Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Eleven

A rich jeweller bought himself a Lamborghini for 35 million rupees [$700,000]. Finding it was impossible to take it out on Delhi’s crowded streets, he offered it for sale. It was bought for 22 million rupees [$440,000] by the twenty-seven-year-old son of a real-estate dealer. Newly married, the young man did not tell his family about the purchase; he hid the car and only drove it at night. At 5.30 one morning, driving at 200 kilometres an hour, he lost control of the car and crashed into barriers at the side of the road, killing himself and severely injuring a man on a bicycle.

The injured man was the fifty-five-year-old caretaker of a school who cycled an hour to work every morning because he found it healthier than travelling by bus. He had worked in the school for twenty years; each morning he had to arrive before everyone else because it was he who unlocked the doors.

On the morning of the accident, he was rushed to hospital with severe head injuries. The school offered financial assistance for his emergency surgery but further operations were required to save the man from paralysis. His son said he had no idea how the family might pay for this treatment, which, it was feared, might cost as much as 150,000 rupees [$3,000].

Looking for a new apartment, some years ago, I was taken with a beautiful place nestled close to one of Delhi’s ancient cities. The rent was far more than I had budgeted, but it was so perfect that I spontaneously handed over deposit cheques to the owner, who was a Punjabi businessman. Eighty years old, he still ran the business he had set up, which manufactured large-scale electrical equipment for sale all over the world. He was successful, and owned many properties in Delhi. His wife served tea and sweets in celebration of our deal. He told the story of how he had fled Pakistan in 1947 as a young naval officer, established a business in Delhi, and set up livelihoods for his brothers, whom he brought, one by one, to the city.

“Now we don’t talk to each other,” he said. “Punjabi families support each other fanatically when things are bad. But when they become rich it all falls apart. That’s why the Marwaris build the biggest business houses. They put the business first.”

Lying awake in bed that night, I was filled with disbelief at what I had done. I could not afford this place. The next morning I called the landlord and said I was sorry but we couldn’t go ahead with the deal. He said he was sorry too, not least because he had turned away other prospective tenants, and he asked if I could compensate him with half a month’s rent. I agreed to stop off at his place with a cheque for that amount; he said he would at that point return the cheque I had given him on the previous day. After our conversation, nonetheless, I put a stop on that cheque.

An hour later he called me. “The price of severance has just gone up. You stopped your cheque at 10.04 this morning.”

I asked him how he knew.

“Do you think I won’t find such things out?”

And he proceeded to list, just so I understood what I was dealing with, the numbers and current balances of all my bank accounts.

“You have insulted me,” he said. “Now I am expecting you to give me a cheque for two months’ rent.”

That was a lot of money. I argued that it was disproportionate to the loss he might have incurred.

“This is not about loss. It is about insult.”

I said I was sorry that he took it that way, and asked if we could work out some kind of compromise.

“Mr Dasgupta, you will find that it is against Indian law to stop a cheque without informing the other party first. Of course it is up to you what you pay me. I will only say that I play golf at the Delhi Golf Club every morning with the country’s most powerful lawyers and judges, and I can make it impossible for you to live and work in this city. You are a foreigner, after all.”

And he added,

“I am not threatening you. I am just letting you know.”

I sought legal advice. The lawyer I spoke to advised me to give him what he asked for. Stopping a cheque in such circumstances was indeed prohibited. “And a man like that can ruin your life.”

The landlord called me about ten times that day. He was frantic at the slight he had received, and could not leave the issue alone. He threatened me, he cajoled me. He appealed to my sense of honour.

When I arrived at his place with my cheque book, he suddenly relaxed. He was jubilant, even. I gave him a cheque. He took a long time writing me a receipt so he could educate me about life.

“There are two important things to remember. Patriotism, which I learned from the navy. And honesty, which I learned from business. If you are not honest, you will never get anywhere.”

He handed me back my original cheque.

“I will keep an eye on your bank account. There is nothing you will do in this city that I will not know about.”

His was one of those large Delhi fortunes that are built up discreetly on the basis of reputation and personal affinities. One of the ways that such things are maintained is that the smallest slight on your reputation is immediately stamped out and punished. You do not let it stand.

• • •

There is admiration, in contemporary fashion, for the smooth mind: the mind without ‘issues’ that is ‘comfortable with itself’. True strength, it is thought, originates in minds like this; the work of becoming strong consists, therefore, in that kind of mental ironing we call therapy.

According to this, Delhi, with its jagged history and unresolved pain, should have been a place of weakness. Those who visited the city in the early twenty-first century, however, were struck in the opposite way: they were astonished at the confidence and ambition of its people. This is because ‘resolving’ trauma is not the only way to prevent it from incapacitating you. You can also use its energy to fuel an entirely different, and far more vigorous, response. You can become — since all of history, since all the world, is a battlefield — a warrior.

This was the way that many people, especially businesspeople, chose to see themselves after the partition; and the free-for-all of liberalisation only served to deepen the need for martial resolve. While most businesspeople in the West considered themselves to be civilians, their counterparts entering the global system in this place — and others like it — thought of themselves as soldiers. To others, they sometimes seemed to be unprincipled — to care little for the rules of society at large, for instance, or for those more vulnerable than themselves — but that was not their own conception of things. Of course they did not concern themselves with civilian considerations, for the warrior’s vocation required them to soar above them. But like all warriors they operated, in fact, according to a strong code of ethics. Their operating unit was the family, and sustaining this as an effective martial force required wisdom, rectitude and sacrifice.

The people of this part of the world, as we have seen, were always tough, self-reliant and prepared for adversity. Partition did not crush this spirit; it only confirmed its premise. Everything can be taken away. Property and money had disappeared, which was the perennial fate of wealth, so Punjabis took up arms against ill-fortune and started to make everything back again. And in Delhi, which acquired a million new citizens immediately after the partition, there were commercial opportunities galore.

Entrepreneurs had enjoyed little visibility in the newly independent India. The ‘good citizens’ were its farmers, soldiers and workers and those professionals who served the nation as teachers, doctors, engineers and bureaucrats. But for the global economy of the future, perhaps, it was those who operated in a permanent state of exception — its entrepreneurial warriors — whose activities were the most significant.

• • •

When I show up to meet Rahul Kapoor,³⁰ I find that he is out at the gym. His grandfather, however, is at home, and he is delighted to have someone to whom he can show off the work that has just been completed in his bathroom. The room has been extended into the garden, so that it is now sunlit from three sides and very long. He raps his knuckles against the walls of the original part. “You see this? Italian marble.” Then he walks into the extension and knocks again. The sound is hollow. “And this new section is just plasterboard which has been painted to look like Italian marble. Can you tell the difference?”

He laughs delightedly.

“Why don’t you come into my study?” he says.

Somewhere above eighty years old, he is spectacularly sturdy and walks without impediment. He leads me into a small room flooded with daylight, where he bids me sit down. He does so himself, in a leather armchair, dons glasses, and presses the buttons of a mobile phone. I look around me at the silver-framed photographs of his grown-up grandchildren, who are all, men and women, strikingly attractive. In the middle of the room is a novelty table with a vast stone book for one of its legs. There is a large oil painting of village women on one wall and a sculpture of Ganesh on the other; above us is a chandelier decorated with glass roses.

“Hello, my dear,” he says into the phone. “I am chatting with a very nice man who has come to see Rahul. Do you know when he will be back? He doesn’t have his phone with him. Is that right? Wonderful. Thank you, my darling. I will see you soon. Very soon.”

He turns to me.

“He’ll be back any minute. Why don’t you have some tea or coffee in the meantime?”

He presses a button and a servant appears, to whom my order is precisely transmitted.

“You must meet my wife. She was one of the most beautiful women in the city. I had to chase her for years. Because I wasn’t a handsome man. Even now she is very beautiful.”

I find myself thinking, as I have thought before, that men from this generation, the men who were adult before the partition, seem able to love women more fully than their sons and grandsons.

“And she is the greatest hostess. While you are discussing something, she will bring out fifty different plates of snacks. And the best thing is, she will take plates for all the drivers also. With all this construction work in the house, she always makes sure the workers have a meal and a cold drink.”

Mr Kapoor is full of his wife. He is full of everything, in fact: he is happy to be alive.

He tells me about the young people in the photographs. Some are in London, some in California. Some are working in the family business in Delhi.

“My grandchildren still want to go on holiday with me,” he chuckles. “That makes me proud. Love is the most important thing. No matter how hard I was working, I always spent time with my children in the evenings.”

I ask him what he tries to pass on to his grandchildren.

“I teach them what goodness is. How to treat people. I know the richest men in town. But I’ve looked after everybody. And one thing I’m very proud of is that no one who has walked into my room looking for help has ever gone away disappointed. These blessings come back to you.”

Tea arrives on a tray with biscuits and a sugar bowl. I ask Mr Kapoor where his family came from.

“We were in Sialkot before the partition,” he says. “We had a good situation there. In 1947 we ran away with just one change of clothes: we jumped in the car and came to Delhi.”

Mr Kapoor was in his early twenties in 1947. He tells me how he revived his family’s lost medical instruments business in their new home. It happened astonishingly quickly. It is clear that, even if many of his class lost their tangible assets in 1947, their social networks travelled with them almost intact, and they could still call upon the same kind of favours and introductions as before. The new housing extensions to Delhi were conceived, in fact, to preserve previous distinctions of rank, caste, ethnicity and profession, and networks could be recultivated with ease. And in a new capital city with a new population in need of every kind of product and commodity, those who had good contacts and entrepreneurial drive found themselves thriving almost before they had found a house to live in. By the early 1950s Mr Kapoor had established a monopoly across north India, and was well on his way to becoming rich.

“It wasn’t very difficult, honestly, to do what I did,” he says. “I just worked very hard and learned along the way. You have to enjoy what you do. Otherwise you should do something else.”

By the 1960s, Mr Kapoor was rich enough to build a large hotel; several more real-estate investments were to follow. Partition refugees, who had been denuded of their assets, were magnetically drawn to the consolations of property, and they acquired as much of it as they could. In the long-term, this served them better than they could ever have imagined: with the recent boom in property prices, they have seen their fortunes turn fabulous. Mr Kapoor owns houses in Delhi’s best neighbourhoods, and a farmhouse outside — a property portfolio whose worth must now lie between $50 and $100 million. It is this property boom that has generated, over the last few years, the extreme self-confidence of the city’s propertied classes, who now find themselves rich on a global scale, and without doing very much. They differentiate themselves from everyone else in the city by their ‘unearned income’ — and if Delhi’s exclusive restaurants are strangely full, on weekday afternoons, of carefree men and women of working age, it is because there is a lot of it.

I hear Rahul’s voice in the hallway. He bursts into the room.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I was running late.”

“Don’t worry,” says his grandfather calmly. “We are having a lovely time.”

Rahul is sweaty from the gym and, since it is a mild day, he wants to sit outside. I pick up my cup of tea to follow him.

“Leave that,” he says. “I’ll have it brought out for you.”

We go to sit on the terrace, which overlooks a walled garden surrounded by majestic trees. A cavernous reception room, all beige leather and marble, opens out here.

“What did you think of my grandfather?” Rahul says.

I offer some warm impressions.

“That guy has balls the size of this table,” he says earnestly. “He built everything we have. That generation built things their whole lives and it adds up to a big story. Young people just fritter it away and it doesn’t mean very much.”

Rahul is slight, intense and twenty-five. He looks calculatedly stylish in his gym clothes. Drinks are brought for us on a tray: he sips a fresh lime soda.

“That generation was strong. My grandfather is nearly ninety and when I drink whisky with him, it’s me who has to give up first.”

Some construction work is going on at a nearby house; Rahul is extremely, even excessively, disturbed by the noise of a drill. He waits for the drill to stop before he begins his story. There is something fastidious about him.

“My family came from Sialkot, which is now in Pakistan. In British India, Sialkot was the centre of surgical instruments manufacturing. My family controlled that industry. When they left Sialkot in 1947, they spread out over India and started it up afresh.

“My other grandfather, my mother’s father, was also a legendary character. He went to south India because he knew there would be little competition. He started off cycling round hospitals, selling products out of a trunk. His company is now by far the biggest medical instruments supplier in south India. It was a shrewd move for a Punjabi to go to the south: south Indians aren’t good businessmen. They’re academic types down there, not very tough. So if a hospital put out a tender, my grandfather and his brothers would guard the room where the documents had to be delivered and beat up anyone who tried to submit a competing proposal. They couldn’t do anything. But once they all got together and ambushed him and beat him up for revenge.

“He was an amazing man. He was a big philanthropist who set up the best schools in Madras. The one bad thing about him was that he had a thing about Muslims. When he came across during the partition, his son was killed by Muslims. After that he tried to have a son many times but only succeeded in producing five daughters. So he hated Muslims till the end of his life. Just the mention of them would drive him into a rage. For a Punjabi man the one thing you have to do is produce an heir to take over your business. His business was shut down after his death. His daughters were spoiled rich girls who didn’t want to do anything, and it’s not good for men to go into their wives’ family business — it’s as if they’re a failure.”

Rahul’s family, like the majority of Delhi’s business elite, comes from the Punjabi khatri sub-caste, one that is equally divided between Hindus and Sikhs. It is probable that khatris were always members of the lowly trader caste, but they like to claim more aristocratic origins, saying that the word ‘khatri’ derives from ‘kshatriya’, the name of the superior warrior caste. They say that they were heroically oppressed during the thousand years of Muslim rule but that their spirit never flagged and, with the wealth and education they had acquired, they rose to important positions in the Mughal military administration. It was the chauvinistic emperor Aurangzeb, they say, who threw them out of his bureaucracy and forced them to become shopkeepers. Even in this commercial role, however, they retained their martial identity.

The way that Rahul remembers his grandfathers is typical of the way this identity functions today. Many young Punjabi businessmen are frustrated at the way their families have become lax with wealth and comfort, and they tell and re-tell the stories of their grandparents’ impoverishment and subsequent recovery. They cling to this historical suffering, and the warlike vigour with which their grandparents faced it, in order to retain their own sense of martial purpose.

As Rahul’s story indicates, however, not everyone can have been happy about the tactics with which Punjabi businessmen built up their empires. The victims of these tactics also saw them as warlike, and not in a positive sense. Many parts of the country resented the ferocity with which Punjabis sought to monopolise business, and the nativist movements of the west and south were specifically designed to protect local economies from the onslaught of businessmen from the north.

“Until recently I didn’t realise we were rich. My family had very middle-class values. My grandfather would always tell us to switch off the light. My mother got angry if we wasted food. They were very financially conservative. They put all their money in fixed deposits and just left it there. They never took loans. They didn’t spend much money.

“When I went to our factory as a kid, thousands of people lined up to see us. So I felt like a prince. But I still didn’t realise we were wealthy until I was in college. Then I became a shareholder in the family business: I went through the balance sheet, I saw what my father was paid and what we owned. That’s when I found out.

“But now, with the rise of China, we have stopped producing anything. My father closed down our production and now we only sell other people’s products. German, American and Chinese. My grandfather still runs a stethoscope factory, even though it makes losses, because he likes it. Even though he’s old and he doesn’t need to, he goes there every day because he is passionate about making stuff. I’ve never really seen anyone from my father’s generation get passionate. They’re happy but they have no ambition. They have their parties, they marry their kids into fancy families — they’re all happy. Too happy. Each of them owns a big company, they sell products that cannot be matched and do not need marketing. One of my aunts owns the India monopoly for Nikon cameras. Money just keeps piling up without anyone doing anything.”

Rahul studied at an Ivy League school in the US. In many ways he felt more at home there than here, and wondered for a while whether he should return. But his father wanted him to take over a chunk of the company, and at length he decided to take the plunge.

“Of course I thought about whether I should do something else. Sometimes, running this company, I just feel like I’ll die. But there are compromises in every kind of life. And I thought: how many people get an opportunity like this? I could have got a job in the US, and now I might be some analyst trying to help a supermarket save 1 per cent of its costs. Then I would be only a part of the machine. But I want to be the machine. Or: I want to control the machine.

“My friends at college were mostly artistically inclined. What I will do by the time I’m thirty will be much, much more than what they will do. Business, money — it’s all just a means to an end. I want to have a legacy. That’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t want to die without a legacy.”

We talk about business strategy. He is undertaking a total overhaul of the company, extending its scope up- and downstream. Right now he is launching a chain of speciality hospitals, using tracts of land acquired by the family decades ago. Ultimately, it will be an international chain. After that he wants to invest in medical research and development, and perhaps acquire a foreign medical instruments manufacturer, so that the company can produce original products of its own and not just sell other people’s. He speculates about new investments even as he’s talking.

“That may not be the right thing to do. But that’s how I’m thinking. I often get ahead of myself. There’s no point in doing this unless you are playing at the level of the people at the top. So you have to think all the time.”

His knee pumps up and down as he talks: there is enormous nervous energy about him. It comes partly from the fact that he is taking big risks within the family.

“In Punjabi business families it’s very difficult to change direction because the family is risk-averse. You carry on doing what you know. You do the thing that is in your blood. For the old business there are thirty people I can ask for advice, but with these new ventures I have to start from scratch. But that’s how I’m different from most of them. Most of them will never do anything significant because personal gain means too much to them. They’re not willing to think far enough. Of course Indian businessmen have to continue their business tradition, and there’s no question that out of ten businesspeople, three or four will definitely go far compared to their US or European counterparts because of the way that our families and society are structured. But if they’re going to do something really great, they have to break out of their conservatism.”

In order to do all this, Rahul has departed significantly from the traditional family ethic, again, by raising external financing. In this he is typical of his liberalisation generation, which holds a profoundly changed conception of money. Before that, money — ‘dhan’, or wealth — was static. It was symbolised in gold, and it was kept locked up. It was not gambled, spent, or invested in uncertain schemes. It could not grow but it could easily shrink, and so every expenditure, no matter how small, was a loss of potential. Punjabis fought over one rupee and 1 million rupees with the same fervour, for other people’s profit was their loss. But with the era of markets, money has ceased to be tangible and static. It has become abstract and dynamic. Putting money out no longer leads, automatically, to loss: not doing so, in fact, is to lose out on the benefits of money’s expanding universe. Suddenly, money breeds money, which is one of the reasons that the younger generations of north Indian families have suddenly lost their anxiety about buying stuff. There is always more money where that came from.

“What I will eventually do is demerge these companies and run them like a venture capitalist, investing capital as they need. Eventually I’ll take some of them public. It’s great to have a tightly held group but I’d rather have 40 per cent of 10,000 crores [$2 billion] than 100 per cent of 500 crores [$100 million].

“Let me tell you, this is not easy. I’ve just come back from financing meetings in London. It’s very challenging to get investment from fifty-year-old guys when I’m so inexperienced. This project is turning all my hair grey. It’s making me old.”

“You look like a kid.”

“How old do I look?”

“About twenty-one.”

“Oh thank you. I feel like I look fifty years old. I feel like I am fifty. I was looking in the mirror this morning, and I thought I was going bald.”

It’s as if Rahul feels he has made a Faustian bargain with his family firm. It will suck out all his youth and energy, and he will be condemned to a lifetime of looking with horror in the mirror. But, as he immediately says, in words that could have come directly from Goethe’s play, it will give him enormous productive power:

“When I go there and see the huge piles of mud and the huge excavations where they’re building the new hospital, it’s so thrilling. If I can make this thing work, the satisfaction will be unmatched.”

Those huge piles of mud, those excavations: these are the images that circulate in magazines as the horror of ruthless, relentless capital, constantly tearing down what exists in order to accumulate anew: more, bigger, further, quicker. But Rahul looks out on the gouged earth and sees himself completed, expanded, raised up.

“Sometimes I feel like I am just drowning. I am sinking and drowning. But sometimes I’m like, Wow.”

I ask him why he needs to live life so dangerously. He becomes melancholic about the history of the family firm. It was split up among the men of his father’s generation in ways he finds unjust.

“I should have been running a much larger group. When I think about that it pinches a little bit. So some of my motivation comes from wanting to compensate for the losses of the past. Crucial chunks were lost to us, and that burns.”

“Being gay must affect your outlook too?”

“Well, that’s another thing that motivates me to be better than everyone else. I am better than everyone else. I know it sounds conceited. And part of the reason is that I have to perform in order to defy all stereotypes — so they can never say, ‘He’s not really a man.’ I’m not one of those burly Punjabis, so I have to prove myself.”

In fact Rahul has all the qualities of the quintessential Punjabi businessman: a sense of historical slight, a struggle against the world, infinite ground to make up. It makes for his nervous energy, his impatience, his great ambition.

“You talked about a legacy. What is a legacy?”

“I mean, you can set up a school where they educate a hundred kids. You can give money to a charitable organisation. Those may be good things to do. But that is not a legacy. In the broad scheme of things it’s so small that it’s completely irrelevant. Have you seen what the Rockefellers did? That’s a legacy. Every college and university in the US has something that the Rockefellers gave. Every person in that country is somehow touched by what they did. That’s a fucking legacy.

“Look at the businessmen around you. Here. They build obscene houses. They have all these obese children who will eat themselves into an empty grave. Then there will be endless property disputes. And then what? And then what? What is their vision of life? You make money, then you die. You just accumulate a big fortune, and you go on and on and on, and you never do anything else. And then what? I mean how much money do I need? Once I have my apartment in New York and I fly everywhere first class, how much more do I really need? I’m going to change the world with my money. Which is why I need to make so much.”

“So you’re working for the benefit of those less fortunate than yourself?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I did go to a liberal American college, and that’s what I am in my heart. But when I’m running the company, I’m the stereotypically evil capitalist. I’m like a character from Hard Times. I order people about and tell them to polish my shoes. I make sure servants don’t get above themselves.”

It happens that I have come to see Rahul directly from one of the camps set up for the labourers who came to Delhi to work on the infrastructure for the Commonwealth Games, and I am still disturbed by the experience. I cannot help responding to Rahul’s comment with an account of what I have seen in that pathetically overcrowded place. Workers and their families sleep in windowless corrugated iron shacks, and there are ten toilets for about 3,000 people. With the monsoon rains, the whole place is under water: wandering children have fallen into unseen holes in the ground and drowned; mosquitoes have reproduced exuberantly and spread malaria throughout the camp. I have spent the afternoon talking to those too sick to be out at work. They are not paid for the days they do not work, and cannot visit a doctor. They wonder if they will ever make it back to their far-off homes.

“It’s not necessary that it be so bad,” I say. “It’s bad by design. It’s obstinately bad. It’s impossible not to feel it is sadistic.”

“I’m sure if I were to see that I would feel the same,” says Rahul. He pauses, thinking about his feelings, and adds, “But if I saw those people, I am sure I would also feel contempt.”

Rahul’s grandfather comes out into the driveway. He gives us a merry wave and climbs into the back of a Mercedes, which pulls away. Guards open the gates, and the car drives away. Rahul and I contemplate his departure.

“He’s extraordinary,” I say.

“He is,” Rahul replies. “There’s no one I respect more. But you shouldn’t think he was always like this. In his own day, he was a bastard. Ran this family like a tyrant.”

• • •

Family businesses had several clear advantages over more impersonal structures, and these derived not least from their martial culture. They bred not employees but cult members, whose motivation was not just money but glory. These members accepted authoritarian conditions that employees would not. Sons could be dispatched overnight to spend years on the other side of the world. Wives managed the substantial social and familial duties of a wealthy businessman so that he did not need to. It was a dynamic structure that exploited its human resources in a far more primordial way than the average corporation. Fully owned, usually, by the family itself, no one else interfered with business strategy, and major decisions could be taken over dinner.

So the family did indeed require ‘running’. Parenting was a critical business skill. Paternal authority was essential, but when the entire business depended on sons taking over from their fathers, this authority could not be naively applied. Fathers knew that if their sons knew nothing except authority, they would either run away or become idiots. They choreographed an elegant dance with their teenage offspring, therefore, which allowed substantial liberties along the way, and even gave youngsters the idea, when they finally came home to join the business, that they had chosen it of their own free will. Mothers were often exceptional personalities, deploying an astonishing range of resources to manage these complex human dynamics, and ensuring that the inflexible family structure was nonetheless abundant with spiritual and chivalric meaning.

One of the advantages of all this is that there was great continuity of purpose in business families, even through the white-hot economic environment of the post-liberalisation period. They did not have to deal with the metaphysical shock that struck more liberal, ‘middle-class’ families over the same period, for whom everything suddenly changed. In business families, sons did work just like their fathers, and marriages were reassuringly patriarchal — so it was possible to watch calmly as the rest of Indian society tottered in disorientation, and to profit from the chaos. As we have seen, north Indian business families have always considered themselves to be at war, and the sight of calamity and destruction revives their spirits. The early twenty-first-century shake-up allowed the more forward-thinking of these families to greatly increase their economic reach. They understood, as many of the middle classes did not, that endless accumulation required the constant production of the new, which could only happen through perennial destruction. This is what Dostoevsky was referring to when he observed, in London in 1862, “that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order”.³¹ The business family was a structure that was designed to ride undismayed through the storm of disorder, and to profit from it.

But the risks were high. One of the reasons that legend speaks so exuberantly of the perfect warrior is that he — or she — is an extremely rare occurrence. Knights are flawed and fragile, and often allow inscrutable urges to divert them from their calling.

Those young men whose fathers briefly sponsored their interests in photography or music — buying them the most expensive cameras or drum kits, allowing them the freedom of girlfriends and months of travel — gave themselves intensely to these pleasures because they knew they would expire; and when the time came to get married and join the family firm, they did so obediently, because their life had never been about ‘personal fulfilment’ or any such civilian nonsense: the warrior ethos was built on sacrifice, and they had always known they would eventually have to give themselves to their calling. It was painful to leave behind girlfriends and lifestyles they loved, but it was precisely this pain that sharpened their martial resolve. They threw themselves into work with the torrid sense that otherwise they would die.

And yet. It did not always work. So many things could go wrong. If fathers were painfully preoccupied with their sons’ characters and life choices, it was because reproducing the warrior ethos from one generation to the next was extremely difficult. Sometimes alcohol and other addictions came to take the place of all those things young men had allowed themselves to dream of. They beat the wives who had been thrust on them, who, in their turn, turned to addictions to cope with a life in which bearing children was their main significance.

In some cases, the situation became fatal. I heard of a businessman who had no heir and therefore adopted a son from one of his brothers, who had several. The boy was already in his teens: he was good at sports and had no interest in commerce. His real parents felt it was better if they did not see him so he would settle in better with his new environment, and his new parents began to groom him to take over an enormous business. They married him to a wealthy girl from another business family. He told his family he was not happy, but they did not realise how serious he was. Eventually, the burden of what he knew he could not do became too great for him, and he killed himself.

The great expansion of powers that business families experienced in the early twenty-first century also made the transfer of authority to the younger generation more fraught. The forces were greater and more volatile, and Delhi was full of a significant number of failed and dissolute knights.

• • •

Simran says, “I did realise my husband drank a lot. Everybody drinks a lot from time to time and it’s okay, but this was a little more. It began to have effects on our life. His was a Punjabi business family and they had given him a division of the business to look after. He couldn’t handle it. He was drinking a lot. He was never violent, just switched off. Hung-over, never going to work. His family members would hound me on the phone — ‘Where is he, why isn’t he picking up his phone?’ — and I was lying all the time: ‘He’s not feeling well, he’s got an upset stomach, he’s lying down.’ I couldn’t deal with it.

“I took time to have my children. I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring children into my marriage. Because my husband was an alcoholic. But I loved him.

“The family was trying to figure out ways to make Prashant feel good about himself so he would stop drinking and take on his responsibilities. They started pressurising my father-in-law, saying he’s married now, he’s nicely settled, he’s in charge of part of the business, give him some shares in the family firm so he becomes more responsible. So my father-in-law gave him his first shares as a gift. And the first thing he did? Buy a Lamborghini Murciélago. Which was great, and he was feeling so important and happy. But I just kept getting this feeling that something wasn’t right.

“Things didn’t change and eventually Prashant got kicked out of the family firm for his alcoholic behaviour. He had done something silly. So he left and he didn’t know what he was going to do. My in-laws kicked us out of their home as well, and we moved into a rented apartment. He was redundant and was just drinking and sleeping. Our life was starting to fall apart.

“Then something terrible happened: I went into a coma and had to have brain surgery, and I wasn’t allowed to have children for two years. He was very shaken by what had happened and he decided he was going to clean up his act. He went to rehab in England.

“By the time he came back, my medication was over, we were allowed to have children, he was completely clean. And that was great, and that’s when we decided to start a family. My son came along, Prashant was a great father, his business started doing well, he came up with the most fantastic product anyone can imagine. I was very proud of him.

“But I was beginning to have issues with him again. He lost interest in his business and would go to work very late every day. It would piss me off because he would sleep till midday, none of the rooms would be cleaned. By the time he got up, his breakfast had been cleared away because it was already lunchtime and—… but I tried to deal with it. Once in a while I’d tell him: ‘Prashant, you want your shares in the company, you want your father to respect you, so you’ve got to act responsibly. You can’t just sit with your mouth open under the mango tree: nothing is gonna fall in. Go to work every day, it’s not a big deal, you know? You’re on the internet talking on Skype to random ladies or watching movies till four in the morning. Obviously you’re gonna sleep all day. So start acting responsibly. Your children need to see that. Discipline, routine.’

“We also had loads of conflicts over money. Prashant was raised frugally. I mean, he had the best of everything: travel, education, and all of that. But he always felt deprived for some reason. So that’s why he had this whole ridiculous thing with his Lamborghini. I would always say to him things like, ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ or ‘Money doesn’t buy you love’ and he would go ballistic. He felt I was limiting him. Everywhere we went he would be like, ‘Oh nice watch, let’s buy it!’ and I would say, ‘Oh my God, it costs as much as a house! What is wrong with you?’ And he would get angry, so I would say, ‘Can I think about it for a couple of days?’ Before spending $60,000 on a watch! And he would hate me for it. He hated the fact I was natural and didn’t wear crazy fancy stuff and that people still liked me. All his friends really liked me and so did his parents. He was horrified by that because all his life he had never felt accepted and that’s why he put on these airs. When he saw me wearing ordinary clothes and looking like myself, it irritated him like a wound. He said I looked like a beggar, and I couldn’t sit in his Lambo looking like that. I have a Breguet and a Rolex but I wear a big Swatch. I like its big dial. I’m a Swatch girl. Like this scarf I’m wearing cost me 400 rupees [$8].

“So I was already irritated with him. It was showing in my behaviour. And I was fat — something he couldn’t handle — because I’d just had my babies. Then we had all these problems with a priest. My brother’s factory had just burned down: he makes metal handicrafts for export. So this friend of ours introduced this priest to my brother, saying there must be something wrong with the lay-out of your house. You know about ‘vastu’, which is how your house is oriented for good or bad luck. So I thought, why don’t we get this priest to look at the vastu of our house, since our life was going wrong too. So we brought him into our life. He was very happy to be associated with this big family and over time he started realising he had this good-looking-don’t-know-their-heads-from-their-backsides couple who have a lot of money, so let’s use them. He started really irritating me.”

There is a fly in Simran’s tea and she is distracted. She asks a waiter to bring her another cup.

“Where was I?” she asks. “I’m sorry, I have problems with my memory. I’ve been through ten-and-a-half hours of brain surgery, and I keep forgetting where I was.”

“You were talking about the priest.”

“Right. Later on I found out that this vastu man, this priest who everyone talks about with so much respect, actually does a lot of black magic. Things had fallen apart with Prashant and he decided to leave me. I don’t know what happened. I confronted him and that made things worse, and he left. And the priest asked me what was going on and I said, ‘You know what’s going on: Prashant is with this Czech woman and he’s gone to live with her. You should know, you speak to him every day.’ So he asked me to do something ridiculous, which didn’t sound right to me. Black magic. He said, ‘If you do this, this woman will be out of your life.’ He said he would make me something of metal with her name on it and I had to pour boiling water on it every day. Sounds scary, doesn’t it! I said, ‘I can’t do that sort of thing. I’m a simple person. Let her live! Let her live with my husband and eat up all his money. I don’t care. I don’t want to kill anybody. My husband’s gone haywire and I’m not going to stop him. If he sees the light at some point and comes back, I’ll see if I want to go there. As of now I’ve got my own responsibilities: keep a clear conscience, spend time with my children, raise them into great adults, into responsible secure, good citizens — that’s my focus and it doesn’t matter what he does.’ So I never did it.

“Prashant had been acting strangely for a while. He had stopped giving us an itinerary for his overseas trips, which was what the whole family did: they put up an itinerary for their trips with back-up phone numbers and everything. Prashant had stopped doing that. So my father-in-law would ask me where he was and I would say ‘Last time I heard he was in Frankfurt.’ And my father-in-law said, ‘Don’t you speak to him every day?’ I said, ‘He never answers his phone.’ And he started figuring it out. I told him what I knew and he said, ‘Something isn’t right because Prashant just took a ridiculous amount of money out of the bank, which he was planning to take with him. I had to confiscate a suitcase of money from our assistant who was taking it to Prashant. It’s just not on — there are all kinds of people who will come after him, including the tax people.’

“So my father-in-law confiscated all his money. And they had this huge fight about it. And my father-in-law said, ‘I’m not giving it back.’ Because he could see that Prashant was doing something wrong. So Prashant got on the plane and hasn’t come back. He’s lost, for sure. I don’t know if he wants a higher life than the high life that he has. Or, he’s looking to renounce everything eventually. No: I think he just wants his money back, that’s all he wants.

“His father knows what’s going on and he’s very upset. He’s taken care of me and my children, he gives me a monthly allowance, and he’s helped me take legal action against his son to secure properties.

“He is spending $100,000 a month in London. So he has immense money needs and his company is losing money because he’s not there. So he needs to liquidate property, which is difficult because everything is in my name too. Once he came to me and threatened me holding an ink pen to my cheek like a dagger, saying, ‘Sign now!’ I said, ‘Can I smoke a cigarette and think about it?’ and he said, ‘Sign now!’ and I did because my kids were next door and I was afraid of what he would do. And my father-in-law said, ‘Why did you sign?’ and I told him the situation and he understood. So then we put an injunction on the other properties and Prashant was mad. There’s one very valuable property and he thought he would sell it, buy a beautiful farmhouse in England, have thirty cars and live happily ever after. What can I do? He wants to sell everything and do what? Put all his money down the toilet. I need to educate my children. I need to run a home. I need money to invest in a business for my own self-respect because I feel embarrassed about taking money from my father-in-law.

“For a long time after that pen incident I went around with bodyguards because I was terrified of what Prashant might do to get property out of me. I’ve hidden my kids’ passports because I’m scared he might send his mother to take them away. His mother is a very beautiful woman: five foot ten, blond hair, beautiful hands, perfect features — she’s a stunner, you know? She’s very fair-skinned because her family hails from the north-west of Pakistan. She’s from a very humble home but she was married to my father-in-law for her good looks. They never fell in love. So she lives in London and she says — she used to sing opera — she says she sings opera at the Royal Albert Hall but that’s just fantasy; she drinks herself crazy, that’s what she does.

“But Prashant is very close to his mother and I can just see her coming to get my kids. She would say, ‘Come with me to London and you can ride around in my pink Jaguar and I’ll take you shopping to Harrods and I’ll take you to Disneyland,’ and of course they would go with her.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if he’ll come back. I’m just trying to take care of things as best I can. I have wonderful kids, and just being a mom makes me feel fantastic. I’m just scared all the time. I’m scared he’ll say I’m crazy because of my brain surgery, and he’ll take my kids away.

“Did I tell you about my brain surgery? He was responsible for that too. It happened after he bought his Lamborghini.

“I have a condition called AVM,” says Simran. “Arteriovenous malformation. It’s pretty common and it’s no big deal: just thin arteries in part of your brain. You can live with it forever without any problems. It doesn’t handicap you or anything.

“I remember it was my father-in-law’s birthday and we had drinks at home. Afterwards, we said goodbye to all the guests and I went to sleep. The next morning Prashant was in a golf tournament. So he woke up early and he’d been drinking all night — I’d gone to sleep and he’d stayed up drinking, watching TV and whatever. On his own. And then the next day he left early for the golf tournament and apparently packed a bottle of vodka in his golf bag. And he left his mobile at home so I couldn’t get in touch with him. So I called his friends to ask if he’d arrived safely and they said, ‘No but we can see him cruising in his Lamborghini with a bottle of vodka — he’s so cool — he’s such a stud, he’s such a rockstar. He’s drinking a bottle of vodka and cruising.’ I was like, ‘You think that’s funny?’ They’re like, ‘He’s a wacko, your husband, but we love him!’ — you know, for them it was a joke. So that stressed me out. He’d been drinking all night. And he was drinking while he was driving. He was driving one hour away from Delhi. I was so stressed. And my blood pressure went up and burst the artery in my brain. And I went to sleep and I didn’t wake up for twenty-two hours. My mother-in-law kept telling my maid, ‘She just can’t handle her drink: keep giving her water and she’ll be fine.’ And then my mom called and she was worried. She called the doctor and the doctor said, ‘Take her to hospital immediately.’ And my mother-in-law said, ‘No, I know Simran’ — as if she does — ‘Simran can’t handle her drink so let her sleep.’ Then the doctor called back and she said, ‘Oh, she’s still sleeping,’ and the doctor said, ‘I’m telling you there’s something grossly wrong with her, she needs to go to hospital.’ Then my mom called up and said, ‘I don’t care about you, I’m taking my daughter.’ She came and wrapped me up in a blanket. I wasn’t waking up. By now I was just out. The doctors couldn’t talk to me. They put me in the MRI machine and said, ‘If you had brought her five minutes later we would have lost her.’ It was zero hour.

“I was in a coma for nine days. My chances of coming out of it were very low. Because the burst artery was in the area of speech and memory, they said, ‘If she ever wakes up, either she won’t remember anything or she won’t be able to speak again. She might just be cuckoo and you’ll have to deal with that. And there’s a 10 per cent chance that she’ll be okay. So you know what? — we’ve done what we’ve can; all you have left are prayers. And our best wishes.’ So what really saved me was the prayer. There were 101 priests chanting for me. Prashant’s grandmother and my grandmother put all of them together. And everybody’s kindness, and people who wanted me to live, and all the positive energy — I survived and I was absolutely fine, and I was in that 10 per cent of completely normal people.”