How to Kidnap the Rich

The great social movements passed us by. Independence, socialism, capitalism, everything was the same. My life was grinding spices for tea.

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!

‘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.

The All Indias are the big one, the ones that everyone takes when they leave school. There are other entrance exams all year round for everything, one for law schools, one for the army, one for fucking toilet inspectors, but the All Indias are the cream of the crop, my biggest earner for the year. They are the gateway to the best universities, the

Ramesh Kumar – Educational Consultant. That is what my business card says. You want your little darling to get 99.4 per cent and become an IITian and lord it over the rest of us? You come to me. You want your little rasgulla to top the state boards, start his inevitable march to the corner office in Wall Street or London or, God forbid, if everythi

They wouldn’t fuck with me if I wore suits. But they would have to be Italian ones, or French. You wear an Indian suit, they’ll smell it, and they’ll fuck you even harder.

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 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.