing on all those years of watching Tarantino films and shouting at TV cricket.

  Look at that! Give one kid a very rare cricket bat signed by the entire team of the immortal Eden Gardens victory of 2001, and look what he turns into. Give another kid an education from a French nun, and look what happens to him.

  Pratap was edging forward again.

  “Rudi, can we swap? This kid is starting to annoy me, and if Pratap comes any closer, I WILL BEAT THIS CHILD,” I shouted. Jesus, the pain was killing me, and it was exhausting holding the boy while he struggled, as the blood pounded into my hand. Abhi was sweating, his breath loud and hot in my ear, and my finger, my finger, my finger. His father turned even paler, and started mumbling childhood prayers to himself.

  I handed Rudi the kid, who was still crying. Rudi walked backward with him. I waved the bat with my left hand, higher now, just past Abhi’s jaw. His father looked like he was having a stroke. His son was an asset, one that a cricket bat across the face would permanently devalue. Pratap looked like a tiger eyeing a memsahib on a palanquin.

  “Get in the Maruti,” I shouted. There were about ten million of the ratty old things in Delhi. The SUV was tempting, but even in the most arduous of circumstances, you must know who you are and where you came from. I was not born to be an SUV driver. It was not fated.

  Rudi threw Abhi into the back and climbed in after him. I jumped into the driver’s seat.

  I imagined going to Pratap and hitting him a few times, maybe say some filmie dialogue, “I shall piss on your grave when you are dead” kind of thing, but I thought better of it. He might have another knife hidden somewhere; best not to act like a hero and end up dead.

  “You tell the police anything,” I shouted through the car window, just so they all knew the stakes—I am a great believer in contractual clarity, after all—“and your pretty little son gets it from us. Again. But this time across the face. No more TV for him!”

  I turned the key, and off we went. I crunched through the gears. I had some knowledge of clutch control from years of mopeds, and I am a very quick learner.

  “That fuck is not going to give up,” I said, as the car bounced over dried-up streams and farmers’ graves. “Pratap. He’s going to kill us or die trying. I know his type.”

  “We’ve got very few choices,” shouted Rudi. “I say we get to the studio, tell them what happened, file a report with the police—”

  “The fucking police aren’t going to help us, Rudi. You really want to turn up to Oberoi with this? He’ll fuck you over somehow. And whoever Abhi’s father is, he’s rich and he’ll know the police—hey, kid, what’s your father’s name? Tell us or I’ll cut off your finger!” I started laughing. I roared. My hand convulsed with pain. I nearly drove off the road.

  Rudi looked at me as if I was crazy.

  “No,” I added, after I had calmed myself down. “I have contacts. We go to them first. We can’t go to Oberoi or the studio yet.” Or Priya, I thought. I wanted to go to her right then, take my money and run far, far away, somewhere they had Christmas mass and ate chestnuts straight from the fire and where parents brought their children hot chocolate at night. I had to keep her the hell away from this.

  And I couldn’t do that to bloody Rudi.

  I couldn’t let him rot. I liked the little lund, I’d realized.

  I tried to hold the wheel with my thumb, tried to keep the vibrations from jarring my wound. I swore repeatedly, at the pain, the road, at farmers to move their cows, at anything.

  I drove on through the arsehole that is Uttar Pradesh, breeding ground of half the world’s murderers, rapists, dickheads, and quiz hosts. I found the main road. Delhi, 70 miles. I drove back at a world-record pace.

  You want to know who a man truly is? Watch him drive. Watch how he reacts, how he responds to people who cut in, who break rules. Watch his speed, how often he checks his mirrors.

  That day the drivers on the Delhi–Agra road must have thought they were driving alongside a madman.

  Eleven

  We went back to my old rented apartment. I stopped the Maruti outside and checked for anyone I knew. Just men, always men, minding their own business, doing the usual midday motherfuckery, keeping their heads down, YouTube-watching, eating, and spitting. My neighborhood was in that sweet spot between rich and poor, the one where people knew not to ask questions, not to look where they shouldn’t. To be a busybody, you either need lots of money or none of it.

  “Now, kid, are you going to cooperate?” I asked our little princeling. I didn’t need to. He looked like one of Krishna’s calves, sweet and innocent. He nodded, and then the hatred returned.

  “You’d fucking better,” said Rudi, who had decided to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger, only fatter and less threatening. The kid nodded again, his brows knitted together, his gaze moving away from both of us. He hated us. Post-cricket loss-level hated us. I would have to talk to Rudi.

  “Okay,” I said, opening the door of the van, making sure no one was around—I was in the company of a TV star after all—“on my mark, here—we—go.”

  At my signal, as soon as the street was empty, we rushed inside, Rudi and I hauling Abhi between us, up the dark stairs, up past the apartments of suicidally depressed accountants and gas board workers and municipal planners who dreamed of killing their colleagues over stolen lunches.

  We collapsed back into my little one-room flat. I saw it anew. There was the old bed, the desk, the computer, the life I’d had before Rudi. It all looked so small, so pathetic.

  I had an elephant shit pat of junk mail, bills, marriage proposal website ads, and astrologers’ predictions that I kicked out of the way like kids do to cats. I threw the boy onto my bed. I took the cricket bat and kissed it. Thank you, Dravid! Thank you, Tendulkar! It was the only time I’ve ever cared about cricket.

  “We’ll be okay for a couple of hours here,” I said, because it was obvious and it was what film stars said in such situations. With films and nuns as my chief educational influences, it’s no wonder I have turned out the way I have.

  I knew I must have appeared crazy. Hair wild with sweat, looking like I’d just been kidnapped, because I had. I glanced over at Abhi. “Do not worry, little man, you shall be back with Daddy soon, celebrating Diwali, editing videos, and cutting off hands. No hard feelings about all this, ya?”

  “Fuck you,” he said, snot running down his face onto his polo shirt.

  “What did we do to you?” Rudi asked. I thought it was quite obvious what we had done to him.

  “You fucked up my life. You fucked up everything,” Abhi said. “Everyone thinks I’m a joke.” His ferocity made Rudi fall quiet, his
movie star bravado vanished entirely.

  “My father thinks I’m a joke,” Abhi said finally.

  Rudi and I looked at each other at the same time.

  Fathers, huh?

  “Well,” I said sweetly, “we are very sorry. Aren’t we, Rudi? We will sort this all out very soon. We will get you back to your father. We will make amends. We went too far, didn’t we, Rudi?”

  “Yes,” he said. He kept giving the kid these strange, gurning looks. I was trying hard to figure it out—oh, it was sympathy. He was growing. He’d become more of an adult. What a silver lining to this whole bloody experience.

  “Fuck you both,” said Abhi.

  “A very understandable response,” I said. “But we need information. We can make a deal that keeps everyone’s precious family honor intact and whatnot. Then you go back home. Okay?”

  The kid grunted. He turned his face to the wall. Bloody upper-middle-class teenagers. If I cannot stand them, why did I choose a life that revolves entirely around them?

  “So your papa is . . . ? Huh, beta? Please,” I asked in my Claire voice.

  “Himanshu Aggarwal,” he said finally, while facing the other way. I looked at Rudi. We shook our heads as one. Abhi turned his head. “Himanshu Aggarwal? Construction? HA Builders? ‘Take a Rest, HA Is Be—’”

  “All right!” I said, stopping him before he recited the entire “About Us” section on his family’s corporate website.

  People in construction—the worst. They’ll do anything. It’s putting their stamp on the world, their little pimple on the ass of creation, that attracts the worst sort of person.

  Just the sort of people we didn’t want as enemies.

  I gestured to Rudi and we went into the corner of the room.

  “You need to be nicer to the kid,” I said. “You humiliated him on national television. Did you not see the GIFs? The reaction videos? The bhangra remix? We need to keep him on side. Please, Rudi.”

  He looked back to Abhi, who was staring at us like an uncle at a wedding buffet that’s run out of butter chicken. Yes, he was that angry. Rudi nodded conscientiously, and for the first time in months looked like the eighteen-year-old he was.

  “Good, boss. You do that. I have a contact who can help us, but we need to move fast.” I had turned my back on Sumit before. That had been a mistake. I’d have to buy him all the Paco Rabanne in Delhi if he helped me out of this one.

  “What do we do?” Rudi asked. “What’s our angle?” What’s our angle? Seriously?

  “If we give the kid back, his father will back off. Yes, he knows our secret, but you saw him. He’s an amateur. An amateur with a pet psychopath underling. A rich man bringing us to his own house. Telling us who he is. We stay out of trouble. We use my middleman Sumit. Maybe we sweeten the deal. You don’t really need all those Instagram advertisements, do you, boss? Maybe we give Abhi a little helping hand. And then back to the big time for you and me.”

  I counted out the steps we’d have to take, with a little masala to make it seem less like something I’d pulled out of my arse. “My contact. Make a deal. Give the kid back. Make our miraculous reappearance, you’ll be back selling washing machines on TV in two, three days tops. All right?”

  Rudi looked suitably impressed. Or terrified. I have difficulty knowing the difference even after all this time.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and he started looking thoughtful and introspective, and God, I knew what that sentence meant, it meant crisis of conscience and I am going to volunteer my medical services in the Congo. “I have been so materialistic. So out of control. I need to get back to basics. I need to reassess what’s important in my life.”

  He looked full of charity and joy and other things that make no money.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I agree. I’ll sign us up to a Buddhist prayer retreat in Sikkim first thing.” Three days of that, vegetarianism and chanting and dead bodies decaying on the hillside and prayer flags fluttering in the fucking wind, and he’d be begging to go back.

  “You’re my one true friend, Ramesh,” he said. “All this money, this false god, it never makes a difference. No one wants me for me. They want me for my fame. We’ve got to start getting in touch with who we really are. What do we really want out of life? What is happiness?”

  I was going to murder whoever made the YouTube videos he’d been watching. Some bhenchod Eastern mystic type, living in fucking California, talking about the evils of materialism from a Malibu beach.

  “That is wonderful,” I said. “Truly touching. I need to go out.”

  I was about to leave. I thought of what my life with Rudi had become, even before the kidnapping. Hiding from the world. Now he realized things had gone too far. He was trying to make a change.

  I turned back. He was having a crisis, and I had to be his friend. I had to help him. This kidnapping business could be the start of something better, for him and for us.

  “Can you please make a start on the kid?” I said. “Make him hate us less. I know you can do it.” I gave him a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “You’re good at winning people over. Try, all right, boss?”

  He nodded, and smiled grimly at me. He wasn’t shivering or pale anymore. He looked like a changed man from just a few days before. No more drugs, I thought to myself, I’d make sure there were never any more drugs.

  I pulled on a pair of sunglasses and fished out one of my wigs from the old days. I went into the bathroom, stood on a bucket, and pulled out a few thousand rupees from a brick I had hidden in the fan vent, nearly slipping on the marble floor as I climbed down.

  “Ah, Ramesh,” said Rudi as I left. “Perhaps buy me a phone? Just to check on the n—”

  “No!” I said. “You’ll give us away in about five seconds. Let me just check the trending, then it’ll be let me do a post about being kidnapped, then it’ll be a livestream. No phone. No social media. We need less of that from now on, Rudraksh.”

  I went out into the street without waiting for the reaction. A few people looked at me. The neighborhood was getting richer, clearly. The local moonshine joint had gone, the tailor, the butcher, you know, the useful things, and in had come flower shops and workout studios.

  Unlike Rudi, I could go out easily. My face had never been on the news. I was just the servant, the associate, the underling. “He was devoted to him,” they would say if I turned up headless, if I got any coverage at all. There were no good photos of me to use. No Facebook, no Instagram, nothing. It was as if I didn’t exist.

  I bought a cheap smartphone at a little electronics place, cash only, no identity cards needed in east Delhi, no sir! Government regulations against Pakistani undercover agents? Against Dubai-dwelling dark money? Ha! We spit in the face of national security when there is money to be made. We live in our premodern world and we defy the state and its grubby claws besmirching our freedoms. For now.

  And then I did what I’d been wanting to do from the minute I’d been kidnapped.

  I rang Priya.

  I felt overwhelmed. I sat in a café and drank coffee, Indian coffee, savoring the burnt, cheap taste of chicory, watching little people live carefree lives around me, eating vast family dosas and slurping down lassi in lower-middle-class contentment. But I wasn’t any better than them. I was them and they were me. I’d just gotten a bit richer, and my morals and values were yet to adjust to my newfound wealth.

  I could be putting her at risk, her life, her career, her payments to her parents, but I needed to listen to her voice. I needed her to know that I was all right.

  I sat there for far too long, listening to the excitement in children’s voices as they begged their parents to buy toys, firecrackers, sparklers for Diwali. Maybe I’d be listening to some of my own one day.

  I swallowed my fears. I rang her.

  I had memorized her number, of course, one of those tricks the rich have forgotten with their smartphones.

  “Ramesh?” she said. “Ramesh! My God, you’re alive.”
And then she began laughing, and then sobbing and finally sniffling with relief. “You’re alive!” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. There was a strange lump in my throat, and I found myself unable to say anything else. That’s either love or a lack of proper hydration.

  “Where are you? I’ll come—”

  “No!” I said. “You can’t. It’s complicated. We’re safe. We escaped.”

  “We paid the ransom straightaway,” she said, “and then we didn’t hear anything. I thought you—”

  “What?” So Abhi’s father had betrayed us. Cut off my finger. Stolen the ransom.

  I breathed out long and hard.

  My finger, lost for nothing. For drama, for show, to make a point.

  I was capable of many things, but never something like that.

  “I’ll do anything to help,” she continued. “Tell me where you are. I want to help, Ramesh.”

  “No,” I said, even though I wanted to see her more than anything. I wanted her to run to me and tell me it would be all right. I delighted for a moment in the pure selfishness of it. “I’ll be in touch tomorrow. I promise. I just wanted you to know I was alive.” I hung up.

  I didn’t tell her what I really wanted to say, the let’s-run-away-together-and-never-look-back thing, because of the many-dozens-of-skeletons-hidden-in-my-closet thing.

  I didn’t tell her I loved her, either. But I wanted to. I would do. Nothing would stop me, when all this was over.

  So the ransom had been paid. Oberoi had come through for us after all. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe he’d felt guilty for bringing Abhi on the show in the first place.

  I sat and thought about Rudi too. It seemed that kidnap and violence brought out the caring side in me. At the end of the day, I was the kid’s only friend.

  It was my job. More than that. It was my calling. It was my fulfillment of sanatana dharma, my way out of purgatory, out of the life I’d built for myself, this lonely little meaningless life.

  I needed him to be all right.

  That was what responsible managers did.

  That was what friends did.