How to Kidnap the Rich

by Rahul Raina

  No one had recognized us. The disguises were still working. At least one of my stupid plans had played out as it should. Rudi straightened his clothes as we moved away from the main strip. “People were fucking groping me, yaar, fucking again,” he said, with disgust on his face. “Do all men do that?”

  Priya and Bhatnagar nodded.

  “Oh,” he said.

  We moved down toward an enclave or a colony or something posh-sounding, and managed to book a cab. Bhatnagar was hyper-vigilant. Everyone approaching us was a threat, every scowl of every street sweeper, every car that moved too quickly or braked too hard. Her head was twitching like a Parsi finding a hole in his accounts.

  When it arrived, the cab could barely move because of the hubbub. The driver had to get out and herd the people out of his way, and we had to listen to his purple-faced complaints about the traffic and how the city seemed to have lost control, all the way to Bhatnagar’s place.

  Her house was gigantic. If someone had a house in Delhi, you automatically assumed they were rich, but hers was on a different level. Green vines climbed the walls of the courtyard, a forest of plants sat fat and regal in terracotta pots, wooden shutters with intricate designs dotted the walls, three, maybe four floors.

  “Aadarsh and I were going for a haveli, with a modern twist,” she said.

  “I’m sure it was all you. You have such wonderful taste,” said Rudi, dragging his sari off to reveal a sodden T-shirt underneath. “Such an oasis,” he added with a sour face. “A beautifully curated retreat from the cares and worries of the modern—”

  “Can we please see the news?” I said, and Bhatnagar led us through large French doors into a living room, past sweet-smelling tapestries and frantic modern art, maybe even the real deal. Her tasteful furniture no doubt was sourced from the poorest artisans giving traditional Indian designs a modern twist from their roofless shacks in Odisha.

  We collapsed in front of the TV. We learned very little. That was usual. People thought I was a demon. That was not.

  Much empty discussion was raging. We had become a diplomatic incident. Retired Pakistani generals on blocky Skype calls were disavowing their nation’s part in the Saxena affair, Saxgate, #PakExamScandal.

  “So we need to kidnap Oberoi, right?” said Rudi after a few minutes. He looked at all of us. “We know that’s what’s going to happen. Priya will make all sorts of humane, liberal statements. Bhatnagar, you’ll talk about the rule of law. But we know what we have to do.” He dared us to defy him. We said nothing. “Do you have a computer, Ms. Bhatnagar? In the library? I’m going to go watch some videos. Come and get me when you guys have grown some balls.”

  “He’s right,” I said, but only after he left.

  “He’s not,” said Bhatnagar, tapping her fingers against her jeans. “I swore to uphold the constitution of this country. I swore to defend it against its enemies. There’s nothing in our laws that makes kidnapping legal.”

  “I don’t think anyone else got that message,” I said.

  “We have to play dirty,” said Priya. “There’s nothing else I can see.” She and Bhatnagar shared a look. They had been talking while Rudi and I bickered the past few days, while we shot shit about food, about Manchester United, about TV series, about pretty much anything that men will talk about instead of the issue at hand.

  “There has to be another way,” said Bhatnagar, but Priya shook her head gently, with the sort of insistent reasonableness that overcame all opposition. Our kids . . . her kids wouldn’t ever be able to say no. She would guilt-trip the shit out of them.

  Bhatnagar made calls and tried to figure out which of her men were still trustworthy. The TV blared on. Even the BBC was talking about us, although they made it seem one of those crazy India stories, What are the bloody brownies doing now?

  Priya leaned against me. She started playing with my hair, which was tangled and wiry from the heat.

  “You smell terrible,” she said, and snuggled against my arm. I didn’t know how or why it had happened, but I accepted it. I had never faked any exams about women.

  We had coffee. Her face was hidden behind her mug. Her hand was in mine throughout. I felt very adult then, like a man is supposed to, something I never understood, something to do with aftershave and taxes and doing laundry.

  For dinner, we ate Lebanese, and wondered what the hell we were going to do.

  Eighteen

  It was a simple, suicidal plan. But when a whole country is against you, and you have only one senior civil servant on your side, what else can you do?

  We would make our move on a Saturday morning, everyone hungover from Friday’s whisky and imported wine.

  We would break into the People’s Party headquarters.

  I would break into the People’s Party headquarters.

  They were drunk with power right now, everyone was licking their lunds round the clock. They had turned India into what seemed like one mass riot from Kargil to Kanyakumari that they could direct toward the houses of liberal journalists and NGO heads with degrees from Harvard. They would be distracted, signing TV deals and film rights and getting their interns to suck them off. I would take Oberoi, force him to confess on live TV, and everything would be right in the world.

  I said it was a simple plan. I didn’t say it was a good one.

  We were running out of time. Sooner or later someone would notice that Bhatnagar’s departmental house had been getting a lot of use in the last few days, far in excess of what any educational investigator usually required. That someone would ask questions, because they wanted to drag her down a caste or two, and she would be exposed, and then we would all be going to prison for the rest of our lives, because once you are in there for one reason, you will be kept in for any. We had to strike first.

  On TV, the students were rioting. They were thrilled that Rudi had turned out to be a Pakistani agent. “He has shown the false value we place on education in this country,” said a man with rainbow-colored hair and a clipped boarding school accent. The People’s Party and their saffron-robed followers had turned up to counter-protest. The students were waving Pakistani flags, and there was punching and screaming and throwing of plastic chairs—pre-Diwali festivities, like I said.

  Bhatnagar came back that afternoon and described the layout of the headquarters of the People’s Party to me. She had not come up with a better plan than Ramesh Kumar. I blame her limited Brahmin imagination, or maybe the long reign of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. They have robbed all these do-gooding types of their initiative.

  “Office block, Lutyens Delhi, lots of guards, impossible to get into without capture,” she said. “You’ll have to be quick, Ramesh.”

  “You mean Captain Umar Chaudhury, the James Bond of Pakistan,” I joked. I wasn’t even resigned anymore. This was my life now, stupid, dangerous stuff. What did a little more peril matter?

  “She’s right. The media has nothing but a blurred photo of you,” said Rudi. “You break in, you capture Oberoi, then you either walk out with him or you call Bhatnagar and she can pretend to arrest you if things go wrong.”

  I should have sworn at him, but I was all class now. I gave a polite, venomous cough. He was not the one who was meant to be coming up with ideas. He was not meant to be taking control of the situation and feeling morally superior about his intelligence. That was my job. How fast they grow up these days!

  Bhatnagar outlined exactly how I was going to carry out the plan. It was original, at least, and very cheap. “Then we break into the studio, show the world the truth, and help you avoid prison, Ramesh.”

  “Just me?” I said.

  “You see . . .” she said.

  “Why the hell would I be the only one going to prison?” I asked.

  “Well, Mr. Kumar,” said Bhatnagar, “you were paid money to falsify exam results. You have broken the law.”

  “So did he!” I said, pointing to Rudi.

  “I am just saying,” said Bhatnagar, “that you’re
most in danger. They’re not sending the Topper to prison, he can always find a way to get out, but you, they’ll get you, on kidnapping, on extortion, on the whole industrial system of academic impersonation that you’ve been running for the last six years.”

  “Please, everyone!” said Priya. “Can we get back to the plan? Ramesh, we will all make sure you won’t go to prison.”

  “I am not going to go to prison!” I said.

  “You and I will go to the People’s Party headquarters, Ramesh,” said Bhatnagar. “We will abduct Mr. Oberoi. Priya and Rudi must go to the studio. Their faces are everywhere now. There they will gather your production team and coordinate a very special broadcast of your show. We will bring Mr. Oberoi, and then we will unmask him, live on television.”

  “But Ramesh gets put in harm’s way most,” said Priya.

  Bhatnagar stayed silent.

  “That’s not fair,” said Priya. “It’s not his fault any of this happened.”

  It was clearly my fault that all of this had happened.

  I watched the faces around the room trying to come up with some alternative. But there wasn’t one. Priya was wrong. This was all my fault.

  “No, Priya,” I said. “They are right. I have to see this through. Nobody else can go the places I can go. Nobody can move unseen like I can. I have to do it.”

  Bhatnagar was visibly relieved.

  Rudi and I nodded at each other.

  After we finished, I went off with Priya. I held her close to me, and this was almost the most unbelievable part of the whole situation, can you fucking believe it, me and this girl, like I’d ended up with Juhi Chawla, absolutely amazing.

  Another kidnapping! I was becoming a pro at it. I was even thinking of writing a guide. It’s a difficult business, and even harder to make much profit from. You need transport, reliable, fast, unmemorable; water, food, soundproofing, medical gear; a conveniently located series of hideouts, each with communications facilities; most important, you need a plan. Of course, every kidnap I’d been part of—two so far, and who knew how many more to come—had had none of this, just idiots doing desperate things, but as Bill Gates says, you need to know failure before you can know success. Or maybe that was Adolf Hitler. Our motivational calendars do not care much for proper attribution or morality.

  If only Claire could see me now. All that effort she must have expended, dragging her weak body around, short of breath, knowing she was seriously ill but never telling another soul, her breaking voice begging her friends for work, for a life, for anything for her little boy who had nothing.

  I remembered the weight of her body while I supported her over puddles and across streets, the way she brushed the hair out of my eyes when we reached the safety of our rickshaw, willing me to know that it was all going to be all right.

  What would she make of the man I had become? In dark evenings at the chapel, on days when Dharam Lal had humiliated her, she would beg forgiveness in a soft voice, light candles, sweep floors. Days would go by where not another soul would talk to her save me. People would move away when she sat at tables. There would always be a gap between her and anyone else, and her soft shuffle would reduce rooms of girls to embarrassed silence.

  All because of me.

  I had wanted to run away so many times, to save her from me, but had never had the courage to face the world without someone to tell me that I was special and that I mattered and that I was so much better than the circumstances of my birth. Was that so bad?

  I still felt like a coward.

  What had she suffered and died for?

  For this?

  She had seen a better future for me, one where I wasn’t at the mercy of higher powers, where I didn’t have to take what the world threw at me. I had risen far higher than she could have imagined. But this country doesn’t like that. There’s only so far a boy like me is meant to go.

  They would make me pay somehow. I knew it. I went forward all the same.

  Nineteen

  The only plausible way to get into the People’s Party building was to pretend to be a journalist, and the only way to do that was to pretend to be one who already existed. The saffrons might have been crazy, but they weren’t stupid. Some little greaseball was always going to give me the once-over, a search on the internet, a check on Twitter.

  How did we find the perfect journalist? Did we scour the newspapers of India for one brave soul committed to truth and justice and win him over to our cause?

  No.

  We searched for journos who looked like me. Non-liberals, non-commies, of course, just your run-of-the-mill gossip ones who shared an unfortunate resemblance to one Ramesh Kumar. There were more than a few. Me with longer hair, me with a moustache, me with glasses. The one we settled on was called Utsav Mehta, a film columnist with a million shitty pieces about Kangana’s latest outburst and Kareena’s new post-pregnancy bod.

  Then we got Bhatnagar—well, me—to message him on Facebook.

  I read your article on 5 Top Celebrity Moms, I wrote. You are a great up-and-coming Indian journalist. Maybe we can meet to discuss sources and . . . more.

  Mehta bit like a goat on its mother’s teat. Two minutes—ping!

  Wow, so quick, and so handsome too. Hopefully you are not quick at other things! Want to meet up for chat? Priya sat by me and contributed the most ludicrous lines she could think of, driving young Utsav crazy with lust.

  Bhatnagar checked in, just to see we weren’t doing anything too bad, allowing herself to chuckle after she read a line about what cup size Mehta preferred—coffee, of course. He wanted selfies too, and we wrote that it would be better for him to get them in person.

  He turned up thirty minutes later at the gate, our little Romeo, panting with anticipation, glasses rubbed to shining, hair gelled like a lychee, and deodorant applied for the first time in years.

  Kidnap!

  I tied him up and stuffed him in a second-floor bedroom as soon as he got inside.

  I let him marinate for an hour, then went in to tell him what I wanted.

  “How much does it pay?” he asked after I’d set out my story. He didn’t give a shit about Pakistan.

  Straight to business, dick deflated, knew when to give up. Not like me.

  “A lakh. All you have to do is stick to a story about being tortured into aiding us.”

  “Five.”

  “Deal,” I said. I’d been robbed. Five lakh for a day’s work, what a world. “Think of the article, huh? What a fucking story.”

  He nodded. “And I could sell the film rights. You’re fucking Umar Chaudhury.”

  “You’ll be rich, bhai.”

  I took his glasses and his media card and his phone, rang the People’s Party and arranged an interview for Saturday. I was squeezed in at eleven. Oberoi was a busy boy.

  I was a good captor. Fan in the room, bottled water, TV on the cartoon channel.

  Mehta didn’t struggle.

  I watched over him. Let him talk.

  He was so rarely listened to that he went on and on. Nobody ever consulted him. Nobody needed his advice. His life was an endless scraping of Twitter feeds for content. He blathered, he described every detail of his existence, how he was ignored, how he was taken advantage of, for who knew when next someone would talk to him? He needed the contact, did not want it to end. He could not control himself, and his voice grew higher as he spoke with childlike enthusiasm about Marvel, wrestling, and octopus-based anime.

  I feel sorry for everyone, that’s my fucking problem.

  This Mehta fellow worked nonstop, seven days a week, for people who’d replace him in a second. I was giving him a career here. He’d be on cable news every night for a year, speeches and talks and symposia. He might just get a chance with the women then.

  I left him.

  For the rest of the day, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak, but then none of us could. No more jokes, no more laughter. The enormity of what we had to do stopped our tongu
es. That night, I kept my eyes shut and waited for Priya to fall asleep, and then breathed in every detail of her that I could.

  The next day, I said my goodbyes. Rudi and I shook hands.

  “See you in a few hours, Ramesh,” he said.

  “You’re a good dude,” I said, “at heart, at the end of it, deep down, below all the—”

  “Yes, all right, Ramesh.”

  I hugged Priya. There was too much to say.

  I caught a well-battered taxi from the local market. Bhatnagar would follow in her own car. When I told him the destination, the driver, gods aplenty on the dashboard, turned around and said, “Sir, are you trying to get fucked or something?”

  “Pretty much,” I said, and he drove on.

  The journey took an hour. The whole time I could see Bhatnagar in the rearview mirror, trying to keep up.

  Outside the building, in a gigantic snake, stood a crowd of pilgrims, supplicants, business owners, license needers, heading straight to the very source of power, Saffron Central. The lobby was designed in the old Raj gymkhana style, with fans lazing overhead. An army of men hung around, busybodies each trying to get their 10 percent. I waited in reception as the crowd of favor-askers marched onward. Finally the journalist liaison presented himself.

  “You’re from DesiAdda.com? Never heard of it,” he said. Barely a teenager.

  “Gossip. Anything that gets clicks,” I said. “Bollywood. Pakistan. Saris falling off.”

  “Fine, just as long as you’re not one of those liberal elite journalists.” He must have had specially bred right-wing high-caste bat senses, for he knew where every obstacle was without ever looking up from his phone. “Where did you do your master’s? USA? I did mine at Western Minnesota. It’s very prestigious. Come with me, we’ve had people all day for Mr. Oberoi, it’s a big story and I’m in charge. You will put my name in, won’t you, my uncle is the Minister for Forestries.” Didn’t need to say any more, did he, the little bhosdike?

  I was led down corridors that smelled of bleach, past people doing nothing at all. Faces being fanned, sweat-soaked handkerchiefs, TVs blaring talk shows.