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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.