Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Miniature

Mangoes are surely the most literary fruit. Countless tales have been told, in this part of the world, about their magical power; many more concern the wily stratagems by which loveable thieves — or children, or monkeys — successfully purloin mangoes from the trees of miserly owners. The mango has a prominent place, too, in literature that touches on sexual desire, for though its pubescent lobe does not properly resemble any part of the human anatomy, male or female, it still manages to incite mysteriously erotic thoughts.

When, in the blinding heat of Delhi’s May, mangoes begin to pile up on vendors carts, it is easy to feel they have fallen out of a fairytale. Imagine: it is forty-five Celsius in the afternoon, and even the sky is seared white. The wind blows in from the bitter plains like the blast from a clay oven, and no moisture can survive. Laundry hung outside has the water sucked out of it in five minutes by the parched air, which sucks at bodies too, drying out eyes and tongues, dehydrating the very innards.

Amid such universal desiccation, the unabashed, chin-dripping wetness of the many species of mango that suddenly pour into the city is a miracle. That merciless nature should supply such consolation for its own ravages, that it should display simultaneously such brute impact and such subtle deliquescence, is literary already. Like rags that turn to riches, or fools who outwit kings, mangoes attract stories because they overturn the general logic of the world.

Cut up into small cubes whose sunshine orange is their concession to the season, it is mangoes that appear on the table now. My friend Gautam and I take a bowl each and eat with relief. The fruits have come out of the fridge, and they restore our systems to some kind of balance after the climatic emergency from which we have just come in.

We sit in semi-darkness, for all the blinds are closed against the angry glare outside. A quiet glow emanates from the corner of the room, where a glass box containing a plastic model of the Taj Mahal fluoresces in alternating colours. The fan churns like the rotors of a helicopter.

Gautam and I have stopped here to pick up one of his friends, Ranjit. But he is not back from work; we sit in the front room and chat to his father, Baljeet, while his mother brings more snacks from the kitchen. We sit on sofas covered with white sheets. Ranjit’s mother flicks on a fluorescent light in honour of our arrival, which bathes the room in green.

Baljeet is rotund, and gives his weight entirely to the support of a worn armchair. He wants to tell us about his latest scheme, in which there have been some encouraging recent developments. He takes out a scruffy bit of paper from the pocket of his white kurta and hands it to me, chuckling conspiratorially. It is a receipt for 2,000 rupees, and it is dated April 1980.

“This is a receipt from a DDA lottery.”

The Delhi Development Authority was set up by Nehru’s government as a consolidation of the capital’s various planning and development agencies. It had sole responsibility for the city’s development and, in order to fulfil this, it had the right to acquire land forcibly and at greatly reduced prices. It was a development monopoly, whose exclusivity was guaranteed by laws making it impossible for private individuals or companies to own more than a few acres of land within the Delhi borders. At various points, however, it released plots of land to individuals through lotteries. Entrants paid a non-refundable fee to enter the lottery and waited, sometimes years, to hear if they had been selected for a plot. If so, they could then buy it at a guaranteed rate.

“This lady entered a lottery in 1980 and she still hasn’t heard anything. But this year she is likely to get a plot. I mean, she will get a plot. She doesn’t know she’ll get it of course. But I know because I have contacts in the DDA. So I am trying to buy her receipt from her. After thirty years she won’t care about it anymore: she’ll be happy to give it up. In fact she has already said she wants to sell. So the plot will be allotted to me. It should be worth about 15 lakhs [$30,000].”

He clasps the arms of his armchair as if it were a throne, and sits up, inspecting my face for signs of approbation.

“You have to know people in the DDA for this kind of business. DDA officials are transferred every two to three years to prevent corruption, so you have to keep building those relationships: take them out, take them gifts.

“When the plot is finally allotted to me, I’ll pay all my contacts. Twenty thousand [$400] here, twenty thousand there.”

In Baljeet’s universe, this is what business is. Business is a lottery run by cheats, and anyone who gets involved had better be prepared for the consequences. This time you might be lucky enough to outwit others. Next time round, it will probably be different.

“I’ve made crores and I’ve lost crores. I’ve probably lost 60 lakhs [$120,000] in scams. One person sold me a property that didn’t exist. I paid 40 lakhs [$80,000] for it. Most of that was cash: the paper value of the property was only 6 lakhs [$12,000]. So 34 lakhs [$68,000] just disappeared, but I filed a legal case for the other 6 lakhs. The DDA came back and told me I had no case. Some guy in the DDA was playing with two people over one property, and accepting money from both.”

Baljeet retired some time ago from a long career with the Bank of Maharashtra. Since this was one of the banks nationalised during the prime ministership of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, Baljeet was effectively an employee of the Indian government. Much of his career was devoted to delivering on Mrs Gandhi’s populist promises for the state-run banks: he worked in some of the remotest parts of the country to set up branches which were, in many cases, the first contact those regions had with formal banking services. In 1976, while still working for the bank, Baljeet began to speculate in property. This is what occupies his time, and especially his thoughts, now.

“Another time I bought a shop in the market near here. I started running the shop and it was going well. But what I didn’t know — which the person who sold it to me did — was that it was soon going to be demolished. A powerful real estate developer wanted to build there. He had political support. And since my shop was an illegal construction — it wasn’t within the approved limits of the market — it didn’t officially exist and I could get no compensation for it. So I lost 23 lakhs [$46,000] there.”

There is a gloomy silence.

Gautam says philosophically, “But you have done okay. You still have two houses. You’ve provided houses for both your sons.”

Baljeet grunts lugubriously in response. He begins to describe another deal he lost out on.

“In 1976, when Sanjay Gandhi was trying to clean up Delhi, he shut down all the dairies within the city. The DDA appropriated land from villages on the outskirts and gave it to dairy farmers in compensation. But some of those areas are no longer on the outskirts at all: they’ve become very fancy since. So now the owners of those dairies are trying to get approvals to build on their land.

“The standard way to acquire a large amount of land,” he says, “is to buy it at a highly subsidised rate for some public purpose — a school, a temple, some sports facilities — and then pay an official to get the land-use changed. But it’s a gamble, because changing the land-use may not happen, and then you’re stuck with a temple.

“Three or four years ago some people were trying to sell off their dairy at a greatly inflated cost because, they said, at some point the land-use could be altered and it could be developed as real estate. They had already divided the dairy into plots, which they were selling for 12 lakhs [$24,000] each.”

Gautam says, “All of us were saying to him, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it! That’s not a good investment to be in.’ But then they did manage to change the land use!”

“Now they’re selling houses on those plots for 7 crores [$1.4 million],” says Baljeet.

He laughs wryly.

“If you made money on every deal, everybody would be doing this business. It’s high-risk. Every time you invest, you have to assume your money is gone. You have to say to yourself, ‘It’s gone.’ And then it might come back four-fold.”

He erupts into a coughing fit. He is not a healthy man.

“He always used to have a drink in his hand,” says Gautam. “He was drinking every evening and smoking two or three packets of cigarettes a day. Then last year he developed severe lung problems and had to go to hospital. He almost died. Now he’s given up.”

Baljeet grins sheepishly and makes a gesture of resignation. He shifts the conversation back to business. He offers us the benefit of his experience: how to distinguish good deals from bad. How to carry around large amounts of cash.

“I never travel the same route twice. I vary my route every time. And I don’t bring cash into the house. I keep it in a briefcase in the car. People never imagine that anyone would be so mad as to leave 30 lakhs [$60,000] in their car.”

While we are talking, Baljeet’s other son, Jimmy, drops in. He’s been out walking his dog: he lives just around the corner, in the other family house. He wears stone-washed jeans and sunglasses, and he is sweating. His mother brings him a glass of water which he downs in one go and sets back on the tray she holds patiently in front of him. There is a great weight of gold on him: gold necklaces, gold bangles, gold watch. He is in the property business too. He starts telling Gautam about a new apartment complex that’s just being built and that he thinks will do very well.

Baljeet cuffs the air in order to dismiss the opinions his son has hung there. He says to me, “He is not an expert like his father. He is way behind me.”

As if in response, Jimmy begins to vaunt his foreign travel. His father has never left India and this is an area where Jimmy can one-up him. Jimmy travels to Dubai and Bangkok as often as he can. He talks about the stuff you can buy in Dubai. The gold markets.

“Do you take your wife with you when you go?” I ask.

“I’ve taken my wife to Dubai. For shopping. Not to Bangkok. Who takes their wife to Bangkok?”

There are dirty laughs.

“Anyway I don’t let her drink,” adds Jimmy. “So there wouldn’t be any point.”

He starts talking about online poker, which is his latest obsession. He looks at the floor as he speaks. He is a braggart, but a peculiarly edgy one. He is divided within himself, and one part of him clamps down on the other.

“Jimmy refuses to go to Europe,” says Gautam, “because he’s not confident of his English. I tell him there are lots of places in Europe where they don’t speak English, but it doesn’t change anything. As far as he’s concerned, white people speak English.”

Baljeet’s wife brings out tea and pakoras. There is quiet in the room, for father and son have managed to silence each other. They are happy to listen to Gautam, who is a supremely relaxed conversationalist. He has recently bought a new car, and everyone enjoys stories of new cars.

“This guy who got it for me, he got my first car too. At that point I had a motorbike but it was giving me terrible back problems. I just happened to mention this to him and he said, ‘Get a car!’ He said if I had 75,000 rupees [$1,500], he could organise financing for the rest. I said, ‘Let me think about it.’

“The next day he called me. ‘Do you want to go ahead?’ I said, ‘Okay.’ So he said, ‘So what car do you want? What colour?’ And so on. Then he called the garage. Five minutes later he called me back and said, ‘The car will be outside your house in 45 minutes.’ We hadn’t exchanged a single piece of paperwork and a few minutes later a brand new car turned up in front of my house.

“So when I wanted to buy this car, I called him again. It cost 6 lakhs [$12,000]. I gave him a cheque for a lakh [$2,000], and he gave me the car. ‘I’ll take care of the rest,’ he said. Once again, we didn’t sign any paper. As soon as I got the car I drove it up into the mountains. While I was there this friend called me to say my cheque had bounced. I felt bad: it looked as if I had just given him a bad cheque, taken the car and run away. But he wasn’t bothered in the least. ‘Don’t worry,’ he kept saying on the phone. Like he was reassuring me.”

Ranjit has shown up during this story. He apologises for being late. He quickly downs a cup of his mother’s tea.

“Let’s go,” he says.

We say goodbye to the parents. Jimmy follows us out of the apartment so he can check up on his dog, which is tied up downstairs. It’s a young mastiff, large and full of energy; it goes nearly hysterical when it seems us coming down the stairwell. We venture out under the gong of the sky. Jimmy lets the dog off the leash and even in this enervating heat it bounds majestically into the distance. We are in Shalimar Bagh, in the northern outskirts of Delhi, on the site of the long-forgotten gardens built by the emperor Shah Jahan; space is generous here — as it was in Bhalswa, which, though it is a separate universe, is only a twenty-minute walk away. In front of the apartment block, a great area of empty land slopes away to a surprisingly sparkling canal, which is itself a relic of the Mughal water system. The buildings are run down, but there is a sense of ease about things: the cars are parked indolently, and trees grow where they want.

As we walk, Jimmy asks me if I know anyone who might be interested in buying apartments. He gives lists of features: Italian marble floors, modular kitchens. He asks for my email address so he can send me the floor plans. We reach Gautam’s car, which is so new that the seats are still covered in plastic. We get in, and I spell out my email address through the open door. As soon as I shut it, the air conditioning starts up with a whoosh, cool on our perspiration. We drive away, the sun descending over the canal, the mastiff racing optimistically after us.

“Jimmy’s amazing,” says Gautam. “He doesn’t miss an opportunity. That guy does business with everyone. You want to borrow 5 lakhs [$10,000]? He’ll get it for you that day. You want 20,000 tampons, he’ll deliver them straight to your shop. He can forge any document you want. Anything you want to do in Shalimar Bagh he can hook you up. Who to talk to, how much to pay.”

Ranjit is on the phone as we drive. He runs a small travel agency, and he is trying to sort out the crisis of a client who has been denied a visa to Canada. “This guy,” says Ranjit between calls, “pays 70 lakhs [$140,000] income tax a year. He’s a businessman with a wife and two children. But his travel history is weak. That’s the problem.”

The evening is only just beginning: we still have to pick up another of Gautam’s friends from his shop in Sadar Bazaar, a large wholesale market near the railway station. The roads around there are packed with activity, and before long we have ground to a halt in the commercial mêlée. The driver in front of us takes advantage of the stasis to open his door and spit a red stream of paan onto the street. Cycle rickshaws manoeuvre around us, piled with chemicals in drums and stacks of printed packing boxes. I watch a group of women sitting on the sidewalk making brooms. Further down, mechanics are putting the finishing touches to a stretched “Hummer” limo. They have welded this thing together entirely from the parts of a Jeep. But it looks a lot like a Hummer and they have put a Hummer sign on the front. Now they are spray-painting it gold.

We inch forward. A cycle rickshaw is hemmed in next to us, the driver a bright-faced adolescent, dripping with sweat, who shrieks out loudly in a perfect imitation of a car horn. He wears a T-shirt which bears the words, “I can cure your virginity.” We draw level with a textiles workshop whose owner sits on a bench outside gluing together paper bags which have been cut out of newspaper. I can see why he is not inside: he has divided the normal-height room into two levels so that he can fit in double the number of tailors at their machines. But it’s impossible to stand upright in there.

Makeshift accommodation has been built on the roofs of these workshops, to which people climb up by ladder. Workers’ underwear flutters overhead like so many grey flags. In every room you can see a great number of water vessels: gathering and storing water is the great enterprise hereabouts. The water pump by the side of the road is in constant operation. People flock to it with buckets, bottles, plastic drums. Next to it is a vast and luxurious peepul tree around whose trunk statues of Shiva and Durga have been propped up: a large woman sits there, her breasts exposed, babbling to herself.

We arrive at Pratap’s metal shop. He is not there. We wait in the heat. The shop, whose front is open to the street, is not large enough to drive a small car into. Pratap’s son, Amitabh, is perched on a huge stack of one-kilogramme nickel plates, talking on the phone. More plates are being unloaded in front of the shop: they clang loudly as they are put down, but this is incidental to the background din of car horns and auto-rickshaw engines. Amitabh must shout for his deals to go through.

Pratap buys metal in bulk and sells it to big consumers: manufacturers of car components, bicycles, bathroom fittings, and the like. The whole business rests on the vagaries of metal prices, which are in constant flux. Amitabh’s mobile phone is hung on the wall so he can watch the flickering prices on the London Metal Exchange throughout the day.

“It’s very intense,” says Amitabh, joining us. “You invest money in a quantity of metal and you have to make it back. But prices can fall at any time. Of course we read reports, we keep on top of everything that’s going on in the metal markets. But it’s basically unpredictable. And now we’ve started importing our own metal, in addition to what we buy from dealers. It takes a whole month for your metal to arrive, once you sign the deal. In that time anything can have happened to the price. And price is everything. If you are one rupee more expensive than the next guy, no one will buy from you.

“The mental pressure can be huge. Sometimes you make a crore [$200,000] in a few minutes, sometimes you lose it. Sometimes you have to sell property to cover losses. There are men in this business who drink a bottle of whisky every night to deal with the tension, and they take it out on their wives and kids. My dad was never like that. He never spoke about it at the end of the day, even when he’d lost a lot of money. He knows how to relax. He takes us for weekends in Hong Kong or Bangkok just so we can all chill out.”

“How much does your business make?”

“We turn over about 100 crores [$20 million] a year.”

“And it’s just you and your dad?”

“And my cousin. My father brought his sister’s son into the business too.”

Pratap came to Delhi in 1980 from a small town in Uttar Pradesh. A friend of his from the same village had migrated some years before to Sadar Bazaar, where he found work as a broker with a successful metal trader dubbed the Metal King. The friend arranged for Pratap to apprentice with the same trader and, since brokers are entrusted with a lot of cash, he gave guarantees to his boss that he would pay for the losses should Pratap disappear. Pratap’s monthly salary was 600 rupees (then $75).

“He worked hard and he learned. He had a dream. He saved his money: he used to walk three kilometres to work to save fifty paise (then $0.06). He wanted to eliminate the label ‘broker’. A broker is nothing. A broker gets ignored. Some of them earn a lot of money. But they are just middlemen, and if they come into the room, no one takes any notice. A businessman is something else. You give value to that person.”

After fifteen years of learning and saving, Pratap struck out on his own. He bought his own stock and got himself this shop. He worked methodically, never risking too much, always knowing his limits.

“My father is happy with normal risk and normal profits. He doesn’t like to lose too much sleep and take big risks. He says, ‘Remember the Metal King!’”

A few years ago, the Metal King was ruined. He was over-exposed to nickel when the price of the metal crashed. He had debts of millions of dollars. He sold real estate to pay off his debts and then retired from the metal market. His sons had started a carpet manufacturing business, and he went to work with them.

“Just imagine. Twenty years you ruled that market, and then you lose everything. It’s years now since he started working in carpets, but people still call him the Metal King.”

We stand just outside the shop smoking cigarettes. Nearby, a man is frying samosas, which smell superb. A goat is chewing at a tuft of grass growing from the crack between the shop wall and the sidewalk: where its tail should be is a massive sagging tumour, which we discuss for a while. It holds a macabre fascination.

A big Toyota pulls up. Pratap’s workers rush to move their bikes, which have been stacked in his parking space so that no one else occupy it. Pratap gets out of the car, a blazer slung over his shoulders like a cape. He has been exchanging news with other metal traders as he does every evening; any one of them who misses this session is at a disadvantage the next trading day. He stands for a moment, waving to us like a patriarch, and then ducks back inside the car to escape the heat. Gautam goes to get his car and pulls up outside the shop so Ranjit and I can get in.

“Are you coming?” I ask Amitabh.

“I’ll stay and shut the shop,” he says evasively. The suggestion that he should go drinking with his father is obviously out of place.

I get in the car and we set off behind Pratap.

“That Toyota he’s driving?” says Gautam. “He had great difficulty buying it. He takes home 10 or 15 lakhs a day [$20,000–$30,000] but none of the money goes into the bank. He pays almost no taxes. There is no record of his money. So no one would give him a loan to buy his car. You can’t buy a car with cash. Eventually he had to take a loan against his property just to buy a car.”

It is dark now. Gautam plays old Hindi movie songs on his stereo.

“Don’t think he’s dishonest. It’s quite the opposite. He has a very strict code of ethics and for him it is the state that is corrupt. He won’t let himself be compromised by cheating policemen or tax officials. This unofficial economy — which is basically the entire economy round here — runs on a different moral system.

“But each year he pays more taxes,” he continues. “Because it’s getting difficult to function if you can’t show taxable income. The government knows there are lots of people like Pratap who earn 100 crores [$20 million] and declare only 15 lakhs [$30,000] to the tax authorities. But they are moving gradually: for now all they want is to get them into the system so they know who they are. Ten years ago they were totally invisible. Now they all have tax identification numbers and they file returns. It’s a big change.”

Ranjit is on another call. He is trying to change the timing of a flight to Nairobi. A battered bus overtakes us, its flanks festooned with the vomit tracks of passengers rattling inside.

The traffic bunches around a wedding procession and for a moment we are jammed up against the wedding band. Thirty trumpets resound in unison to the beat of big drums hammered with simultaneous passion and boredom, and the street is full of leaping men in suits, their shoulders shuttering, horned fingers aloft. Aloft on his white horse, the bridegroom looks curiously lonely. On the dark street the procession is a glaring island: uniformed men carry bright lamps on their shoulders, the wires trailing from one to the next. At the rear, a man wheels a cart on which a juddering diesel generator grinds out the power for all this illumination.

On the other side of the glass from my nose is the bare midriff of a dancing man whose shirt is hoisted high by his thrusting arms. Around the waistband of his bouncing boxer shorts is printed a brand name with no vowels: MYYTPPPS.

Forcing our way through the streets we arrive, finally, at a proud restaurant crowned with red neon signs. Pratap’s car pulls in ahead of us, and attendants, recognising him, jump to his assistance and ours. Both cars are whisked away by valets as we evacuate. We are in a red night glow. Above the entrance to the restaurant is an imposing statue of the god Hanuman. Behind his monkey head rises the moon, a quarter tonight. I think again, as I have so often, that no matter how many years I live in this place, I will never get used to that moon. I grew up with a moon propped up at a jaunty forty-five degrees. Here it lies on its back. The earth is round: we jut out from it at different angles to the sky.

We walk inside. Another statue of Hanuman greets us, garlanded with marigolds, but with this exception the restaurant has something of the feel of a strip club, with its parsimonious spot lighting and sweeping mirrored ceiling. The dining room itself is like a giant cavern, with tables stretching away — since the walls are black reflective glass — to apparent infinity. There are only men here: it is a businessman’s haunt.

We sit around a large round table: more people are expected. I sit between Ranjit and Pratap. Waiters bend their ears to Pratap, who orders whiskies for everyone. I have already been told that this is his show. It’s a tradition. He orders, he pays.

Ranjit is telling me about the first job he ever held.

“It was a lottery racket. Very sketchy. I worked for two brothers who had contacts inside the Nagaland state lottery. This was back in the 1990s. Every day they would pay 15 lakhs [then $50,000] to the lottery people to give them the last digit of the winning ticket before it was announced. Then they would buy up every single ticket ending with that number. We used to fan out all over India to get them. I used to cover Punjab and Haryana; I would take the 06.25 train to Jalandhar. When I arrived, I’d call my boss: ‘Which number should I buy?’ — ‘7’ — and I’d go to the market and buy every ticket ending in seven. Then I’d get on another train, go to Amritsar and do the same. And the same for all the cities. The tickets cost 10 rupees, and every ticket with the correct last number won 70 rupees, so they made 60 rupees on every ticket I bought. Tickets that had two or three numbers correct won 50,000 or a lakh. The winning ticket won 10 lakhs. So after all their bribes, salaries and expenses, my bosses earned profits of around 20 lakhs per day [then about $70,000]. It was crazy. We worked in a vast office where there was constant free booze and people were on the phone the whole time. Eventually one of the brothers was killed in Nagaland when he went to hand over a suitcase of cash. A terrorist organisation demanded his money, he refused to hand it over, and they shot him. The whole operation shut down straight away. But imagine how much money they made over three years. The surviving brother runs restaurants all over Delhi.”

“You should have seen Ranjit in those days,” says Gautam. “He used to earn lots of money, he wore expensive clothes, he had a nice car. He always had a full tank of petrol: you could say to him, ‘Let’s drive to the Himalayas,’ and we would just go. But he was very disturbed when that guy was shot.”

A tray of whisky arrives. Ranjit is irritated that this dinner has been arranged on a Tuesday, which is one of his non-drinking days. Drinks are distributed to everyone else: now we are seven or eight at the table. Their first gulp after the working day is greedy. They praise Ranjit’s abstention, however: “It is good to know you can do without it.” They tell astonishing stories of alcoholic addiction, whose spectre looms large for all of them. This leads naturally to chat of heart disease, diabetes and renal failure.

Pratap contributes nothing to these conversations. “I lost 60 lakhs [$120,000] today,” he says. “Can’t you all stop chattering?”

But no one takes any notice. The music is too loud in here for people to hear each other across the table, so they talk to those around them. Ranjit continues his account.

“I decided to look for a real job. I had been earning good money but I knew there was no future in it. When you’re doing something like that, you can’t say to anyone, ‘This is what I do.’ So I began to think about learning a real trade.”

“But you worked for that cable guy first.” Gautam laughs. “Ranjit was a hired thug.”

Ranjit is laughing too.

“That was when cable TV was just coming into Delhi. Every neighbourhood saw intense competition. I was employed by a cable operator to make sure no competitor came into his area. If they did, I would beat them up. I got into so many fights with that job. Once I was at a paan shop: a man came up and said, ‘Why are you standing here?’ and I said, ‘Who are you to ask me why I’m standing here?’ and three of us started beating him up. We only realised afterwards he was a policeman, and suddenly the police were all over the neighbourhood, beating people up to find out who had done it. We had to flee town.”

Ranjit is a quiet man. It is difficult to imagine that his modest physique might be capable of such exploits.

“I had a friend who worked for a travel agency and he told me there were good prospects in travel. So I got a job with a travel agency. My salary was 1,300 rupees [then $42] a month. Before that, at the lottery, I used to earn 30,000 rupees [then $1,000] a month. But I wanted to learn something respectable. For the first six months I worked as an office assistant, serving water, making coffee, washing plates. Then I spent six months as the office runner, delivering tickets to customers. Then I worked in their courier business: I would accompany large loads to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi or Moscow. When I went to Bahrain I would leave on Saturday night with a thousand-rupee allowance and $50 for a Bahrain visa. But I didn’t want to spend the $50 on the visa, so I would stay in the airport for two days until the return flight on Monday night. I would just sleep for two days.

“After that I began to manage travel for big corporate clients. Before that I didn’t know how to talk to important people. I didn’t even have a picture in my mind of what they looked like. These clients would spend 12 lakhs [then $30,000] on a trip, and I would have to monitor the entire schedule as they travelled. If a flight was delayed I would call them in the US, tell them the problem, and they would say, ‘Get me on another flight.’ It was very exciting.”

Ranjit now runs his own travel company. He started two years ago with an investment of 1 lakh [$2,000]; now the company has capital of 40 lakhs [$80,000].

“I give excellent service. I work very hard and my money means something.”

Pratap has ordered enormous quantities of food which now arrives, suddenly, in gleaming brass bowls: daal, butter chicken, kebabs, roti. Everyone digs in: this is the kind of food that has you slavering primordially when it is put under your nose.

Whisky keeps coming too, unaccustomed for me, but which I drink by way of conviviality.

Ranjit says, “When I watched my father and brother in the real estate business, I knew I didn’t want to live like that. No standards. No permanent income. You have to drink every night with the police — my father would drink two or three bottles a day and come home dead. If you want to be in the property business you have to work like that. And every night you say, ‘God, I did this today. Please forgive me.’

“I don’t like that world. I don’t like how those people have no respect for money: money comes easily and just disappears on clothes and drink and trips. If you work hard for your money, you will save that money.

“Not only that, but real estate people have no respect in society. You only need a table, three chairs and a phone to do that business. People say, ‘If you can’t do anything else, you do that.’ My brother cannot sit still on a chair all day long and concentrate on a screen. He has to jump around all day and be on the phone.

“Now I’m happy with my life. I’ll work as long as I live because I love this work. I want to make it on my own. I want to look after my children and give them a better education. The only thing I still need to sort out is my wife. I don’t like her working so far away from me. I’m planning to train her in the travel agency business so she can work with me.”

“Every day,” says Gautam, “he drives two extra hours so he can drop her to her office before he goes to work, and pick her up again afterwards. He won’t let her travel the streets on her own.”

“But my closest relations are with my friends,” says Ranjit. “Not with my family. Not even my wife. If I need help, I call my friends first. One thing I don’t like is that I work so hard now, I don’t see my friends as much as I used to. I keep asking Gautam if he wants to go on a trip. But he doesn’t have time for me.”

He says it with some edge. Actually it approaches a conflict in their relationship. Gautam has recently married a white American woman, of whom Ranjit does not totally approve, and sometimes it is awkward for them to be together.

“Ranjit never says it to me because he is a very nice man,” says Gautam. “But inside him those issues are deep. Hindus and Muslims. He can’t stand it if I have Muslim friends.”

I am slightly confused. “But your wife is not Muslim,” I say.

“Muslim, Christian — it’s all the same. It’s not Hindu. It’s not Hindu culture. Ranjit is bothered by everything that disrupts Hindu culture. For instance, I don’t live with my parents and Ranjit always tells me this is not our culture, and I say, ‘But my sister lives with them!’ and he says, ‘Don’t try to escape your duty. It is the son who should take care of his parents. It’s your responsibility.’”

I finish eating and run away from the table to wash my hands. With this food, the passage from pure animal craving to incapacitation and remorse is remarkably rapid. Afterwards you are desperate for hydration, because it is constituted, overwhelmingly, of oil. You drink glass after glass of water but it doesn’t make any difference, because it will never penetrate the pure lipid you have become.

The conversation turns to cricket. Or, more particularly, the private lives of cricketers. Pratap, who is sitting on the other side of me, is unable to engage with this sporting gossip, and stares off into the distance. I try to rouse him from his silence. He tells me about his working life.

“It’s getting very tough out there,” he says. “It’s becoming a winner-take-all market. Smaller guys are going under, and the fight at the top is more vicious.”

“What can you do about it?”

“You can’t plan beyond a point. No one knows the future. The main thing we have done is to diversify our income. From a metal trading business we began a metal import business. From those two businesses we began buying land outside Delhi for development. We also bought a property in Delhi which we run as a gym. We will always have several businesses, whatever happens. If one doesn’t work, others will.”

I ask Pratap if he considers himself a rich man.

“I have a lot of respect in my family,” he says. “I have given money to many of my relatives, and I have given my sister’s son a job. But I am not rich. In Sadar Bazaar terms I am one of the smallest traders. Many of them have been there for a century and they control far bigger markets.”

“The Forbes list of billionaires only includes white money billionaires of course,” I say. “Corporate billionaires, whose money is publicly accounted. But there must be many other billionaires who will never come to the attention of Forbes. Cash billionaires.”

“How much is a billion dollars?” asks Pratap.

“Five thousand crores.”

“Oh, there are several in Sadar Bazaar who have that. If you lower the bar to 1,000 crores, there are very many. But you would never know from looking at them.”

This is a conversation that interests everyone. They all pitch in with their stories of fabulous wealth. Someone has read about a gold bathtub.

I ask, “Who is the richest person in Delhi?”

Several men shout, “Madhu Koda!” — which is a joke. Madhu Koda is the story of the moment: a poor-farmer’s-son-turned-billionaire politician. The newspapers have been breathless with his life story. He began working as a miner and welder, entered politics in Bihar in the early 1990s and became a minister in Jharkhand when that state was carved out of the former. Minister with authority over mines and minerals, in fact, in a state whose enormous natural resources were just then, in the wake of liberalisation, attracting a stampede of mining corporations from all over the world. Later on, during his tenure as chief minister, Madhu Koda was arrested for possessing assets and investments valued at close to a billion dollars. He allegedly owned mines in Liberia, a $200 million real-estate development in Dubai, business investments in Sweden, Thailand and Indonesia — as well as resorts and houses all over India, including in two of Delhi’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. This money was amassed, in part, by selling mining licenses to corporations for cash. It was part of a grand business plan, the newspapers reported, that was intended to culminate in respectability and a listing on Nasdaq, but it was impossible to keep a lid on it all that way.

It is in some ways a grimy tale, and yet it has also the thrilling glint that all rags-to-riches stories possess. And it is stunning evidence for the truth that politics, for India’s poor, is the quickest and most accessible route to wealth. Stories of poor people making fortunes through business are much loved, but in practice they almost never happen. Politics, however, which offers so many quotas and breaks to those from the most marginalised sections of the population, has made many of India’s poorest rich. If you have no money, status or connections and you want to get rich in your own lifetime, politics is the absolutely rational career choice. Corrupt politics, in this sense, is a corrective to the brutal inertia of the rest of society, which is why, for many, it is not so much a reason for despair as the main source of hope.

The reason it is funny to invoke Koda as the richest man in Delhi is that he has only just arrived here. He has been moved from a jail in Jharkhand to Delhi’s Tihar Jail, in fact, so that he can continue to attend parliament. Which puts him in good company. The bus between Tihar Jail and the Parliament Building is not a lonely line to travel.

At some point in the conversation I am forced to make an exit so I can catch the last Metro. I bid farewell to the company, drunken by now. Gautam leaves with me, and drops me to the Metro station. It’s deserted. I get into an empty carriage. The air conditioning is powerful, the ride smooth. I feel drowsy. At the other end, I pick up my car and head for home.

I am nearly at the house when I see a peculiar sight. A woman in a glittery nightclub negligée is walking down the dark street, so unsteadily that it seems she might fall at any moment, and behind her, two men are following at walking pace on a motorbike. I am not sure what to do. It is well after midnight, and the woman seems oblivious to everything around her: not drunk, but flying on the wings of some other potion. I draw level and put down the passenger window.

“Are you okay?” I ask. She looks in the window. She cannot focus too well on my face.

“What did you say?”

“I just asked if you were okay.”

“Me? I’m fine!”

I watch her walk away. I put the window up. I look ahead, ready to drive on, and see that one of the men on the motorbike has run in front of my car, which he now proceeds to beat violently with both his palms. While he is doing so, the other man jerks open my car door and grabs my arm.

“Get out!”

“Why?”

“She is a prostitute. You are under arrest.”

“For what?”

“What did you say to her?”

“I asked her if she was okay.”

“How do you know her?”

“I don’t.”

“Get out of the car.”

“Who are you?”

“We are police.”

I get out of the car. I look around for the woman, who seems to have completely disappeared.

“Driver’s license?”

I can’t believe this situation. I get my driver’s license out, and I watch while he inspects it.

“Which country is this from?”

“The UK,” I say.

“You are British?”

“Yes,” I say. He looks at me strangely. He begins writing down the number of my driving licence. While he is doing so, I hear my car engine rev, and turn round to watch it being driven away by the other man.

“Where’s he going?” I cry.

“Police station.” He is unperturbed. I am dumbfounded. He continues making his quiet notes. Then he hands me back my driver’s license.

“Get on the bike.”

I climb on the back of the motorbike, and he drives away at speed in the direction already taken by my car. We whizz round dark corners and out into the neon sea of the main road. A U-turn, a side road, more dark corners, and finally the police station. My car is meekly parked out front, under a sign offering helpful advice to all who visit the Delhi police: “A Person Who Has No Opinion Will Seldom Be Wrong”.

There seem to be two opposite conclusions to draw from this, and I honestly don’t know which is the intended one.

I am led into a ramshackle office smelling of dust, sweat and stamp pads. A policeman is sitting behind a desk. He seems happy to see me in his net. My captor briefs him.

“What were you doing this evening?” the boss asks me.

“I was having dinner with friends.”

“Girlfriends?” he says, smiling.

“Friends.” I can see that he hopes I will turn out to be morally vulnerable. I resolve to act blasé. I don’t have much money on me.

“So you leave one girlfriend and think you can pick up another girlfriend?”

I do not answer.

“Why would you stop to talk to a woman in the street? In the middle of the night.”

We go over the details of the event again. He asks where I live, trying to place me in the Delhi galaxy. You never know with foreigners.

“Have you been drinking?” he asks.

“No,” I lie.

“Shall we go to the hospital and check?”

“Okay,” I say. This irritates him.

“What do you mean, ‘Okay’?” he barks. “Show me your driving license.”

I hand it to him and he makes a big show of inspecting every detail. I am not going to give him the satisfaction of hanging on his opinions. I look around. I’m actually a bit fascinated by this place, which is the most dilapidated seat of state power imaginable. Wires spill out of empty light sockets. There is a cardboard ceiling, in which holes have been rudely cut for the spinning fans to protrude. The walls are covered in phone numbers written at screwy angles and, behind every chair, dirty brown clouds where heads have leant. Someone has put up a sticker above a desk saying, “Sexi Hot Boy”. In the corner of the room is a shrine with statues of various gods.

The office is just a cleared-out corner, in fact, of a giant storeroom. All around is the most enormous accumulation of police paraphernalia. Road signs, traffic cones. Rows of megaphones on shelves. Piles of shoes and boots. Beds. Massive piles of old files.

Birdsong starts up in the room, which I realise is the ring tone of the policeman’s mobile phone. He answers it. “Yes sir,” he says solemnly. And again, “Yes sir.” I can hear a raised voice on the other end and realise he is being reprimanded. I know the consequences for me will be bad if I stand and watch his indignity, so I wander out of the open back door into the courtyard outside. Another policeman is draping wet laundry over the handlebars of the old scooters which are parked here in great numbers. In fact, as my eyes adjust to the light and I can see out across the courtyard, I realise there is here the most enormous expanse of rotting vehicles. Abandoned scooters, cars and auto-rickshaws, all broken and twisted, and jammed in together. I wander into the darkness, round the corner of the building. The trees here are old and tall, and bats flit overhead. The wreckage goes on and on. There must be fifty or sixty rotting police vans. Rusting traffic lights and police barricades. Unbelievably, there are two small aeroplanes jammed in at the end, half overgrown with grass.

I head back to the building. The policeman ignores me when I come back into the room. He is typing with one finger on a computer keyboard. I sit down. Another man comes in and sits next to me. His walkie-talkie keeps erupting with voices of the night. Listlessly, he picks up a shred of newspaper from the floor and tries to make out what the ripped-off article is all about.

The man behind the desk acknowledges me at last. He says,

“What would have happened if my men had not saved that woman from you?”

I feel he is running out of ammunition. He says,

“Would you like everyone to know what you do at night?”

I try deference. I call him “Sir”. I tell him again how it was.

He holds my driving license in the air and summons the cop sitting next to me.

“Photocopy.”

The man takes my driving license to the photocopy machine in the corner, whose sparkling newness contrasts with the general decrepitude. He presses the copy button but nothing happens. He turns back to the man behind the desk.

“No paper.”

The man behind the desk has a full packet of photocopy paper in front of him. He carefully takes from it one single sheet and hands it to his colleague, who opens the drawer of the machine and places it in the tray, closes the drawer, presses the button, and prints on it a copy of my driving license.

The boss hands me a pen.

“Sign,” he says.

I sign the copy of my driving license. For some reason. He throws the original down on the desk.

“Never come back to this place,” he says.

I retrieve my license and leave the room. I get in the car and drive home. This time I arrive successfully.

The house has been empty all day, and the air is stifling. By this stage in the year, the bricks of houses have accumulated so much heat that they continue to bake the rooms even at night. I turn on all the fans.

Then I go to the fridge and take out two ripe mangoes.