Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Sixteen

You like this table? I designed it myself. Brilliant white. If anyone comes in to the room unexpectedly they’ll never be able to spot the cocaine on it.

— Delhi millionaire

“Parties in Delhi are no fun, dude! In Mumbai, even when they’re doing coke it’s fun to be with them. Here it’s not like that. In Delhi people are crazy, and they go to parties to escape themselves because fundamentally their shit is fucked up. When you go into it with that mentality, you’re heading for some morose shit. You go to Delhi parties, and you see two sitting in that corner, three in that corner, four smoking outside. No one’s talking. It’s like that here.”

I’m speaking to Krish, who, as a retired drug dealer, knows something about all this.

“I started out dealing in Goa and Manali but I quickly got connected to the cities. If any party happened in Delhi, I used to be there. Nothing works without drugs in Delhi, so without me there was no party. Without me, there was no Fashion Week. When Fashion Week happened, they called me up to make sure I was coming, and they booked me a room in the hotel where it was happening. Any designer who was having a show would call me before to say, ‘Dude, you have to be there on that day.’ For Fashion Week you needed 100 or 200g easy in one or two days. I used to get everything. I was perfect. People used to trust me because I never messed up. I would just finish my job and walk away.

“Everyone is using, boss! Big politicians, big industrialists, fashion, media — all of them. But in Delhi you don’t see it out much: it happens in farmhouses. The people who do so much coke don’t go out. The farmhouse area is a fucking junkyard. I don’t care to go these days. Delhi used to be fun. Before 2001 we used to have rave parties in farmhouses. And it was fun, people wanted to listen to music, and the parties were outdoors. And yeah, all kinds of stuff used to be around but nobody used to do coke. Ecstasy or MDMA. Not cocaine. People loved each other and there were only a few people in the scene, they didn’t give a fuck what other people thought, they just wanted to dance. Now the parties are all shuttered up and no one cares about music. Everyone’s got their expensive clothes on, so they need air conditioning. You can’t do MDMA in a closed room, you know: you need to be outside dancing. You can’t fucking do it in a room and sit there. So coke is more convenient for people nowadays.

“Coke has taken over everything. People want the feeling of cocaine. To catch a girl, to catch people. Rich people who do a party in their farmhouse, they can’t have it without that feeling. They are rich but they don’t feel rich without coke. If people do a farmhouse party they put down 5 lakhs on the coke.

“And coke is good for all these people who have to work. If you do Ecstasy or LSD the whole night, the next day you can’t do anything. Coke, you work the next day. I know so many people who have twenty-four-hour lives. Like that fucking politician — he doesn’t sleep for two or three days. He just finishes the night, puts some water on his face and a suit on and then he turns up at meetings fucking hyper, you can tell, you know. Coke is good for that. With other drugs you can’t. You are shattered next day. So now there’s no weekend: now every day is a weekend. People will call, ‘Dude, can you hook me up?’ and I’m like ‘Today is Monday!’

“Go to all the five-star hotels, the toilet’s always busy, mate! Even like all these lounge bars, it’s the same thing, everybody knows. They know if they tell one person not to do it then ten others won’t come. They don’t want to lose business. So they tolerate it. You need to have a crowd in your bar, so you can’t fuck around with the dope. Otherwise, next time they won’t come and they’ll tell everyone else too.

“You can get busted. But it doesn’t really happen. The cops take money and then they leave. It’s mostly just these black guys who get caught, they get really fucked. Most people who use coke are connected. So even when the cops arrest someone, they somehow get a call from somewhere else like, ‘Dude, that’s my friend, so take care.’ So they just say to him, ‘Pay us and fuck off.’ It’s a kind of business for them. Whenever they catch a politician’s son, it’s a jackpot.

“It’s much more in Delhi than other cities because the people who run things in Delhi are the people who already have money. They have property and businesses, and they live off that. So it doesn’t matter whether they work or not. No one sits at home doing nothing in Mumbai because you won’t find anyone else around you. Everybody else is at work. Even if they’re rich, they still work. They do all this shit and all, but the next morning you’ll see them in the office. Here in Delhi, it’s like more royal style. Delhi people call each other up in the afternoon and say, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ — ‘Nothing really’ — ‘Okay, come for a drink love’ — and there you go. You go to their house, fucking every evening you will see ten or fifteen people. Mumbai doesn’t have time for that kind of stuff.

“The rich here are really fucked up. These people don’t even pay their servants and the people who work for them and all. But they can like spend on drugs like easily 50,000 rupees [$1,000] a night. Especially the boys — they spend too much money in Delhi: go to clubs, find a chick, buy a drink, buy coke. Partly because Delhi has fewer girls out than Mumbai. Guys are going crazy with competition. Girls are more sheltered in Delhi, they mostly live with their parents. In Mumbai they rent their own places like boys.

“I know this guy who lives in a farmhouse. I was in his house just yesterday. He doesn’t work. He’s all alone. When you enter his gates, you have to drive a kilometre to reach his palace. And he made his house like one of those old houses in London. The cars are fanned out in front. When he buys a car he spends more money than the cost of the car on modifications. Like whatever car he buys, he calls them and he’s like, put this shit, put that shit. So he’s got this row of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Maseratis, Range Rovers. Vintage cars too. And all this guy thinks about is, ‘Okay, what guy can get me the best coke? Which girls are new in town?’ That’s all he does. And his friends are like that too. All of them are like that. They don’t need to work like a hundred years and they can spend so much money and still it won’t go away. He has a big big company and his money is made. So many of them in this city like that. They are fucking smart enough dude! A couple of them studied in Oxford and they’ve done like super things, but once this thing is in your head, everything is dead, everything.

“I see people lose everything. You lose your friends, you lose your family. You lose yourself. You go nuts. You go fucking nuts. People destroy everything, they don’t work, they lose themselves. So many of those dudes have done too much, they’re wired all the time, they can’t handle people you know, they’re fucking shivering and all, they start shouting. Like Trainspotting you know, they fucking freak out.”

• • •

Was this oligarchy happy? Strangely, perhaps, happiness did not seem to be among its more pronounced attributes. In order to understand why, we might ask another question: “How do you know you own what you own?”

In Western societies, where there was a long-standing and widespread capitalist consensus, the question caused less difficulty. Spiritual problems with money and property had been laid to rest long ago: contemporary Europeans could no longer empathise with the spiritual terror with which their Renaissance forbears contemplated the accumulation of profit. And in modern, democratic times, a consensual explanation had arisen for what some people owned and others did not: hard work. Over the previous century, the wealth of America’s financial elite, for instance, had derived less and less from inheritance and more and more from corporate salaries and bonuses. The rich could explain their privilege, therefore, through merit: they had excelled at university, they had shown intelligence and originality in the workplace, they had driven themselves to their limits, they had been promoted because of their skills — and it was quite proper that they should be rewarded with property, luxury and mobility. They did not need to ask themselves, as they drove home at night, if their mansion was really ‘theirs’ — if they were not, in fact, imposters, hucksters or criminals who merely ‘squatted’ in wealth. Their ownership of property was not just legal and theoretical: it accorded with their own inner sense, and indeed with society’s general opinion. It was all legitimate. What was theirs was ‘really’ theirs.

It was an absurd rationale. If hard work were really recompensed with property, many of the global poor would look out over rolling estates. If talent always found its way, the planet would not resound so deafeningly with the disappointment of wasted skill and ambition. But this was not the point. It was important to the functioning of a society that there be a consensus as to what constituted a legitimate basis for property, even if the whole thing was a delusion.

In the wake of an economic upheaval like India’s liberalisation, where enormous fortunes had simply been seized from the mêlée, the rich did not have such an easy time explaining how or why wealth had come to them, for they knew better than anyone else just how arbitrary the whole thing was. Their money had been acquired by a combination of elements — luck and connections, brute force and cunning — that had nothing individual about it at all. Anyone else could have done the same thing. Wealth remained, at some level, external: it did not feel ‘mine’. Looking at their houses and jets, they suffered from a profound misrecognition, like the impotent man whose mental image of himself has no penis, even though he can see the thing hanging between his legs. They found it difficult to feel rich. They enjoyed physical and legal control over their assets, but this did not translate into a secure inner feeling of ownership. They were fully aware of how unrepresentative they were of their poor country, and that society at large had little conviction that they deserved what they owned. They were regularly called thieves and pillagers, and the fact that they denied it vehemently did not mean that they did not believe it themselves. “Why has this come to me?” they asked themselves and, since the answer took them into places they did not want to go, they were addicted to distraction. But even Delhi’s endless drugs and parties could not cut off the anxiety that all this stuff might be taken away from them as easily and quickly as it had come. It was a Hindu idea of wealth too: the goddess Lakshmi, she of the gold coins, was always only a visitor. She had to be coaxed into one’s house at diwali time and, given the great whimsy of the Hindu cosmos, she could depart at any time. Every morning the Hindu shopkeepers said prayers to her: not today, Mother Lakshmi, do not leave me today.

This is why spiritual advisers were as prominent in the business world as accountants and lawyers. Having acquired their wealth by hacking the political machine, rich people sought to ensure they did not lose it by employing the services of those who could hack the cosmic machine. Gurus told businesspeople what to do to keep the universal flows pointing in their direction: eat these foods, drive a car of this colour, choose a phone number ending in this digit, marry a woman with this name, wear a ring with this stone. There were gurus who specialised in property, gurus who were experts at legal disputes, and gurus who helped with focus and energy. A business class that, despite all the signs to the contrary, suffered from deep fears about its own downfall, turned to gurus to help it preserve itself. Gurus exorcised this class of its many ghosts: they sought to extract from the equation of Indian business the great accumulation of negativity that they felt.

But it was possible to glimpse something else in Delhi businessmen, something more paradoxical than the simple desperation to hang onto what they had. It was possible to see that their urge to acquire and accumulate sat alongside another, precisely opposite, impulse: to rid themselves of everything, to be pure, ascetic and uncorrupted. In this they had more in common, in fact, with European capitalists of the Renaissance era than with their contemporary Western counterparts. The consumer universe offered many kinds of ‘choice’ but it did not allow rich people to choose nothing — and yet this desire to possess nothing is actually much more powerful in human history than we consumerists commonly remember. In this part of the world, particularly, the urge to give up the material life and wander in search of something else was significant, as was the relationship entertained by the powerful and moneyed with the spiritual and poor. The way that contemporary business warriors registered their success was through the accumulation of money and possessions, but this in some ways dulled the entire enterprise. For warriors have always prized asceticism: the spiritual economy that allows practitioners to rise above the common condition and achieve truly noble feats. Sometimes the ascetic drive was felt powerfully by these men — particularly the men — whose Hinduism constantly warned them of spiritual corruption. Delhi’s businessmen turned to gurus not only to help them keep their wealth, therefore, but to help them endure it.

• • •

“In 1999, my life changed. I began an affair with a pretty married woman with two kids. She was separated from her husband and I really liked her. And it was in that year that I began trading.

“I went into business with a man who was India’s largest wheat exporter. We began trading a lot of different commodities and the returns were so amazing that everyone was putting money into our business. The richest Indians from all over the world put money in: they would give us a crore and six weeks later we gave them 3 crores back. We were getting capital from everyone and everywhere we could. I liquidated property and investments to put money in; all my friends were doing the same.

“You see: liberalisation was a gradual process, and as late as 1999 trade restrictions were still being lifted on imports. My partner and I knew people in the government, so we had inside information about which restrictions would be lifted next. It was just like all the real estate guys who got inside information about where the new highways were being planned, and then bought land there. We bought up stocks of a commodity before anyone else knew it would be derestricted. We had shiploads ready to come into the country as soon as the restrictions were lifted, and we made a pile of money very quickly. Then the big companies would start to import that commodity and we moved onto something else. We made so much money, it was embarrassing.

“Then it all ended. Because we have something in India called jealousy. My business partner had another business partner who reported us to the police, and straight away every investigative agency in the country was up our ass. Asking how we had made so much money so quickly. We also had huge quantities of black money because we had to give out bribes. A shipload of wheat was worth 40 crores [$8 million] and to get it through you would have to hand out bribes of 50 lakhs [$100,000]. So they were suspicious.

“After that all my bank accounts were frozen and my money was inaccessible. I had 500 crores [$100 million] sitting in the bank but I couldn’t touch it. So I didn’t make anything during the boom while everyone else was putting money in real estate. There were four years of questions. I became very frustrated — I’d worked to earn the money but couldn’t enjoy the fruits of my work.

“At the same time my girlfriend left me and began an affair with one of Delhi’s most insane men, the son of a cabinet minister. She knew he was very violent but she also knew he was about to become very rich because her brother was in on the same deal. So she went to be with him.”

Now thirty-four years old, Puneet has not worked for more than a decade. He stays at home, mostly, since his friends are all rich and he has no income. Today, in anticipation of my visit, he has put on a shirt, newly pressed trousers and a pair of leather brogues. We sit together in the spacious living room whose walls are hung with hunting scenes and antique engravings of Indian cities as they appeared to English nineteenth-century travellers.

Puneet’s improbable windfall was helped along by the fact that he went to one of Delhi’s most prestigious schools, the preferred choice of the political and business elite. His school friends were the sons and daughters of the most powerful people in the country, and they revelled in their shared invulnerability. The school provided, essentially, an apprenticeship in power-mongering.

“There was this guy who married into an army family, which enabled him to become a successful arms dealer. His two sons were at school with me. One day we were at the nightclub at the Hyatt and the sons got into a big fight. The bouncers started fighting them and they called their dad. He rushed over there — he’s a huge guy himself — and he beat up the bouncers. He picked up big plant pots and threw them at them. Then he got his sons out. After that he planted a fake picture of his sons bandaged up in hospital in the newspapers to get sympathy for them, and filed a lawsuit against the Hyatt.

“That kind of stuff happened all the time. Whenever trouble broke out, boys would be competing with each other over which of their fathers had more power to intervene: ‘I’ll call my dad. No, I’ll call my dad.’

“One guy was the son of the minister of external affairs. So his father had control over passports. One day my friend gets off a flight into India and he turns up at the immigration desk. His passport was folded in two in his back pocket. He put it on the desk. The immigration guy said, ‘You can’t treat your passport like that. You’re defacing government property.’ My friend replied, ‘You want to see how I treat my passport?’ and he started ripping pages out of his passport and tossing them one by one in the face of the guy behind the desk.

“Another friend wanted to get a driving license. When you’re eighteen, everyone is trying to get a driving license. So he walked into the transport authority. He started dropping the name of his uncle, who was the chief of police. As he went around the office, he moved from the lowest rung to the highest rung until he met the guy in charge, who organised for him to have his full license there and then. This was an incredible feat. Usually you have a provisional license first and a full license is only granted later, and at age eighteen a full driving license is the coolest thing you can get. But while this was going on, someone made a call to the police chief’s office, found out the guy was bullshitting about who his uncle was and cut up the license in front of him.

“My friends use connections for everything. How else can you function in this place? I was in a car accident some time ago and they confiscated my license. I called a friend’s father, who sent policemen to sort out the situation and rough up the other guys. Then I called up a friend in the ministry whose father had an amazing assistant who got my license back for me the same day. Otherwise I would have had to go to court and everything.

“This is why the elites of this country are so crazy. Their high comes from being able to do stuff that no one else can do and they’ll fight like anything to protect that. And it’s the parenting too. The parents worship power, so the kids do too. That’s partly why loss and failure have been such important lessons in my life. It’s only when everything is taken away that you start to see what crazy things you were doing.”

That is what, in 2000, Puneet felt had happened to him. And he felt it was not just a chance event. It was a spiritual message.

“Some negative energy was attacking me that I couldn’t deal with. I felt I was being told, ‘You can’t go the way you were going. At least: you have to go another way before you can go that way.’ I got deeper into spirituality so I could get my money unblocked. I started going to see gurus who could help me find out what problems in me were keeping this money away.

“I found a guru who was the head of a big bathroom fittings company. I’ve had many gurus, but when I met this guy there was an insane exchange of energy, and I’ve been with him now for a long time. So he listened to my story. I explained that the reason my girlfriend left me was that I turned her down when she asked me to marry her, which was all because I felt I should not be distracted from my spiritual path. He told me I should not have turned her down. When a woman asks a man to marry her that proposal comes with the universal female energy and should not be rejected. To the point where he told me my money would only be released when I got married. So basically it seemed that on the day I turned down this woman’s marriage request, somebody pressed the fucking pause button on my life.

“He pressed me to get married. And at some level it’s easy for a good-looking guy who has 500 crores sitting in the bank which are going to get unblocked soon. There are so many fucking beautiful women I could have had. But the problem with a guy with my depth is that I can read what’s on a woman’s mind and if I don’t see that she’s coming with the right attitude I won’t fuck her. The one big problem with Delhi society is that if you fuck any woman who’s part of that web, you might as well get a webcam and start broadcasting your sexual activities over the internet because it’s pretty much fucking in public dude. You have to have the fucking confidence of a fucking pornstar.

“And it’s difficult for me and my brother. He’s not married either, even though he went to Yale and he’s a successful banker in London. My brother has a voracious sexual appetite. He’s fucking fearless in that department. He scares me sometimes. He’ll try his luck with any woman anywhere. He’s not good-looking at all now. He’s like balding and short. But he’s a sweet guy. The thing is our mother is an overbearing personality. That’s one reason it’s difficult for us to get married. Then our money has got stuck, and anyway we weren’t so financially secure after my father died. The expansion of wealth that happened in normal families where the father was alive did not happen with us. You have to understand that when one is living in Delhi, whether one likes it or not, one is part of the rat race, and we have not ridden the wave of wealth multiplication which has carried everyone else with it in the last ten years. We’re fucking poor compared to everybody else. We used to have another house from which we used to get rental income and a commercial property too, and both have been sold, so now I don’t have any unearned income. That’s what everyone in Delhi wants, unearned income. But we don’t have any. So that’s a problem too for prospective brides.”

By this point in the conversation, Puneet and I are smoking a cigarette in the garden outside. His mother walks up the drive — she has been attending a wedding party at the house next door, for which every BMW and Mercedes in the city seems to have turned out — and Puneet hastily throws his cigarette over the garden wall. But he is not quick enough. His mother shouts at him for smoking; he denies it, but half-heartedly.

He returns to his meeting with the guru.

“Anyway, the other mistake that guru told me I had made had to do with my uncle. I had taken my uncle to court, and my guru said, since my father was dead, my uncle was the head of the family and you should always keep peace with the head of the family.

“This house was divided between my dad and his brother. My uncle owns the back half and since my father died he has been trying to get the whole thing. His part is painted a different colour from ours: one night he had the roof of the entire building painted his colour to try and indicate that my grandmother had wanted him to have the whole house. Then he used his contacts in the police to intimidate me: they threatened to arrest me if we didn’t vacate the property. And then they issued death threats to my mother. You can imagine if someone can go down to the level of fucking sending my mother death threats when I’m sixteen years old. To a widow, you’re doing it to a fucking widow. I can’t even imagine what goes on.

“My uncle is a very toxic influence in my life. He’s got a fucking crazy family. His elder daughter is a very good-looking woman. Foxy fucking hot chick. Tall, very fair, very slim — very arrogant. She had a lot of guys chasing her so her ego got inflated even more. She had one of the biggest industrial families offering her to marry their son to her — an offer she should actually have accepted if she’d been sensible and humble. She got engaged to some guy whose mother is a big socialite — then she broke off her engagement with that guy, he went nuts, he’s never been the same since. Then she got married to a leather exporter, sweet guy, moved into his house in Nizamuddin, a year later got out of there, took all the fucking furniture with her, took all his family’s diamonds, divorced him.

“She was friendly with a woman who owned this company that became famous for big scams and fraud and shit. At one point that woman and her entire family were in jail for some scam, or they were on the run. She used to live at the Maurya Sheraton because she was making so much money, and she used to have a Rolls-Royce parked outside which became like a landmark for us boys. Anyway when she went to jail that Rolls-Royce was parked outside our house, because my cousin was her best friend and she was doing all the paperwork for the company. While she was working for that woman she met her nephew, fell in love with that asshole, and one day we come home and find that she’s getting married to him. That marriage went on for a while and she made that guy’s life hell. I believe one of the servants who later left them told us that she physically kicked her husband in front of him one day. Then there was another divorce. Now she’s living in the other part of my house. I have very pleasant company around me.

“Anyway so her father, my uncle, sold one of my father’s factories without telling me or my mother. Our side of the family were 50 per cent shareholders. I took him to court and eventually used strong-arm tactics to get our share of the money from the sale. But when I went to see my guru, he said that some of my problems stemmed from this. He said that traditionally, in Hinduism, anybody who takes the head of the family to court will be not treated well by the spiritual ancestors.

“There is a period in the Hindu calendar called the ‘sharadh’. This is a period when all the souls of your ancestors are supposed to come down to the earthly plane. And you’re supposed to win their blessings. Somebody who has the ancestors on his side is supposed to have amazing good fortune. And when you don’t have their blessings, when you have annoyed them, the opposite happens. Everything you try to do there’ll be an obstacle. So I believe the reason I’ve faced so many blockages since my father and grandfather died because I’ve had what in spiritual terms is called the curse of the ancestors, or ‘pitra dosh’.

“The philosophy is like this. After they have died, the same father or grandfather who would have loved you in life, if their souls haven’t proceeded to the next plane, they will keep fingering you and bothering you, compelling you to do whatever is necessary for them to be released. In India we have two or three holy sites where you’re supposed to go to release your ancestors from whatever earthly plane they’re stuck at. Only a son can do this ceremony. That’s why Indians are so fucking crazy about having a son, because they believe they can’t get their salvation or move to the next level until their son actually cremates them and gets this ceremony done for them. So I did this ceremony finally this year to clear my pitra dosh, which is like twenty-two years after my grandfather and my father died, and I definitely do feel a tangible difference. And after that I went to my guru and he said, ‘Half your work is now done.’ And I can actually feel one of my channels is absolutely completely clear which is exceptional. I mean basically when you’re becoming a master all your three channels have to be absolutely clear — that means you have no pitra dosh, you have no ancestral problems, even your ancestors’ sins, which accrue to you, you’ve paid off. In Hinduism the ultimate son is supposed to be a guy who is so auspicious that he actually releases twenty-one generations of his ancestors from a certain plane and grants them salvation. That’s the ultimate son that can be born into a family.

“That bathroom-fittings guru has totally broken me down and rebuilt me, which was the only way I could have been saved. And now things are looking up. My lawsuit is near to completion, and the government has forgiven me the tax, which is an acknowledgement that the money is going to come back to me soon. But I’ve changed totally in the process. Some experiences I cannot even tell because people would think I’m insane. My ego has been broken down. I’m celibate. My rich friends come to me to find peace. They admire me, because part of them wants to be living the spiritual life like I am, dude. People with money are so attracted to me. Sometimes they have problems in their business lives — they make massive money off two deals and then nothing else happens — and I find a quote or a lesson that will unblock them.

“You see during the period of money-making in Delhi everyone lost their way, dude. My best friend’s become a coke addict who spends his time fucking hookers. He just sent me a picture of himself in the Ritz in Singapore with these two hookers. All my friends are going through crazy divorces. Money’s all they cared about and now they’re realising they don’t have anything else. So they come to me.”

I have asked Puneet to take me to see his guru this evening, and it is now time to leave. We get in the car and set out for Punjabi Bagh, one of the business enclaves of west Delhi, which is where the guru lives. Puneet is light-hearted on the road. He makes observations about the people in the cars around us. We pass two cops on a motorbike, a man in front and a woman behind.

“That woman cop is giving me the eye, man!” Puneet says. “She wants a piece of me.”

A white Bentley limousine powers past us, and we watch as it parts the traffic ahead. It crouches low on its massive tyres; the winged “B” on the back looks like a rapper’s medallion. Bentleys and Rolls-Royces used to sit upright like pillared country mansions, but those were the days when wealth aspired to the style of the English aristocracy. Now Bentleys and Rolls-Royces are made to look like vehicles for gangsters, because the aesthetic of twenty-first century money is different. The question of what ‘taste’ is, is no longer clear: from Los Angeles to Beijing, the rich assume a style of criminality.

We arrive at the ashram, which is packed with waiting people. We are informed that the guru is asleep. We decide to wait in the line, which snakes back and forth across the large basement, up the steps, and around the house outside. Volunteers hand out steel plates of rice and daal to the patient congregation. We wait.

“When he is sleeping,” says Puneet, “you’re not supposed to disturb him because he’s actually at a level of consciousness where he’s working on somebody’s problems.”

It’s hot where we are sitting, and this spiritual refuge attracts great numbers of mosquitoes. Puneet starts to get frustrated.

“God has been very kind to me,” he says. “My guru has been very kind to me. They’ve saved me from a lot of danger. Perhaps nothing good has happened in the last ten years of my life but I’ve been saved and brought out of a lot of danger. A lot! I mean you probably don’t even comprehend how much. I’m very grateful. But it’s been a long time without my money. It’s been a long time since I had good times.”

“What will you do when you get your money back,” I ask.

“I just want to get laid, man. Just leave all this behind. Spent too much time being a hermit. Do you think I don’t want the things other people want? I still like the idea of living in a luxurious house and driving a big car. I like nice women with nice asses. I like the concept of having a family and children and all that. I’ve put in ten years to cleaning up my spiritual account and my money still hasn’t come back to me. It’s tiring.”

I’m sure everyone with a monastic bent has thoughts like this, and I’m not entirely convinced that it is real. Has the last decade of his life been a “state of exception” — or is this perhaps just who he is? If his deepest impulse were to “get laid” would he not have devoted more of this decade to it? — he has not exactly been short of time. If he had wanted to, he could also have found other ways of earning money over these years, rather than opting out of Delhi’s boom. I wonder if he really wants his money back at all, or if the money is just one big alibi, if this money in the bank, which he mentions every five minutes, is not just an excuse for him to lead the kind of life he would like to live anyway. The story of his future liberation — when he has his money, and there will be women and parties and pleasure — may be just a fiction. An attempt on the part of a man who does not really like the world of money and struggle to appear ‘normal’ in this era of obsessive accumulation.

As if he can hear these thoughts, he says,

“But I don’t want physical things to ever smother my connection to God. I want both. So I’m a little confused right now. Because maybe God is just putting this money in my way as one more obstacle between me and him. If you’re gonna be so audacious to think that you want to be in God’s company all the time — that’s a very audacious thought. Out of the seven billion on earth only a few people have that ambition — that I want to be with God. Very few guys wake up in the morning and say that’s what I have to achieve today, right? So my guru says to me in that case, a person who’s thinking like that — in that case, which is your case, he says, God will do everything the fuck he can do in his power to discourage you. And test you. Because he doesn’t want sub-standard people in his company. So if I go the wrong way he’ll kick me the fuck out.”

The whisper goes around that the guru is awake, and, very slowly, the line of cross-legged people begins to move. After a couple of hours we reach the top of the steps outside the guru’s room, and we are ushered in.

The room is large, and there are still many people ahead of us. If I expected any great surge of feeling on seeing the guru, I am disappointed. He does seem like the only normal person in the room — everyone else is in a slightly altered state — but I don’t feel anything more exceptional than that. He is just back from a day selling bathroom fittings: he still wears his suit, and he is sitting cross-legged on a bed with his socks on.

People kneel in front of him and everyone can hear what is being said: “My daughter is doing badly at school. I am suffering from pains in my knees.” One woman gives the guru a letter to read: she is crying. To most of these supplicants, the guru gives a steel cup of drinking water that he has previously blessed by holding it against his forehead. To others he gives cardamom seeds.

A favourite phrase of Delhi businessmen is, “Your bad deeds always come back to you.” In the course of accumulating wealth you must pay bribes, steal from the system, intimidate people, make enemies — and generally forget about everything that is not accumulating wealth. If you are making a lot of money it ‘proves’ that you are a favoured child of the universe: it is on your side, you have nothing to feel bad about. But even very large fortunes can sometimes seem dwarfed by the negativity that has been accumulated in the process. Making this negative surplus disappear is therefore an eternal preoccupation of the business classes. You have to find other beings to take your negativity from you, places where it can be dumped and never return. Giving charity is good: it shifts some of your negativity from you to the person you are giving to. Going on pilgrimages earns you credit that can be offset against this negativity. But the dream of course is a mechanism that can make your negativity simply disappear.

“Those people have come with manifestations of negative return. An aching back, a child failing in school — it’s all because of negativity. The cardamom seeds take the negativity away. The guru blesses the person and the negativity is transferred to the cardamom seeds. The seeds are then thrown into the Yamuna river, where the fish eat them.”

If there are still any fish in the Yamuna river.

“Fish, because they live in water, are protected from Saturn, so there the cycle of negativity ends.”

But there are volumes of negativity that all the cardamom seeds and all the fish in the world cannot absorb, and struggling against them is a full-time occupation.

Puneet asks me, “What are you going to ask him when you see him?”

I have a pang of unease.

“What do you mean?”

“Well you’ve waited all this time to see him. What are you going to ask? Why are you here?”

Puneet is not one of this guru’s ordinary followers. The guru extends special favours to him because, he says, Puneet has spiritual qualities that most people do not have. The $100 million in Puneet’s bank account might have something to do with it too; I don’t know. The point is that I have somehow imagined all this time that Puneet and I would have a private audience with the guru. A cosy chat among equals. Now I realise I am coming on my knees to him as just one more devotee among many.

The situation triggers a deep fragility in my personality. My thoughts turn to chaos. My head begins to spin. I don’t know how to speak for myself in front of this man. In front of all these other people. Everyone will know I am faking it. I am sweating, and not with the heat.

Puneet’s turn comes first. The man on the bed puts his hand on his head. Though the two of them spend their weekends watching soccer together, there is no flicker of recognition from the guru, who asks him why he has come. Puneet tells him that his eyes have recently been stinging a lot. The guru requests from his assistants a steel cup of water, which he places against his forehead and hands to Puneet.

I feel myself collapsing inside. This is the role I choose: I am the observer, not the observed. I am in a panic, and I find myself contemptible. I realise that I know nothing. Everyone else in this room knows something very basic about life that I do not. They live; I am just an eavesdropper. I spy on life so that I do not have to live it. A non-existent wind is rushing in my ears and, in that moment, I am convinced that I have reached the age I have without ever embarking on anything real. I realise I need to speak to this guru. Maybe this has been the whole point, all along. I need a word from him to draw me in from the comfortable void of the outside. I realise I will approach him in utter earnestness.

Puneet is led away by one of the guru’s helpers. The man puts his hand on my head. It feels good. I can sense his power. He looks into my eyes.

“What can I do for you?” he says gently.

I look humbly at him.

“Please tell me,” I say, “what it is I still have to learn.”

He stares for a second.

“What did you say?”

I am embarrassed to repeat it, but I do. He smiles. He says, “Are you making fun of me?”

“No!” And it’s true.

He looks at me inquisitively. Then his face breaks into a grin.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

I cannot believe it. He says, “Go away and lead your life. Stop making fun of me.”

He is laughing now.

It is over. He looks at the next person in the line. I get up and wander away.

I am devastated.

What did I do wrong? How did he see through me?

My feet lead me through the door and into the dark night outside. I run into Puneet. He is bent over and weeping copiously. I understand now why these encounters bring out people’s weakness. I put my hand sympathetically on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “They sprayed fucking lemon juice in my eyes, dude.”

I laugh, despite myself. He is so serious about his damn eyes. We walk back to the car. He lights two cigarettes and we stand under the trees smoking.

I ask him what went wrong between me and the guru.

“Did he see through me?” I ask. “Did he realise I was a fake?”

“It’s difficult,” he says. “You don’t get to ask a question like that the first time around. It takes a lot of work to get there.”

This street is tranquil save for the crowds milling around the guru’s house. The electric gates open next to us to let a BMW convertible glide out.

Puneet says, “And anyway it’s intimidating at one level. You have to get used to it. It’s easy to fuck up because it’s not a normal situation. You know he’s looking at you, you know he can take you on a spin if he wants to. You don’t want to be fucking with that. Even I looked away from him because I just didn’t want to get messed up with that energy today. You might have noticed that I blink less than most people. That’s because I’m spiritually clean. But today I didn’t want to get into that.

“Normally I’m one of the few guys who, when I’m spiritually completely clean, can stare him down. I’m one of the few guys that he knows of. Usually, when he looks a person in the eyes he can completely fuck them up and they have to look away. But not me. There have been times when we’ve exchanged energy eye to eye for a good five minutes and people are like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ And then he has to tell me, ‘Puneet. Look down.’”