How to Kidnap the Rich

Real honesty bores people, but honesty that’s just on the line between truth and falsehood? The world is built on it.

You think your parents are just a source of shelter and slaps, and then you grow up and find out that you become them, not a perfect copy, but one of those pirated films where you can see people in the theatre stand up and go to the toilet.

The others had ginger mochas, a Western invention with a glaze of Ayurveda that our middle classes had fallen for – what better way to show you were at once modern but also in touch with your roots, your culture? That was the business I should go into when all this was done, I thought.

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.

‘You’re alive,’ he said. He tried to compose himself, tried to pull out words, continued to scratch, then opened his arms wide to show how wonderful this all was, that we were back, that we would be welcomed like sons returning without white girlfriends from MIT.

Up went Rudi, unsteady after too much whisky and coke. ‘We are the future, I am the future, this man,’ he said, grasping the minister, whose name he did not know but whose body fat percentage showed importance, ‘is the future, aren’t you?’ He started jabbing the man’s stomach, and kept repeating, ‘Aren’t you, aren’t you?’ Then he jumped off the sta

I listened to film songs about moons and stars and destinies, and at night I bought imitation Levis for fifteen hundred rupees from Alibaba. No more the polyester shit of my youth! No more cast-off Barcelona shirts from some spoiled kid in England or Spain! I was assured my clothes came from the same factory in Chongqing, the very same!

‘What are you going to do now, Rudi?’ ‘Bill Gates is going to offer you a job, is that true?’ ‘How did you achieve this miraculous feat?’ The little fucker had come top. I had come top. Fucking top. Of the whole country. Well, not top. Actually second. But the first place was Iqbal somebody, and he sure as shit didn’t count. No cameras for the Musl

Piles of dusty Western DVDs crowded the shelves, crap some relative had probably hauled over from Canada back when that had been impressive, something you could show off to your neighbours, how life was so wonderful for our family in Amrika. That was before social media, when we could all see how stupid the Americans actually were, in real time.