by Rahul Raina
Rudi had paid good money so that there would only be two of us in the cell, and not the usual fifteen. Then he had to pay more because I was attacked for being spoiled and Western. Only two to a cell! It was against all the Vedic principles.
Normally people say they read a lot in prison and transformed their lives through ancient books of philosophy and religion. I tried mostly not to get stabbed. I had a shower once a day. I ate oily chapatis and watery daal.
One day I had a visit. “Some fellow from Charity Chai to see you,” said the guard.
It was my bloody father.
He looked ten years younger than the time I’d last seen him. A man followed him in, clutching a camera by his side.
“Ramesh,” said my father. His fingers still stuck in that claw of his, but there was a contentment, a roundness to the rest of him.
“Charity Chai?” I said. Seven years, and those were my first words to my father.
He gave me a little rat-smile and sat next to me on my bed. “The alliteration makes it easier for the whites to remember. Everyone knows Charity Chai,” he said. “What a story! He slaved hard at his tea stall to get his son into convent school, but then his son disappeared, so now he does the same for all the children of Old De—”
“Who’s that?” I said, pointing at his companion. Papa was far too self-congratulatory and far too full of devious schemes.
“He’s from some American streaming service. They want more feel-good ethnic films, like that sushi fellow. Prakash bhai, turn the camera off. This is a deleted scene,” he said, and his body hacked with laughter.
“Nothing feel-good about this,” I said.
“What an ending, no? He saved the poor boys of Delhi, but now he has to save his own long-lost son.”
“Could have saved me six months ago, Papa.”
“I had not signed the television deal then,” he said.
I folded my arms and looked at the floor.
“I want to help,” he said, and touched my shoulder, and I did my very, very hardest not to flinch, as once I would have. “We can spin them a tale. You did this all for money. I came and saved you. You will be someone again.” He saw that I wanted nothing to do with him, even though I hadn’t seen him in seven years.
We stared at each other a little longer. He didn’t seem to want to leave.
“Papa, can we talk about our feelings?” I said.
That did it. Off he went.
“Call me when you get out,” were his last words.
I did not.
I wasn’t going to lie anymore. I wasn’t going to tell half-truths. I deserved punishment. I was going to take it like a man.
I got out within six months.
They handed me a piece of paper on the way out saying I was to be a productive member of society and that they hoped I would not be back. I had money, but I had nothing else. It was like being born again.
At the gates, I was met by Rudi’s car.
There were no journalists. I had been ordered to be forgotten.
I holed up back in the flat. Whenever I passed the landlord on the stairs to pick up fast-food deliveries, he would mutter insults under his breath.
Beat the Brain was still a hit, bigger than ever before. Priya was the producer now. Rudi asked me if I wanted to see her. I didn’t even answer him.
I stayed in the flat all day and hoped the world would forget about me.
For a while, I wanted to do the romantic thing, the old dream, set up a school for kids like me. We would harvest rainwater and I would say in assemblies, “I’m not teaching you children how to learn, but how to live,” but nah, yaar, that’s something for when you’re forty. Who the hell wants to live in the arsehole of somewhere with a bunch of whiny kids when you’re twenty-five? I thought also that I might be a little too self-centered to make it work.
Rudi was like a changed man. No drugs. No partying. No nonsense.
He got a girlfriend and suddenly I wasn’t necessary anymore. She was nice. She wanted me to stay. But I could tell that he needed to be with her.
I left without even saying goodbye.
It was staring me in the face all along.
I was a pariah in India—nobody fucks with the exam system like that and gets away with it. But what do Indians love more than anything? The West. And what does the West like more than anything? A rise-and-fall-and-rise-again story. Redemption. Forgiveness. All that Christian stuff. I admit that Papa had also given me ideas.
To get India to love me, I would need to leave it.
The religion angle had been staring me in the face for a long time.
Temples and mosques, my father, Claire.
I got a business visa to the US. They didn’t generally let criminals in, but a little money to their Indian consulate staff cleared up any problems.
I bought twenty-four acres of land two hundred kilometers north of Houston, with good airport links and the interstate a few miles away. I had a main house with three bedrooms and an outhouse with six more, small cell rooms barely big enough for a bed and a desk in each. I bought a van, put up a website, and hired a Mexican housekeeper I’d found in a convenience store whose wages I immediately doubled. I got tamales from her three times a week.
Business was slow at first. The website was uninformative. I had no reviews. There had been a program about Indian cults on Netflix and the Brooklynites were wary.
Then people came flooding in.
A retiree couple. A German tourist driving around the south. A mattress company executive who’d had a mental breakdown. We would all sit around a fire eating vegetarian chili under the stars and talk about the ways our lives had turned out. The days were for quiet contemplation and walking around the acreage, mending fences and doing light physical work.
I bought some cows and let them graze, and a few horses. It was very Vedic.
In Texas they all eat barbecue and shoot guns and drive jeeps, like some parody of America. I was friendly to the local Christians, who came to make sure that I wasn’t drugging teenage girls to be sex slaves. They even tried to convert me afterward.
After a year, I was fully booked.
News spread quickly about the strange nine-fingered young Indian who was running a retreat in rural Texas and, miraculously, not drugging anyone while doing it.
Go and find out what’s going on, Olivia, Hannah, Rachel, get me some dirt, said the editors.
I was notorious. I looked too good to be true. But I convinced them all. I was open about my past. I had hurt people. I was mending my ways.
The magazines, the internet sites for racially conscious white millennials, the national TV shows, they all descended on me like vultures. I gave free weekends to influencers.
I ran a tight ship. No fucking around. Just talking and walking and working and fasting.
I grew my hair. I started wearing orange, like the saffrons. I put the prices up, first to five hundred dollars a week, then a thousand, with a few free rooms for stragglers and wastrels and drop-ins. I constructed some tents away from the house, with solar heaters and rainwater showers. Our hikes lasted three hours. We replenished ourselves with sacrificially purified mineral water. I confiscated phones. We talked of forgiveness and being true to our better selves.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—I was all over them, but I stayed mysterious. I took artful shots of hands meeting in the dust, of footprints on sand and embers in the dusk. I let the media do the selling. I took my guests, my executives and managers, and made them something better. By the end of the week, they shone with gratitude and hard work and inner peace. I made them clear scrubland and put up more tents. For dinner we served them vegan burritos and allowed them a few joints of faux-Himalayan weed in our nightly talks.
I made a lot of money.
I don’t know why everyone brown isn’t in this business. The whites are begging for it.
I don’t even try to be mystical. People just tell me things without me asking. If they call me Guru-ji, I get
very annoyed. Just Ramesh, I say. All these rich Americans are guilty about everything, and they desperately need to be forgiven. I tell them how we are all looking for forgiveness, not just them, but me too, and we hug in the pink dawn light.
The whites tell you everything. It’s strange how they hide their true thoughts away for most of their lives, but when they finally open up, you know everything about them. Kids, sex, mental problems, incest, rape, drugs, child abuse. We all listen and we cry and we forgive.
The Indian press started covering me soon enough, and sent shifty-looking men and women, Sharmas and Patels. The old accent made my ears burn.
Out came the profiles in India. I had Wi-Fi, of course, even if the renunciants didn’t. Forgiveness was coming. You could sense it, but I had stopped caring.
I found myself not thinking about India at all, not even craving its silent acceptance, until my original idea felt like the most pointless thing in the world.
Who cares about being someone there?
In the mornings I bow to my guests, and they to me, and we say “Om!” and let it ring out across the plains, and then I serve them Josefina’s bean soup before we sweat out our sins.
It is unbelievably boring.
This place is hotter than a bhosdike. Out on the plain with the cows and the watering holes and the buffel grass, you can let yourself think you are in India a hundred years from now, when everything is at peace and the uteruses have stopped pumping out kids and everyone has moved on from trying to kill each other.
Maybe not a hundred years then.
There are Indians here with strange, mixed-up nasal voices (that even mine is turning into, I fear), who wear cowboy boots and hats with broad brims, who eat beef and vote Republican. They come to the shop I have set up, to buy crystals and Ganesha statues and Dehradun rice, drawn to my celebrity. They have daughters in medical school with colored hair who look straight into your eyes and take no bullshit from anyone.
Even Rudi’s going to come down, he says, with his wife. He wants to bring a TV crew. A grand reunion. The housewives will dehydrate themselves through crying.
Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Claire. Thank you, Rudi. Thank you, Anju and Abhi and Priya.
I guess I made it after all.
Acknowledgments
To my family, who support me in all things. Thank you for tolerating me. I am poorer without you. To my grandparents, who gave me the gift of knowledge. To my teachers, LP, LF, JO, and AM, who told me I’d do this someday. Big mistake.
To Sam Copeland, first reader. Thank you for this all. This is the part where I’m contractually obliged to call you handsome. To everyone at Rogers, Coleridge, and White for sending this book around the world.
To Ailah Ahmed, who makes everything better, and whose faith in this book has been a source of joy. To everyone at Little, Brown, who gave this book a home. To Emily Griffin, who always asks the right questions. To their assistants, for answering midnight emails.
To all the writers I’ve met, who have cajoled, motivated, pestered, and supported me. To the children of Delhi, many of whom found their way into this book. You deserve the world.
To CB, who lit the fire. CH, AQ, and RG, who gave me time. DH, DR, CL, and TM, who know where the bodies are buried. JG, PR, AS, AN, and SH, whom I should have told about this book. To DL, JI, PS, and FR, the murderers’ row. To CN and ZA for always listening, especially when they shouldn’t have. To RM, never forgotten, who left us far too soon.
About the Author
RAHUL RAINA divides his time between Oxford and Delhi, where he was born. He is twenty-eight years old and splits his time between running his own consultancy in Britain and working for charities benefiting street children and teaching English in India. How to Kidnap the Rich, his first novel, was written in the forty degree-plus heat of Delhi.
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Praise for How to Kidnap the Rich
“Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich has already been optioned by HBO: a Delhi-set, reality TV–based literary crime crossover, it will appeal to fans of Parasite and Crazy Rich Asians.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“A satire, a love story, and a thriller, How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina has shades of The Talented Mr. Ripley. . . . [It] casts an unerring eye over the huge disparity in Indian society. A rollercoaster of a read, this is going to be big.”
—Stylist (UK)
“Hugely entertaining.”
—Bookseller (UK)
“Rahul Raina’s voice crackles with wit and the affecting exuberance of youth. His ripping good story grabs you on page one and doesn’t let go, taking you on a monstrously funny and unpredictable wild ride through a thousand different Delhis at top speed. How to Kidnap the Rich roars with brilliance, freshness, and so much heart.”
—Kevin Kwan, New York Times bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy and Sex and Vanity
“Part crime novel, part satire on modern India and told with authenticity, razor-sharp wit and a biting turn of phrase, Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich is a book I’ve been waiting a long time for. I can’t remember the last time I read such an assured debut. Raina writes like he’s been doing this all his life. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to welcome a new star to the world of international crime fiction.”
—Abir Mukherjee, author of A Rising Man
“Brutally funny and fast-paced, this debut from Rahul Raina proves he is a star in the making.”
—Nikesh Shukla, author of Coconut Unlimited
Copyright
Also published in Great Britain in 2021 by Little, Brown.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HOW TO KIDNAP THE RICH. Copyright © 2021 by Rahul Raina. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Cover design by Sophie Harris—LBBG
Cover illustration © Shutterstock
Digital Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-302879-1
Version 03262021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-302878-4 (pbk.)
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