‘No shop-bought powders here, sir!’ my father would shout. ‘All done fresh by my little runt of a boy down there. You, rat! Show the gentleman your muscles! Ha ha!’ Sometimes a few insects, a little dirt, some spit found their way into the mixture, by accident, of course. My hate could have made India the world’s leader in renewable energy.

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

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.

If you got Top Thousand, your future was assured. The McMansion in New Jersey awaited, along with the Chevrolet SUV and the kids’ violin recitals you never attended. Top Hundred finishers had their faces plastered on the buildings of the schools that had produced them. Their teachers got interviewed on TV, like they had overseen successful Siamese

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!

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.

All my clients had the usual background of middle-class petty larceny. A few bribes paid here and there for construction permits, to private schools for exam-less admission, to the government to pass off their kids as low-caste for the quota admissions, the usual scum shit that makes this great country what it is, like the pesticides in the milk

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

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