by Rahul Raina
Guns. Riot gear. Batons. Lazily smoked cigarettes. Delhi’s finest stood behind a row of sandbags positioned fifty feet away from the studio door.
Oh shit.
It was a siege. I saw the helicopters buzz overhead, churning the evening smog with their blades.
How had they gotten here before the broadcast ended?
I ran back to the studio, to Rudi, who was flapping around like a pair of testicles. I looked at the crew.
Then I saw him. A cameraman, looking shifty, avoiding my gaze. I have a sixth sense for shiftiness. A suspicious shape in his pocket. It was clear what had happened. I walked over to him and held out my hand. The lund didn’t bother any further. He handed me his phone.
“Sorry, brother,” he said.
I took it as quickly as I could, and tried to hide it in my jeans.
“Oh fuck,” said Rudi behind me.
Too slow.
“I didn’t confiscate his phone. Oh God, this is all my fault.”
He looked around, eyes goggling. He put his hands to his face to hide his tears.
“It’s my first time conducting a hostage situation,” he said. “I was busy, I was tired, I don’t know what I’m fucking doing.” He started shouting, “I don’t fucking know,” and began crying. He was just a kid, I realized again. I went over to him and hugged him, metro-tight. “Okay, boss, okay, boss,” I said, and I told him how proud I was of him, how he had gone through something no eighteen-year-old should, how well he had done in the broadcast.
Outside the police shouted insults and cricket scores through their megaphones.
“Give up, your mad plot is over,” bellowed a voice. “You will never win.”
What could I do? What could I do? I looked around, searching for something. My gaze alighted on Oberoi.
“Fuck this,” I said, and dragged him to the door before anyone could stop me. He was extremely cooperative.
Priya followed me out. “I’m coming with you,” she said.
Just beyond the reception doors stood dozens of police officers behind the sandbag fortifications.
I crept over to the doors, pushing Oberoi along, and opened them. “Let us go,” I shouted. “Don’t come in. We have a hostage! I have a gun.” I pulled out the cigarette lighter pistol from my pocket and waved it around. Priya knelt a few feet behind me, too exhausted to do anything. I found myself full of energy and excitement, or maybe I was pretending, acting out a devil-may-care police officer routine, three days from retirement, that sort of thing, from some film I’d watched.
“No further,” I said, “or we’ll kill Shashank Oberoi!”
“Who is that?” shouted a disembodied voice.
The look on Oberoi’s face was quite something. I almost took a picture of it, but the memory of it was enough. His lips did that upward snarl just before you cry. Wonderful.
“We’ll shoot him, so you’d better let us pass, right now! And then the death of Shashank Oberoi will be on your hands!”
“Sir, we do not know who that is! You enemies of the people! Surrender! Come out with your hands up!”
We did not.
“We have guns!” I said again, just to make sure they understood. Nobody tried to come inside. Who knew what sort of further weaponry the Pakistanis had at their disposal?
The French call it an impasse.
We let our former colleagues go. That would kill us in the press. Rudi stood in the reception and praised them as they left. “Well done,” he said to someone. “Excellent broadcast” to another. “You were a pleasure to kidnap. Give my best to your wife.” As he left, call-me-Sid told Rudi to go fuck himself, as did call-me-Nik, pleasant as always.
At the end of it, there was just us left, Priya, Rudi, Bhatnagar, me, and Oberoi, who looked like one of those animals lying burst on the side of the road with its guts spilled out. Which species it had been in life you couldn’t even tell, dog or cat or calf—all you could say was that its legs were curled up, its eyes were like glass, and its belly was full of madly humping flies impregnating it with larvae.
We sat in the reception, surrounded by plants and plastic-weave carpet that we had turned into makeshift defenses. The hours stretched on into the morning.
The police clearly did not want to come in. We saw the officers in charge interviewed on TV. Bhatnagar rolled her eyes at each one. “Corrupt,” she spat out, or “Lazy,” or mostly, “Fat.”
The police were in the middle of the biggest story of their lives. This positive PR opportunity allowed them to display a sense of law and order, after they had failed to contain the riots across the country. Maybe one of them would write a book called Days in Hell: My Part in the Studio Siege, or conduct TV interviews to finance a new kitchen, or move to Saket, where the people who count live.
The student protesters arrived in the afternoon, when they had finally woken up. The police let it happen, and did nothing but conduct interviews of extreme self-importance and belly-slapping gravitas.
The students cheered us on, telling us to stay inside for as long as we could. They told us we were heroes and would never give in to base needs such as hunger and showers and not being riddled by bullets.
The police very helpfully allowed them to position themselves between the barricade and us. Let all the crazies be on one side, so the TV viewers could make better sense of it all.
What a mess! We raided the vending machines, paying for each item, no vandalism on Anjali Bhatnagar’s watch, no sir, and helped ourselves to tinned chanas from the commissary kitchen, which we guessed were a hundred Gandhis each.
Bhatnagar spent her time conducting long, serious arguments on her phone in the back corridors while Priya and I crouched behind the sofas, saying what we had to out in the open, waving once in a while to the cameras, and laughing as lip-reading experts said we were discussing our plans to hijack helicopters to Pakistan.
“I’m never going to work again, am I?” said Priya.
“Not likely,” I said.
“Eh, big man, you’re meant to console me and tell me the offers will surely come flooding in. What kind of future husband are you?”
“The offers will surely come flooding in, darling,” I said.
“Thank you, darling,” she said. We held hands and thought about a future that might never exist.
On TV, the police officers grew visibly happier as more students flooded in, knowing it would look better when they finally had to make their move—a few dozen brave officers, a thin brown line against a tide of marijuana-infested, bedbug-ridden, greasy-haired young adults. The photographers readied their slow-motion cameras for shots of bones breaking and screams of rage.
Oberoi was totally broken. I had never seen him like that before. We stopped taking it out on him. That was how bad he looked.
Two days later, we ran out of food.
Rudi must have gone mad with hunger, for that night he decided to end things himself. “This is all my fault,” he declared, and tried to break out. “I must pay for what I’ve done,” he shouted. I had to wrestle him away from the doors.
Two days after that, lips cracked with thirst, brains broken by boredom, we managed to leave.
It was Bhatnagar. She’d worked out some sort of deal. I could hear her arguing late into the night, and by the fifth day, she had managed to arrange something. She stood in front of us, explained that the situation was becoming an embarrassment to her superiors, and told us to follow her.
We left. We believed her. We just walked out. We breathed fresh air. The protesters looked strangely at us as we came out. We marched straight past them. They didn’t know what to do.
We reached the line of sandbags and still hadn’t been shot. That counted as a victory.
A police inspector shook his head, shouted to an underling, “Tell the television to go away for five minutes,” and walked over to us.
“What’s going on?” he said. “You are all terrorists. Go back inside or we will shoot.”
“I am a
senior investigator,” said Bhatnagar. “I have been talking to my bosses. This is over. We are walking out. You may take us into custody. Stop performing for the cameras.”
She started shouting at him about water and food.
“You want to fight? You want a big drama for the cameras?” she said. “It’s two days before Diwali, you fool. The new Shah Rukh movie is coming out today. Who is going to be paying attention to this? Who is going to be watching on TV? Take us into custody. Make the students go home. Phone your senior officers. We are done here.”
She crossed her arms and stared the inspector down. He walked away shaking his head. He wasn’t used to this new type of Indian woman.
We stood in the shade of a police van, manure brown.
We were all exhausted. We slouched on the tarmac, drank water like camels, and hoped that Bhatnagar was right.
Oberoi couldn’t have looked more terrified. He was vibrating like a municipal building built on foundations of sand. He slurped water, watched every officer intently, hid in the middle of us, and made panicked phone calls where all I could hear was “Please, sir, you must help me, I have been abducted by Pakistani spies.”
The police officers grunted at him. Nobody took much notice.
A few minutes later, the inspector returned.
“Arrest them,” he said. “No beatings!”
Bhatnagar nodded with satisfaction. She had done her part.
We held up our hands so the cuffs could be applied.
No one said a word.
Then we went to jail.
Twenty-One
The court case was a real nightmare. I couldn’t follow it at all.
There were about twelve different parties suing each other for damages, each trying to get their piece of the action; the state was on us too, for breaking the peace, for all the kidnapping, beating, taking over a TV studio, you know, the cool filmie stuff.
It was like we had become Americans, litigious and desk-bound, instead of solving things in our time-honored and effective fashion of death threats, eternal curses, and immolating each other’s family members.
The personal court cases are still going, perennially on the docket in some municipal courthouse, making lots of money for my lawyers. I get thick letters forwarded to me every few months, with bills and arraignments and demands for devices to be handed over.
The charges of Pakistani spying disappeared magically. It turned out the People’s Party had stopped believing the bedtime stories of some disgraced TV producer. They just pretended it had never happened, and boom! away it went, the media more than happy to send it to oblivion.
Was any saffron-garbed politician embarrassed? Did anyone suffer political blowback? Did people remember they had once spent a few days in a riot over some spy plot?
You bloody guessed it.
Oberoi was simply let go. He vanished. I imagined him somewhere out in the world, buying expensive sunglasses, pitching quiz shows to anyone who’d listen, and avoiding people called Rudraksh.
Now, I could have been stupid.
I could have said all sorts of things about Oberoi, his politician friends, the relations between the classes. But I was mature and responsible. The past was the past. I had a fiancée. I was doing my part for international relations and my future ability to continue living.
I let myself dream.
Never do it, my friends! Never think of your future. Take each day as it comes, according to the principles of dharma and double-entry accounting. There is always someone waiting to fuck you, and never in the nice way.
I was on bail. I thought I was going to get away with everything. I had moved into Priya’s, was planning to go to Ahmedabad to meet her parents, and was thinking about restarting the TV show.
So when the police came to arrest me for academic impersonation, ripped me from the arms of the woman I loved, who looked like a dumbass then?
It was midmorning when they turned up, a fortnight after the end of the siege. I thought the inspector was there to catch up and drink tea, and then he held up the summons and my world fell apart.
I was taken to the station, hauled into an airless room filled with policemen. The charge was read out to me.
Ramesh Kumar. Educational fraud. Maximum sentence, five years.
Bhatnagar didn’t let me down. She defended me for four days in a stuffy office in front of lawyers, underlings, and scribes writing down every mosquito buzz.
She was all business. Her uniform was ironed sharp and not a hair was out of place.
Four days of defense. Worthless. It was obvious I was going to go to prison. They had clients ready and willing to talk. Phone logs. Email exchanges.
When we had finished on the last day, and everyone had packed up, Bhatnagar and I looked at each other, eye to eye, as the room began to empty.
“I’m sorry I could not help you, Ramesh,” she said finally, as the last ogling sub-inspector left. “My bosses. Somebody had to take the blame. I tried to make them see sense. You were the perfect candidate.”
The story of my life, I thought to myself.
If it had been a movie, Priya would have been there, and she would have shouted, “They can’t do this! They can’t! He helped you,” and Bhatnagar would have charged out to change her superiors’ minds, and a Spanish guitar would have started to play and then there would have been a choir of children.
But no.
At the trial, I had great lawyers, paid for by Rudi.
I can’t complain about him. His parents had turned up safe and sound, fragrant and tanned, hadn’t even heard about any Pakistan stuff in Norway, and had told him to let me rot, but he hadn’t. He’d come to me in my holding cell and promised me he’d do whatever it took.
My lawyers were English-accented and brown-skinned and looked like they’d commit genocide to get me off.
But it wasn’t enough.
Bhatnagar’s bosses destroyed me. Bhatnagar tried her best. There was nothing she could do.
So I went to prison. The judge, a gray-haired man who had exhausted his reasonableness by screaming at the press to keep quiet, his voice hoarse and cracked, delivered the final blow.
“I sentence you, Ramesh Kumar, for the multiple frauds you committed, to one year in jail.” He banged the gavel. The cameras flashed like lightning. My lawyers shook my hand for some Western reason, and sat down to write checks for their new holiday homes, leaving me to stand alone. The guards led me away.
As I left, somebody in the audience began to wail, an old woman. She kept looking around the court for someone to notice her. Finally a reporter wandered over, and she collapsed into him. I wondered which distant relative she’d pretend to be.
I went to prison. No one else did. Ha ha ha!
Somewhere Claire was eating pastries and laughing to herself. “The wages of sin, jeune homme, the wages of sin.”
The People’s Party got me. The country got me. The system got me. I made too many people look bad, and they got me.
Rudi wasn’t touched. He hadn’t done a thing wrong, of course.
I wasn’t involved in his being Topper, how could I be? Surely some urchin type could not come top in the exalted All Indias, the greatest exam in all the world. Surely Rudraksh Saxena had merely been hoodwinked by some unsavory lower-caste middleman type who had promised him riches. What innocent Brahmin boy could tell who these people truly were?
He was only guilty of the crime of being too trusting.
He could go back to selling microwaves and daal and liposuction as soon as he wanted.
My whole life would be a small subsection on his Wikipedia page.
Prison, that was a real experience, I will tell you. Rudi had to pay a fortune to get the gangsters off me. I might have been a nobody, but they knew I was Rudraksh Saxena’s manager. I was ripe for some physical extortion.
Thankfully I didn’t have to forfeit any of my own money. I got sued, a lot. The parents of every kid who’d fucked up their All Indias in the last
ten years wanted a piece of me. Rudi got the cases dismissed. It cost him a lot, but he’d made so much money that he didn’t have to worry.
Priya came a few times.
We said nothing much the first few visits.
The last time she came, she said, “I’ll wait for you,” but who was she kidding? She loved her parents. They’d never let her marry someone like me. She was modern and independent, but they were her blood and they mattered more than me, and they were never going to have a criminal in the family.
I told her then to stop coming, told her we’d been stressed and that anyone could fall in love under pressure, that it wasn’t real, just us searching for some small human connection in impossible circumstances.
Maybe it was even true. She cried a lot.
That last time I looked into her eyes, across the table, I saw the most terrible thing in the world. I saw unending love. She’d never leave. She would destroy herself, her name, her family, her future.
So I told a little lie.
“Bhatnagar said her bosses are going after my associates. They’ll never stop, Priya. You think this is the end? If we carry on, they’ll get you next, and your parents, and everyone you’ve ever known.”
She shook her head. “You’re lying,” she said.
“I promised I would never lie, remember? The day I told you I first loved you. One lie and we were done.”
“I remember,” she said.
“You can’t destroy yourself for me, Priya. See sense. See the way it must be.”
I went over and held her for the last time. I’d bribe the guards later. I felt her tears land on the side of my face.
She said she’d return, she said she’d fight, but her smile was worn, her eyes were dull. She sent letters, which I never answered. I was glad when they stopped.
I pined for her. There were many moments when I wanted to write to her and profess my love, and say that we would run away, hang her parents, hang tradition. If they wanted to see their grandkids they’d better change their attitude.
But I’d told my lie. The perfect lie. I’d destroyed us forever.
Aren’t I clever?
I had a lot of close calls in prison. The usual, in showers that suddenly emptied, in kitchens where boiling vats bubbled, in exercise yards where anyone could get knifed in the churn of the crowd. I was a celebrity. I was a spy. I was someone.
