How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  If I hadn’t been in love with Priya already, I would have fallen for her then.

  I leaned in. “Also we won’t email these blackmail photos to every newspaper in the country, please, ma’am.”

  “Do we have a deal?” said Priya quietly. “Inspector Bhatnagar? Do we have a deal?”

  “Fine,” Bhatnagar said and leaned back in her chair. Rudi and I almost gasped in relief.

  She looked at us, at our clothes, at Rudi’s makeup and wig, and shook her head with complete disbelief.

  Then she made some phone calls.

  They did not sound so fine. They sounded very much the opposite.

  I looked at Priya. She laid her palm on my knee under the table to reassure me that all would be well, and I, very stupidly, felt instantly at ease.

  “I’ll set you up in a safe house,” Bhatnagar finally said. “I can do very little else. I don’t have as many friends as I used to. Then we’ll deal with this man Sumit. Getting Abhi Aggarwal back will unlock the whole situation. Himanshu Aggarwal. God! He’s an enemy you can’t afford to make. He was on all the boards my ex wanted to be on, the charities, the golf, the sailing squadron. I always thought he was an idiot. Trust someone like him to be involved in this.”

  Did these people all know each other? Was that what it was like, being truly rich?

  “And I won’t get prosecuted?” Rudi asked. “I am not getting fucked,” he added in most unladylike language. I gave him a kick, a loving one to remind him to draw less attention to himself in public.

  Bhatnagar eyed him, and then me, with significant distaste.

  “I promise,” she said. “Your assistant producer here is a very persuasive young woman. You need to listen to her more and spend less of your time kidnapping people.”

  And blackmailing, I thought.

  “If this hadn’t gone to plan,” said Rudi, “I was going to kid—”

  “We must get going!” said Priya.

  “Where did you come up with that plan?” I asked her as we left.

  “A film. You know the one where Shah Rukh romances that girl young enough to be his granddaughter.” She smiled. “Actually, that’s all of them, isn’t it?”

  Later that day, when we were back at the apartment, a car ordered by Bhatnagar came to pick us up. It dropped us off at some nondescript flat in south Delhi, her department’s safe house, she said. The place was emptier than a politician’s promises, dusty from disuse, but, crucially, not full of people who wanted to kill us. The living room had large windows that looked out onto nothing. Little clouds of dirt pillowed up with every movement of our feet. Bhatnagar was there and she made phone calls to God knows who, arguing, shouting, cajoling, making deals with her superiors.

  “We have a deal,” she said about thirty minutes after her first call. “My bosses have given us time to get Oberoi. We’ll have to move fast. You can trust me.” She certainly looked impressive, a woman who could do anything, move mountains, make miracles happen. I was still cautious. I knew not to trust those who promised the earth, because they could still deliver very little.

  “Are you sure about your people?” I asked. Bhatnagar looked affronted. Her father had probably been Indira Gandhi’s ambassador to Indonesia. She was old money. She didn’t backstab, she said. She didn’t sell out. People had tried, and people had failed, to pay her and her team off. “We are incorruptible,” she sniffed. “We’re the Central Bureau of Investigation.”

  That was all we said to one another. If things went wrong, she could run to the West. She’d probably get a book deal for exposing the dark heart of India. We’d be the ones getting fucked. Again.

  I sat next to Priya on the sofa. She could see the look of mistrust on my face.

  “She’s on our side, Ramesh, she will help us,” she said.

  “Nobody is,” I said. “You know my worst client in the educational consulting business? Jatin Bishnoi. The crusading TV journalist? Mr. Social Conscience? He beat me. You know why? The results hadn’t come out yet, so it wasn’t that. It was because his kid had a nightmare, thought I’d cheated him, in a dream—in a dream, can you believe?—and just like that, I got pulled off the street, because his kid had a bad night’s sleep.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything, but it was this whole situation. It was Priya. She was having that effect on me. I was arguing, I was apologizing, I was showing myself to the world.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But we have to trust her.”

  Rudi was off watching television. Priya and I sat and talked about trivial things. That seemed to be what you did when the world was after you and your heart had spent the last five days beating in your mouth. She held my hand in hers. All I could think was that I shouldn’t have gotten involved in all of this, this education business. I should have become an Uber driver—and what, I thought, received abuse for two hundred rupees an hour, day after day, year after year?

  Should I have worked in a call center, left at three every morning, earned five thousand measly Gandhis a month bullshitting Floridians that my name was Dan and there was a fault on their PC?

  No, I had gone into exactly the right business. High pay, huge stress, followed by months of complete nothingness. All you had to be was clever, morally flexible, unmemorable, unthreatening, a fucking invisible man. A perfect fit.

  And of course, I never would have met her.

  She was talking about her family again, the future. Perhaps she might go back to university and do a master’s. Maybe we would go abroad. She liked the look of Canada. She had never seen snow. Whatever she wanted was fine by me. I was happy to sit and listen. I willed myself to believe that we would make it.

  “Thank you for saving me,” I said when she had finished. “Back there. And in general. You’re very good at that.”

  “I know,” she said. “And modest too.”

  That night, Bhatnagar left and Rudi and I fought over the sofa. Priya slept in the bedroom, a blank marble-floored cube, a bed with white sheets, white walls, and unwired plugs.

  All she had with her was a backpack, a phone, and a change of clothes. All I had with me was a few knives, my phone, and the memory card containing Abhi’s ransom video.

  I couldn’t help but feel sick about what I had drawn her into.

  When Bhatnagar returned the next morning, she had bad news.

  “I can’t give you much. My bosses want me to do this alone. Your Oberoi has been making friends with politicians . . .”

  “That prick,” said Rudi.

  “. . . and my bosses are nervous. I’ll work alone. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.”

  Her face was lined with worry, no matter how well she tried to hide it. We sat in the living room and talked against a background of thick gray morning fog pushing against the windows.

  “The good news is that Aggarwal wants to help. I made him see sense. He realizes he’s been fooled.” She laughed. “That moron. Totally in over his head. His father must have been the one with brains. He just inherited the damn company. Oh, my ex worshipped the ground he walked on. ‘He’s so classy, Anju,’ ‘He knows everyone, Anju,’ ‘Flirt with him, Anju,’ ‘Fuck him, Anju, it’ll be good for us.’ My God!”

  Priya began to snort, and Bhatnagar shrugged her shoulders.

  “I thought you two boys were stupid, but this country has been breeding idiots lately!” She whistled. “This Oberoi fellow, another champion fool. Up to his eyeballs in debt. Political aspirations. So he decides to get you kidnapped and steal the ransom. Men!”

  “Not all of us,” said Rudi, and I thought, have you seen the collected works of Indian mankind, boss?

  “We get the boy back, and then my bosses have allowed me a press conference. Oberoi may have political connections, but we have the celebrity Rudraksh Saxena. But we are alone, remember that. One word from the People’s Party, and my bosses disown me, and you. Fucking typical,” she added, under her breath. “It’s all I can do.”

  Bhatnagar drove a govern
ment-issue Qualis to Aggarwal’s farmhouse. She maneuvered this way and that, with the standard expensive government car insanity, swearing under her breath at slow-moving duffers, at idiot young men driving motorbikes the wrong way, at carts laden with fruit, the ones heroes always crashed into in the action films. Everyone moved out of her way, fearful of who sat behind those tinted windows, wondering which AK-47-toting Yale-dropout minister’s son was out for blood that day.

  We pulled up at the farmhouse. Bhatnagar told us to wait, then got out and walked over to the gate. She knocked sharply.

  It opened quickly, and out came Himanshu Aggarwal himself.

  No servants! No lackeys!

  He moved forward to hug her, but Bhatnagar sidestepped his arms.

  “So good to see you again, Anju,” he said. “The boat club was it, last time?”

  Bhatnagar gave him a false smile. She turned and waved at us.

  We all went inside.

  Himanshu Aggarwal was even more irritating the second time around.

  “Boys, boys,” he said, clasping us to his moist breast, doing the thing where he faked going to touch your feet in respect, and you stopped him and said, “Please, sir, you are older and wiser than me, there’s no need.”

  “Boys, will you accept my apology?”

  Fuck no, I thought, and looked at Rudi, who clearly felt the same.

  “Yes, sir,” we said in unison.

  Then Pratap came into the room. I tried to rise. Rudi let out an involuntary grunt. My finger throbbed with pain. The last time we had seen him, he was trying to shoot us. Now he served us glasses of whisky, bitter, ice-cold, repulsive, unrefusable, well, unless you were Priya.

  He looked as angry as ever, but he had to be nice and unobjectionable and wait on us without complaint. It was most enjoyable.

  “Oberoi has tricked me. He has betrayed me. He has disappeared. No one makes a fool of an Aggarwal,” said Himanshu Aggarwal. His fingers had even more rings on them this time, retail therapy in action. “I forgive you for taking my boy. The idea seemed so simple when Oberoi explained it to me.”

  “How do you know him?” said Rudi.

  “Socially. You know how it is.”

  Yes, of course I’ll kidnap your star attraction, had a nice round of golf, did you? Standard upper-class behavior, no doubt. I had their level of money, nearly, but I would never have their tastes.

  “Oberoi said he had a spot for my son on the show,” Aggarwal said. “He said Abhi would surely win. And then Abhi got knocked out on the first question. Oberoi apologized to me a million times. He said the trick question was all your idea. He tried to overrule you.”

  “I didn’t set him up,” said Rudi. “I would never do anything like that.” Just mocked him viciously and broke him down in front of tens of millions of people, but who cared about that?

  “So Oberoi told me that I should abduct you. We would split the ransom. A nice little Diwali present for the both of us.”

  “Do you often go around arranging kidnap plots with people you barely know?” said Priya.

  “He told me you were arrogant, out of control, that you deserved it,” said Aggarwal.

  “Maybe he was right about that,” said Rudi, but Aggarwal carried on.

  “He told me where you lived. We took you. It was all so simple. But then the ransom money didn’t come. I phoned Oberoi and he said it had been refused. He said that I should cut some body parts off. And then, if still the money did not come, I should get rid of you.”

  “That shit,” said Priya.

  “It could happen to anyone, sir,” said Bhatnagar, without even a hint of humor in her voice. “Who hasn’t wanted to kidnap someone at some point?”

  “Exactly, exactly,” said Aggarwal, speaking quickly, as if he was trying to brush it under the carpet. “And Pratap is very sorry about the finger business. He had to throw it away. It was stinking up the place. Pratap, you are sorry, aren’t you?”

  Pratap, standing behind his master, tried to pretend he had not heard.

  “Pratap!” Aggarwal said. He was watching Bhatnagar for a reaction. She was looking unimpressed.

  Pratap gave me a look of disgust. “Sorry,” he said.

  That was what money could do, I thought. That was what millennia of social control and economic stratification could get you. A forced apology! Groveling! Such power! It was thrilling.

  “Anything else?” Aggarwal asked me.

  I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt Pratap. He was going to get away with it, with hurting me, but as I sat there, knowing how much shit we were in, how much farther we had to go, how much I wanted to run away with Priya, I realized that anything rash I did now would just complicate matters. I let it go. No good would come of me going for revenge.

  I shook my head.

  Aggarwal howled a little longer about how his family had been taken advantage of. These rich people and their problems, family honor and offshore accounts, they are far too much for me. Give me a little money and the love of a good woman any day.

  I honestly, truly, for real this time, had gotten ahead of myself.

  It is very easy, when you are listening to an idiot drone on, and sharing secret looks with the woman sitting by your side as you laugh into your drink, and life seems so perfect, to think that everything is going to be all right, that all you have to do is find one psychopath producer and bring him to justice, and that soon all will be well.

  It is never that easy.

  “We’ve set up the sting to get your son. He’s being held by a man called Sumit Gaikwad,” explained Bhatnagar, bringing Aggarwal’s pity session to a close. She had used her contacts and managed to find Sumit’s whereabouts in a few hours. “Tomorrow, nine a.m., by Humayun’s Tomb. We’ll give you a bag of money, Mr. Aggarwal, you drive there alone, and we come in and save you and your son.”

  “Capital idea, Anju,” said Aggarwal, and Bhatnagar seemed to use all her self-control not to shudder. “Capital. Himanshu Aggarwal has never been afraid of a little danger. Pratap, serve our guests some namkeen.”

  Pratap clanked over to us again, bearing mini samosas and spooning out those awful fluorescent green and red chutneys. He was a very multitalented servant, almost better than me. From tea to torture, he could do it all.

  Bhatnagar went off to take a phone call. I strained to listen, and overheard talk of press conferences and manhunts and bartering for more departmental resources.

  Aggarwal was like a train. He couldn’t be stopped—not an Indian train then, but a Japanese one. We pretended to be interested.

  Bhatnagar returned, drank four cups of tea, and tried to look amused. When we heard something egregiously stupid, Priya and I rolled our eyes at each other. It was a better bonding experience than the whole kidnapping-revenge-blackmail thing.

  Aggarwal changed the subject every five minutes, whiplashing in different directions. The differences between the castes, the original homeland of the Aryan race, Ayurvedic treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s, they all got an airing. He raised his voice when he did so, like he was reading headings from a book.

  I watched him. Then I realized what he was doing.

  The second that Rudi looked bored, or Priya looked away, Aggarwal changed the subject. He raised his voice to regain our attention, and thus satisfied, off he went on another tangent. He was scared of boring us. Him!

  How pathetic!

  At the end of it, he was an Aggarwal. It was his name. He was expected to do great things. Your name is always your destiny. You can tell a man’s life, his opinions, the contents of his stomach, his future, his very dying day by his name. I am a Kumar. There are twenty million of us. Nothing is expected of us but to shit and die.

  The day wore on. We listened to Aggarwal, we sat, we worried about Oberoi and Abhi and everything else. We were waiting for Bhatnagar to organize things, to deal with the Indian bureaucracy. It was a wonder we didn’t wait for weeks.

  At least we ate like kings. I’m a Delhi boy throu
gh and through.

  Priya and I drank coffee long past midnight, into the morning hours. She had her faults. A fondness for Bengali food. A love of K-pop. She preferred Aamir Khan to Akshay Kumar. Nothing we couldn’t get over in time.

  We slept in comfort. Egyptian cotton, four anti-mosquito plug-ins per room, en suite bathrooms, rainwater-effect showers, soft towels. Priya reapplied my bandage and gave it a kiss when she was done.

  We slept in the same bed, me and her, for the first time. There was no funny business. We were too exhausted by the constant churn of danger to even think of anything romantic. We just lay twisted together, our limbs and our lives entwined.

  It was absurd, me and her. It made no sense. She should have been marrying some arsehole IITian and spending the rest of her life in semi-alcoholic Californian luxury, twenty acres and an almond grove. What was she doing with me?

  Of course, as I stroked her hair as she lay on my chest, I was stupid enough to say it. “What do you see in me?” or something like that. I heard her reply, felt the movement of her jaw against my chest.

  “What do you like about me?” she said.

  “What don’t I like! You’re kind,” I said. “Patient, understanding, funny, you’re good at everything you do. I feel different when I see you, my day feels better, my heart lifts.”

  “That’s why I like you too,” I heard her say.

  What a dirty trick! A dirty Western trick!

  Well, at least no beatings for me that night, no sir!

  Sixteen

  We were down the highway from Humayun’s Tomb. Nice place. Like all these tourist traps, I have never been. God knows Claire gave me enough shit for not caring about the patrimony of my nation, Fatehpur Sikri and the Koh-i-Noor and all that bakwas.

  The Muslims are like the Christians. They do monuments to the dead, graves, memorials, and sepulchers. The Hindus have it right, I’d told Claire, once you’re burned you’re gone, and maybe your relatives or co-workers run an advert in the paper. But the Christians and Muslims, they tend graves, put flowers on them, they ask themselves: Am I visiting enough? Am I thinking the right thoughts? All you do is marinate yourself in the bastard past.