Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Seventeen

What did ‘ordinary’ middle-class people feel in those years?

As we noted at the beginning of this book, middle-class people were still not really, in this context, ‘ordinary’. But there were a lot of them nonetheless. In Delhi they numbered in the low millions. And as in any other group of that size there was essentially an infinity of experience. Happy, unhappy. Extraordinary, ordinary.

But the city was a powerful force of its own, and it did supply certain kinds of consistency to middle-class moods. It was possessed of immense energy, and energy is magnetic, whatever its effects: so people were animated and industrious to an unusual degree — until they were claimed by fatigue, which was also prominent in the city. In its protean shifts and transformations, Delhi was also fantastically interesting, and people were extremely preoccupied with their own urban condition, discussing the city’s moods, developments and events all the time, ad nauseam, for good and for ill. But Delhi was not particularly hospitable to the more carefree moods. It was unusual to find contentment, except in the old. Pure joy was rare, except in the very young. And there was a diminution of spontaneity, too, over the course of the century’s first decade, so that these lighter moods became more endangered over time.

During the 1990s, the middle classes had seen a lot of immediate, and mostly gratifying, changes in their lives. Many of them had been relieved to see the end of state controls: they had been stimulated by new jobs, TV channels, products and travel possibilities — and they had reached the year 2000 with a sense of ever-expanding horizons. They felt this was their moment, not only in a local but in a global sense. The world’s age-old domination by the West was coming to an end, and with it their country’s indignity. They looked out with imperial hopes on the rest of the world, and relished every story of Indian corporations buying Western companies.

But the festive atmosphere turned considerably more gloomy and cynical in the second half of the decade. The middle classes continued to make money, and they were the beneficiaries of a substantial re-allocation of resources from the country’s poor. But their lives also became more risky and expensive, and their expanded capitalist incomes did not buy as much as they had thought. Wealth and opportunity seemed to have been won at the expense of a parallel escalation of savagery in their city, and they found themselves more fearful and anxious even as they owned better cars. Wondering what kind of society they were creating, they became wistful for things they had resented while they were still around: cows in the streets, and pavement vendors with improbable trades. Their own get-rich-quick ethos came back to sting them, because in this period of astonishing wealth creation rather little care was taken of the future; and when the new economy’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ had all been plucked, it began to seize up for want of long-term planning and investment. After verging on double digits several times during the decade, GDP growth slowed to around 5 per cent in 2012. One of the reasons for this stalling was that the boom had remained too confined to the educated minority, and had offered rather little opportunity to the great numbers of the unskilled — and it had done frustratingly little to alter the situation of the majority of the Indian population. Development indicators for the country as a whole were lower than in much poorer Bangladesh next door — sixty-one children out of every 1,000 born live still died before the age of five (even in Delhi the number was twenty-eight; China had achieved a nationwide fifteen)⁵⁶ — a fact which itself went some way to quelling any excessive pride in the nation’s economic achievement. But in their own lives, the middle classes found that infrastructure remained terrible, it was almost impossible to secure a world-class education for one’s children, bureaucracy choked all entrepreneurial whims — and the middle classes realised that their own continued rise was far less dependable than they had come to believe.

They also came to the unpleasant realisation during this decade that they were not the ones in charge. It dawned on the Delhi middle classes that their emerging urban society was administered, to a great extent, by a shadowy cabal whose interests were very different, and even inimical, to their own. As time went on, this backroom elite seemed to monopolise more and more of the opportunities and resources of their city, for even very modest entrepreneurial ventures — such as opening a café or a bookstore — demanded levels of political connections that were difficult or impossible for ordinary people. The new consumer landscape of designer bars and fashion boutiques, which might have signalled some multifarious capitalist heterogeneity, therefore felt oddly uniform and, indeed, sleazy: just more profits for the same corrupt gang. By the end of the decade, many middle-class people were blaming these unelected managers for the fact that Delhi, despite its influx of wealth, was still so dilapidated and under-resourced. They began to feel that Delhi was being run as a private racket, and with a depressing lack of care for its development. They felt that their own feelings and opinions were entirely irrelevant to Delhi’s evolution, and that many of the things they had dreamed of for their city were never going to materialise. They felt that they were living in a kind of fantasy and that reality was elsewhere, for even their newspapers hardly mentioned the enormous proportion of the economy that operated invisibly to the state and to the financial community because they had no independently verifiable information about it. The picture one got of Indian business from the press was therefore an entirely corporate one, but this picture said nothing about the great eruptions of new power and money in India, and it therefore failed to explain why life had taken on the bizarre contours it had. This is why society was so awash in rumour and conspiracy theories, which seemed the best way to express the doubts one has about the fiction of reality.

Perhaps it was with the scandals preceding the 201 °Commonwealth Games that middle-class hopes of their society’s future became dashed. For many people, these scandals, which blew the lid on a set of mechanisms usually hidden from view, explained much about why their landscape took the particular form that it did. With some sixty countries attending, the Games had been anticipated as a moment of international visibility and prestige. The affluent classes were in general sympathetic to the avowed ambitions of Delhi’s political managers, who saw the Games as an opportunity to secure extraordinary budgets and powers for a profound transformation of the city: building much-needed new transport infrastructure, restoring and cleaning up the city, evicting the poor from informal settlements on what was now much-prized land. For many of the poor, it was a catastrophe, but it seemed to the middle classes that if the gains came at a price, the best people to pay it were the ones who were miserable anyway.

But as 2010 approached it became clear that many of these supposed benefits would never materialise. Even the mainstream press, usually so enamoured of power and money, hurled daily abuse and accusations at the power nexus that had thrown itself into the scramble for the Games budget. This budget was large and, as it proved, highly elastic since, having agreed to host a mega-event, administrators could hardly refuse to pay if key contractors suddenly inflated their prices a few months before the opening ceremony. It was estimated that preparations for the Games, including the attendant development projects, ultimately set public finances back by 70,000 crore rupees [$14 billion]⁵⁷ — forty times the original budget — and it was obvious that much of the increase could be blamed on an immense racket of bureaucrats and their friends in construction and trade, who over-charged (toilet paper was supplied to the organisers, famously, at $80 a roll) and under-delivered. The sturdy, well-equipped city that the middle classes had dreamed of never arrived: instead there arrived a kind of temporary plaster facsimile of such a thing which, in the end, bore no resemblance to the computer-generated images with which the whole decade-long endeavour had been sold.

“When the Athens Olympics were going on,” said a foreign official involved with the Games, “there was a lot of corruption, but the objective stayed fixed. Everyone was intent on producing the games to the requisite standards. In Delhi, the administrators were entirely willing to compromise the Games themselves. The objective was not the Games at all, in fact.

“Look at what happened with the catering contract. The tender was put out and won by an American company, which was just about the only company in the world that had the expertise to camp in Delhi and produce 8,000 meals a day to the quality necessary for athletes. But they refused to pay 10 per cent to the chairman of the organising committee.

“He sat on it for a while. When they still didn’t pay up he threatened to re-open the tender. His advisers said this would be fatal because months would be lost and the entire Games could be threatened. Without a caterer there are no Games. They also warned that it would inevitably go to the same company, who would then charge a higher price. But he went ahead and issued the tender again, citing some technicality against the American firm.

“Seven months were lost. Eventually, the contract went back to the same company. What’s more, the British company that was going to rent the kitchen equipment now retracted their rental offer and said that everything would have to be bought. Not only that, but there was no longer enough time to ship the equipment over so they had to fly it in. They tried a 747 but it was too small, so they had to rent an Antonov, the largest carrier aircraft in the world, to bring it in. You can imagine what kind of cost escalation all that entailed.

“There were four main ways that people made money out of Commonwealth Games contracts. The first involved awarding them to oneself or to one’s family members. Even if this happened they would not then stop at the legitimate profits that could be earned on these contracts. They would massively inflate the prices and supply only a cardboard cut-out version of what they were supposed to supply — which is why so many roads and buildings were collapsing just before the Games.

“The venues are built to such a pathetic standard that it’s all just trash. Usually when you do these events, there are immediate benefits — like tourism and international prestige — and then there are long-term benefits, which consist mainly of the physical legacy. From the Delhi Games there will be no long-term benefits, because the quality of the buildings has been massively compromised. The steel they provided for the frames, for instance, was of very low quality because of money extraction. So the buildings began to buckle. Enormous money then needed to be spent hiring foreign engineering consultants to re-inforce the buildings.

“The second way to make money was to take a percentage of everything in a certain turf. That’s why organising committee meetings always felt like an assembly of gangsters, because they were dominated by turf wars. Many stoppages in the process, which appeared incomprehensible to outsiders, were about conflicts over turf. For instance, one person took 10 per cent of all hotel bookings. That person managed to ensure that the accommodation that was supposed to be built for visiting officials was never approved, so that they had to stay in hotels throughout. The entire form of the Games, in fact, was determined by the structure of internal money-making.

“The third way was to accept bribes for awarding contracts. Administrators made a lot of money in this way, which businessmen obviously had to make back either by inflating the cost of what they supplied, or by supplying sub-standard goods.

“And the fourth way to profit from the Games was simply to steal all this equipment which had been bought at such inflated cost. Much of it disappeared afterwards. Some was taken by the Delhi police, who used furniture and computers for their offices. In other cases the police may have been paid by someone else to take it. Flat screen TVs disappeared, world-class gym equipment. This was helped by the fact there was no inventory of anything. So no one could prove afterwards that something was missing. The entire Commonwealth Games was run on individual computers and private email addresses: there was no central server. This was not just incompetence: it was a deliberate strategy to ensure there was no systematic information. Another thing that was stolen was hard drives. People turned up in the morning to find their entire data gone. I believe this was a deliberate attempt to erase the data trail. The budget of the organising committee simply disappeared, for instance, and this could happen because the management systems were deliberately inadequate. Decision-making was completely fudged and money disappeared through the gaps.”

There were endless rumours as to where this money went, but most people imagined that it was being used to strengthen the grip with which the corrupt elite held onto society and its resources. Some would undoubtedly be used to fund politicians’ re-election campaigns, some to invest in new business ventures. But a major slice of it the middle classes could detect for themselves, because each time a new tranche of the Commonwealth Games budget was released, it sent Delhi property prices leaping further out of their reach. Delhi’s property market, in fact, was not like those of other places. Delhi property was a sink for billions of dollars of corrupt money, which could not be stored in banks, and this was why prices bore so little relationship either to the nature of the building or indeed the buying power of ‘ordinary’ people. The media reported those moneymakers who set themselves up in $8 million homes during the Commonwealth Games preparations, but this was just the sensational iceberg tip; most of the money was invested in more discreet purchases — a few $500,000 apartments here and there — which brought the financial elite head-to-head with the middle classes, to the increasing disadvantage of the latter.

At the beginning of the decade, it had still been possible for the middle classes to imagine buying property in Delhi. But by the end, the formula had become impenetrable even to very successful corporate employees. Leave aside the mansions selling for $30 million and $40 million: newly built three-bedroom apartments in south Delhi, even relatively ordinary ones, cost half a million dollars, which was out of all proportion to all but the highest salaries. Not only this but, considering the fact that these properties suffered from all the normal Delhi problems — poor-quality construction, power cut-outs and water shortages — this seemed dismal value for money compared to what that money could buy even in London or New York. Much more than this, however, was the fact that in order to buy property in Delhi you had to come up with some 50 per cent of the price in cash. Now, clearly it was not those who worked in the brightly shining corporate economy as PR executives or TV newscasters who could lay their hands on a million dollars in cash. No: the people with the suitcases of cash were, as likely as not, black money businessmen, criminals, or corrupt public servants. These were the people who expanded their hold very substantially over the physical assets of India’s capital during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and if there was a shift in the feeling of the city, towards something darker and more lawless, it was in part because of this. It was generally entertaining to ask restaurant owners who their landlords were: for it was a Who’s Who of India’s black money elite, from paid assassins working for the Mumbai mafia to publicly pious politicians. The professional classes, meanwhile, had no choice but to move out to the new suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida, where the corporate ethos meant that the quoted price was pretty close to the real price, and people with salaries could get a loan to cover their purchase. In practice then, the beginning of the twenty-first century saw a substantial hand-over of India’s capital from those who had acquired property after 1947 to a new black money elite, and it was this group that increasingly set the tone — aesthetic, commercial and ethical — for everyone else.

The financial gains that the middle classes made distracted many commentators from the increasing dislocation they felt in those years, from the controlling apparatus of their society, and from the lurking discontent that ensued, even among otherwise thriving people. That they lived in a society controlled by oligarchs was itself a significant factor in their quality of life, for this fact troubled their mind and sapped their energy more than one might expect. They did not know anymore what to believe about the place they lived in, and it became bewildering to them, and laced with threat. Everything seemed to be an optical illusion created by Mephistophelian magicians to mask their own dark purposes — but what these might be it was impossible to know. Delhi became a surreal place to live, because as time went by people lost their faith that the purported nature of anything was the true one. They knew their society not through what they could see and read but through what they speculated or dreamt on fevered nights. Middle-class people worked and prospered in this society, but they had no image of what, who, how or why it was, and this left them fretful and unmoored. By the end of the decade there had begun a mass movement of protest and petition aimed at breaking the stranglehold of the shadowy elite. Corrupt power became the number one resentment of middle-class people, not only because it sucked money and resources out of their own economy, which it certainly did, but also because it denied them any sense of their own reality: the world they operated in was not the real world and they seemed to flail, Matrix-like, in empty space.

But this resentment of the oligarchs alternated, in middle-class life, with their own fantasies of total wealth and power — for it was difficult to believe in any other route to freedom. The middle classes did not generally entertain mild, democratic sentiments. ‘Middle-class contentment’ was anathema to them too. They were a ravenous class of people, and they read newspaper stories of their neighbours’ billion-dollar fortunes not just with resentment but also with jealousy. They repeated tales of astronomical sums of money with a curious kind of relish, and in their imaginings the power of corrupt politicians reached superhuman, diabolical proportions. They did not believe that power and money would ever be equitably distributed in their society. They felt that the middle-class life would always be one of servitude and illusion, and only the super-rich were in a position to really see what this whole story was about. But since money floated free of intelligence and hard work, since there was widespread disbelief that those who had it were more qualified for it than anyone else, it was also possible to believe that it would one day just pour in to one’s own life, too, unannounced. The conclusion that many people drew from the distribution of wealth in their society was that fortune, in every sense of that word, was totally random — a conclusion which made hard work seem slightly less meaningful, and which fuelled hopes of low-probability, high-value windfalls. People who earned $400 a month felt it was worthwhile deciding which Mercedes they would buy if things came to that.

• • •

My first conversation with Anurag happens in a bar. Afterwards he calls me to say, “I can’t talk in bars. If you want to hear what I feel, you have to follow where I go.”

We arrange to meet again. He asks me to pick him up by the side of a main road. Despite the nocturnal neon haze, I easily recognise his six-foot form kicking desultorily at the kerb as I approach. I pull up and he gets in. He directs me to where he wants us to go. Within a few minutes, however, he changes his mind.

“Stop the car,” he says. “I’ll drive.”

We change places, he slides back the driver’s seat to accommodate his long legs, and he pulls away at enormous speed.

“It will take us all night if you drive,” he says.

He parks outside a dilapidated concrete market and we go inside to buy liquor. Some twenty men are jammed together against the counter, waving tattered banknotes in the air. It is already late, the store is about to close, and more men are hastening down the steps. It’s winter, so most of them wear woollen hats. The liquor store is the only one still open: long, dirty corridors of shuttered shops stretch away in every direction.

There are used condoms discarded all around. This city has numberless people without homes, and so many more who cannot use the homes they have for sex. I’ve never been anywhere where the streets are so filled with post-coital detritus.

We emerge with a bottle each of rum and vodka, and stop outside to buy Coke. Anurag then drives us to Nehru Park, a large expanse in the diplomatic enclave which, by this time, is shut. We climb over the fence and follow the paths, which are shadowy and mysterious under the trees and the full moon overhead.

“Before I gave up eating meat,” says Anurag, “I used to buy chicken kebabs and bring them here to eat in the middle of the night. With my vodka.”

“On your own?”

“Yes. Sometimes the cops used to come and make problems. But the watchman liked me and he would keep them away.”

He leads us to his favourite bench. We lay our bottles and plastic cups out on it. It’s freezing cold, and I hug myself as I sit down.

The watchman hears us and comes out of his shack. He looks about seventy years old and walks with a stick. He is blind drunk. He’s happy to see Anurag and asks if we need an extra chair. We decline.

“I’ll come for a drink later,” says the watchman, slurring. He shuffles back to the shack. Anurag pours rum.

“I used to bring whisky and give it to him. He needs drink. He has to patrol the park all night, and if he doesn’t have a drink he gets sick. People used to beat him up but I knew someone in the police here and complained. Now it’s fine.”

The watchman emerges again, struggling with a chair, which he sets down next to us.

“I’m not so crazy about restaurants,” Anurag says. “I’m more comfortable out here. There’s a beautiful dog here who comes to see me. Black and white. I don’t know where he is tonight. Back when I used to have money, I used to come every night and feed him chicken. It used to make me feel better when I had too many problems. Family, money, girlfriend.”

Anurag doesn’t have much money anymore. He lives to a great extent off his father, who earns rent from a couple of floors of the building where they live. He used to run a small garment factory, but his business partner left and the business fell through. And he’s not interested anymore in the drudgery of running a business like that. He is not looking for a permanent job or a business to build. He wants to get very rich all in one go. So he has become one of the many young men in Delhi hustling for a share of political money.

“You have to match high-value black money holders — politicians who have say 50,000 crore rupees [$10 billion] in black money — with legitimate businesses which are authorised by the Reserve Bank of India to absorb very large amounts of cash. The big real-estate companies, the resort developers, the diamond merchants. When the deal is done, the politician transfers his money to those companies. Some is delivered to the bank, some is sunk into property. They can’t make bank deposits of more than their cash limit, which for big companies is 700 crores [$140 million] per day.

“When they receive the cash, they have six hours to count it. Then they transfer white money to the black money party. They show this money as an unsecured loan. Whenever the newspapers investigate politicians’ accounts, you’ll see they are full of unsecured loans from property companies.

“Moving that kind of cash is a big physical operation. It’s stored in warehouses and to move it you need a truck. When one of those trucks starts moving through Delhi, everyone knows about it. The police take a cut of the money and they guard it all along the route. They give the truck driver a code, which he can give to any policeman and they will let him pass. Delhi isn’t safe because there are always opposition politicians who are trying to expose this money. Mumbai is much safer. I’m not going to do this again. But this is one of those times when I can earn a lot of money in one go, and I have to try it.

“All the politicians are bringing their black money back now. There is a huge conversion of black to white. This is going to be beautiful for India because it will all be invested here and will change everything. In the next ten years, India is going to fuck everywhere. Until now we’ve been funding Swiss citizens’ old age with our money. Now it’s going to come home. Billions of dollars will flow into the country and we will reap the benefit of our corrupt politicians. You can say it’s God’s will. God is recycling this money. People talk about China, but China can never beat India because our politicians have been corrupt for years and years. Their money is building an empire that will rule the world.

“The black money business isn’t my only one. I have another business too: I’m working for a company owned by someone in the Gandhi family, who offers big loans to companies so he can bring back the money he has parked in Swiss accounts. Right now I’m working on a loan to a Gujarati businessman. Very big guy. He needs 15 lakh crores to expand his business and I’m trying to organise it for him.”

He rifles in his bag and pulls out a folder filled with letters between him and a business conglomerate in Gujarat. He hands them to me for my inspection.

“I’m meeting them soon to get the papers signed.”

I like Anurag but he is unpolished and incoherent, and I find it difficult to imagine him being admitted to the inner circle of Indian deal-making. The letters look official but I have no idea what to make of them.

“Are you sure you mean 15 lakh crores?” I ask.

“Look at these people,” he says, showing me letterheads listing business subsidiaries. Mining, infrastructure, mass media, airlines, insurance, agriculture. “See how big they are.”

“And you’re saying the Gandhis are lending this money?”

“Obviously.”

I am trying to work out in my head how much this sum is. Anurag takes out his phone but there is no space on it to type that many zeroes. We finally compute it together: $300 billion.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Anurag.”

He steps back a little from his position.

“It’s not all in one go. It’s over many years. It’s for many different projects. Power, agriculture.”

“$300 billion. Come on!”

“It’s the Gandhis! You can’t imagine how big they are. Just think: any chief minister of Uttar Pradesh will end their five-year term with 50,000 crores [$10 billion] in their pocket. And now think what the Congress must have. This is the Congress man! They have been ruling since 1947! Do you know how much Indian business belongs to them? You just don’t get it. For them this kind of money is nothing.”

“The GDP of India is only five times that.”

“Black money is much more than the GDP! This is what I was telling you. Politicians are bringing their money back into India. They want to invest in India and they need good partners. Giving big loans to companies who are building the nation and who pay 24 per cent a year for black money is the best way.”

At that moment, someone calls him. He has a conversation about providing a loan for several hundred million dollars. Anurag talks confidently about how he will bring in one of India’s leading real-estate companies to finance part of this loan. His commission will be 1.5 per cent.

It feels like a planted call. I feel I am in a fictional world of his making.

Anurag’s call ends. He says,

“This is how it works. The biggest businessmen don’t go to banks for funding. This Gujarati company has a lot of projects, they need 15 lakh crores, and they know the only place they can get it is from the Congress Party. They went to Ambani [Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest businessman], but Ambani can’t give that kind of money. So they came to us.

“The Congress has so much money they have to invest it. And it’s excellent for the country. They are growing India now. And soon I’ll make money for myself and I can do something for the country too. If I make 1 per cent or 2 per cent on any of my deals, I can really start out. I need 1,000 crores [$200 million] for myself, and if my deals start happening it won’t be difficult. I have a friend who made 320 crores [$64 million] on a black money deal recently. He bought himself a Bugatti. I wouldn’t do that. I would do up my house really nice. But I need money for other things.”

In Anurag’s stories, the membrane separating reality and fantasy is exquisitely permeable. One never knows how to tell the two apart. It is not clear that he does, either. In fact what I find interesting about him is that he finds society so extreme that there is almost nothing that cannot plausibly be asserted. His Delhi is a bewildering place, full of vast monsters whose species and scale are indiscernible in the spiritual night, and I understand why he is so lost. And why finding himself again can be imagined only in one way: earning loads of money.

“I want to make things better. If only I had 5 crores [$1 million] I would just have a good life and drive a BMW. But then I’d just be living for myself. I wouldn’t be able to do anything for my nation. I want to change things. I want to show people how to live. That’s why I need 1,000 crores.

“Delhi is a good place but the people are bastards. They’re big show-offs. They don’t know about life. They have dirty minds and they only think about money. I want to make them feel. Money has killed their feelings. God did not do this. We did it and we can change. If I have the money I will change people’s souls.”

Delhi is obsessed with money, it is the only language it understands, and to buy myself out of its vulgarity and its money-mindedness, I need lots of money. It is a strange, self-defeating logic which obviously universalises the escalation of that which it hates.

“There was a wedding party in the street where I live, and they put up a marquee outside my house. There was a tree in the way and they cut it down just to put up their marquee. They cut down a tree that took forty years to grow just for one party. They don’t understand anything. I went to ask them, ‘Why are you fucking this tree?’ But they don’t care what I think. I can’t fight with them right now. That’s why I need money. I want to be strong and when I find people like that, I want to fuck their happiness. You can say there’s a fire in me right now.”

It’s true, it seems, since Anurag, sitting in his shirt, is apparently unaffected by the cold of this February night, while I, wrapped up in a coat, am shivering violently.

The watchman comes back to ask for a drink. Anurag pours him some rum.

“Where have all the good dogs gone?” he asks him.

The watchman spreads his hands in ignorance.

“That black-and-white one was a brilliant dog,” Anurag says.

The watchman walks off into the blackness of the park.

“Animals are so pure,” says Anurag, “so true to their nature. They don’t change. You have no idea how much I love animals. I used to bring food for that black-and-white dog all the time. If I woke up in the night and it was raining I used to drive over here and put up tarpaulin sheets between the trees so he could keep dry. I used to bring a coat for him in the winter.

“People are bastards. I’ve given up on people. Everyone I have ever trusted has fucked me. I don’t have friends anymore. My girlfriend doesn’t care about me. My father is a good man, he’s worked hard, but he has never believed in me. He has never put his hand on my shoulder and said, I understand you. Animals are the only ones who are loyal. Not humans. The simplicity of animals keeps me going. Animals want very few things. They only want money—” He laughs at his own mistake: “I mean they only want food. Nothing else.”

He shows me pictures on his cell phones of animals being maimed and killed. Hundreds of them. There is a majestic, powerful lizard with its feet broken so it cannot move.

“When I found the guy who had maimed this lizard, I broke his ribs and his jaw. I fucked his happiness. People don’t know how to behave. I knew this family who had a Pomeranian that was irritating them and they threw it off their seventh-floor balcony. I would set up a separate animal police to deal with people like that. I would introduce strict laws and have advertising campaigns to educate people about animal rights. I would introduce a 1 per cent tax just to take care of animals.”

The watchman circles back to us, making a drunken show of keeping watch, banging his stick exaggeratedly on the ground.

“You see him?” says Anurag. “He’s a villager, he’s been looking after this place for twenty-five years. He is a real human being. Not like everyone else.”

The moon is very high now. The park is silent and the city seems far away. Owls hoot now and again. We are quiet for a while. Anurag is musing.

“I had this idea for a house,” he says. “In the front there’s the garden and swimming pool. At the back of the house is the car park. There are remote control doors at the front and the back of the house and a wide passageway between them, so you can drive your car right through the house. So in the evening you go out to get your Ferrari, drive it into the house, stop at the bedroom to pick up your girl, and drive away to your party.”

He lets the picture form.

“What do you think of the idea?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “You have a few practical problems. You’d need to get rid of exhaust fumes. And a Ferrari would make a huge noise inside a house.”

“It doesn’t have to be a Ferrari. It could be a Lamborghini.”

“I guess so.”

Anurag pours more rum into our plastic cups, and tops them up with Coke. He returns to his rant about “Delhi people” — the same rant that occupies the lives of so many of those same Delhi people too.

“People are not beautiful in Delhi. Look at how they treat women. In Mumbai they don’t harass women, but here a woman can’t take ten paces without being mistreated. Once I saw this man abusing this girl in public. I knew the man a little bit and I said, ‘Why are you abusing her, man? You’re abusing her in front of so many people and she’s crying. Let it be.’ Then I went away and when I came back he was still abusing her. I fucked his happiness. First of all I slapped him. Then he said you have no idea who my dad is. So I said, ‘This one is for your dad,’ and I broke his rib. And then a big court case happened.”

Anurag breathes deeply.

“I just helped her as a human. I’m a human and if I see innocent people suffering I have to help them.

“Another time, I was in Bangkok with my cousin. My cousins have amazing money. But if I asked to borrow a lakh [$2,000] they would fuck my happiness forever. One day I was out biking on the beach, and I came to the hotel and my cousin had a girl with him. She was naked and he was filming her. She was crying. She was saying she was supposed to get married and now he was telling her he was going to send this video of her all over the world. I said to her, ‘He’s not going to do that, don’t worry.’ My cousin was laughing. He said, ‘Of course I will. I’ll make sure everyone sees it.’ I said, ‘What the fuck, man? Your business with her is over, now pay her and let her go. What are you trying to prove?’ Then he started throwing money at her. 1,000 baht. 1,000 more. And she just threw the money on the floor. I said, ‘Not everyone lives for money, man.’ I snatched his phone from him, then I changed the phone language into Thai and I let her delete the video. And I shook her hand, and she hugged me and she cried. That was the best part actually.”

I feel as if Anurag looks at intimacy through the wrong end of a telescope. It is alluring but far away, its outlines difficult to discern. Other human beings pass close to the soul once in a while, unexpected passings like this woman in the Bangkok hotel, but for the most part they remain hostile and remote. The world of human relations seems completely ravaged for him, in fact. It is sunk in the mire of money, and it is best to treat it as it asks to be treated: as a source merely of connections, advancement, money. For purity, for authentic attachments, one has to look to other species.

His phone has been ringing non-stop.

“It’s my girlfriend,” he says. “I don’t pick up because she thinks I’m in Mumbai.”

“But you haven’t been in Mumbai for weeks.”

“I know. That’s why it’s awkward. But she’s a bitch. She only thinks about money. She doesn’t care what kind of person I am. She thinks I’m a loser. She thinks she’s higher than me because her family is rich. So why the fuck does she call me if she is more than me?”

She sends a text message.

“Many congratulations on your new relationship.”

He reads it out to me.

“You have someone else?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “She’s trying to provoke me.”

He writes back, “Yep. I’m very happy with animals. They don’t care how much is in my pocket.”

She calls immediately. He answers and puts her on speaker. I wonder if any of this would be happening if there were no audience. She says,

“Can you just drop the attitude and talk to me like a normal person?”

“What do you want from me?” Anurag asks, rolling his eyes at me. “Do you want to be with me or not?”

“I just want to have a normal conversation. I can’t say that I want to be with you because I don’t feel I know anything about you right now.”

“See you’re confused right?”

“I’m not confused. I just don’t know what’s going on.”

“What is going on is that you just talk negative about me.”

“This negative outlook that I have about you has just been developed by you, it’s been created by you. I’m a very positive person. I think it is you who has the negative opinion about yourself.”

“What about that wedding you went to? You wouldn’t even let me come in with you. Is that how you show your positive opinion of me? I drove you there because I care about you. I sat outside in the car from 10 p.m. till 6 a.m. waiting for you because I didn’t want you to go home alone. You didn’t come out once to see how I was. Why did you leave me outside? Am I not good enough to be seen with you? Why didn’t you take me in?”

“Because I’m not sure about you.”

“You seem very sure of me in bed, but you’re not sure of me in front of other people?”

“You’re disgusting,” she says, and the call ends.

Anurag is frustrated and takes a big gulp of his drink.

“She doesn’t think I’m good enough for her world. She thinks her world is better than me. So I say to her, ‘Then go and be with the world. Why are you hanging around me?’ But now she’s heard I’m working with the Gandhi family, she’s scared I might become a rich guy. That’s why she’s calling me up. She’s from a west Delhi business family and she only understands money. Her dad had seventeen Mercedes and still her mother left him because she couldn’t handle these people obsessed with money.”

She sends another message.

“Can we have lunch tomorrow?”

He sighs, and with a great effort acquiesces. “OK,” he writes back.

“But you won’t be in Mumbai tomorrow,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I’ll cancel it in the morning.”

There is a long silence. It’s nice out here in the park. The suffocation of the city abates somewhat.

“What was the most beautiful moment in your life?” I ask him.

“When I was seventeen. I gave up my studies to go to Bombay and be a film star. I had a Muslim girlfriend who was perfect. She used to cook me breakfast every day. But then we ran into the Hindu — Muslim problem and now she’s married to someone else. Those were beautiful days. I was modelling, I was working out every day, doing martial arts, I looked good. One day I was walking down the street and a big Lexus SUV pulled up next to me. The back window went down and inside was Sanjay Dutt. The movie star. He looked at me and without saying anything he saluted me. For my physique.

“I still want to be an actor but you need money for it. You need a lot of money to get into that business.”

It’s true that Anurag has an impressive physique. Still not thirty, he is tall and powerful. He has a thick mop of black hair. Were it not for a slight maladjustment he would be a strikingly beautiful man. But there is something bitter in his regard which means that he just misses. He looks shifty and ill at ease.

We’ve been drinking for a couple of hours, and the Coke is finished. We gather up the bottles; we leave the remaining rum with the watchman. We walk back through the park and climb over the fence, more unsteady than when we arrived. We find my car, which Anurag unlocks proprietarily, and we drive away. A few minutes later, Anurag stops by the side of the road and asks me to wind down the passenger window. He whistles out of it and two dogs immediately come bounding out of the trees. They put their paws on the window ledge and crane their heads into the car. Anurag reaches out to them. The dogs are hyperventilating with excitement. He strokes them and they lick his hand.

“These are two of my favourites,” he says.

He tells them he has to go and that he’ll visit them soon. As we drive away he is dialling a number.

“I’m trying to call the guy in my company. He’s forty-two and he manages money for many Congress politicians. You can speak to him. He works in India but he has a US phone number. Imagine that.”

He listens to the phone but there’s no response.

“He doesn’t always pick up,” says Anurag. And, by way of explanation, “He’s a little diabetic.”

The fact that it is after one in the morning might also have something to do with it.

He pulls up at a roadside kebab place that is still open. There are a few plastic chairs arranged on the sidewalk but Anurag doesn’t want to get out of the car because we can’t drink there. He summons the waiter by flashing his lights on and off: the horn on my car is broken. The waiter comes over with a menu limp from many late-night hands. Anurag orders paranthas for us and kebabs for some of his canine friends.

“Make them without spices,” he says.

He winds up the window, inserts two plastic cups into the car’s holder, and pours us both neat vodka. His phone rings: it is his colleague returning his call.

“I wanted to introduce a friend of mine,” says Anurag into the phone. “He’s British. He needs a big loan for his business.”

He thrusts the phone into my hand. The man on the other end speaks well and quickly. He asks me nothing about myself and yet speaks as if the deal is already done.

“We can provide excellent terms in the UK,” he says. “Through one other company we can give you funding anywhere else in the world too. So just tell Anurag how much you need and we’ll take this forward.”

“Okay,” I say.

Anurag takes the phone back and speaks into it.

“I have good news,” he says. “I bagged a Kolkata company. Their business is grain and they need 1,000 crores [$200 million]. Yeah it’s signed.”

As the conversation ends, the waiter comes over and Anurag winds down the window. Hot food is passed inside. We begin to eat.

“So you know why I gave you the phone?” Anurag says. “I need your help. You have contacts in London. When I start making big money I will need to expand overseas. I’ll need your help to talk to those people. We’re going to lend this Indian money all over the world.”

I tell him I hope he takes me out when he gets rich. I’d like to see what it looks like. Half of me feels he will spend the rest of his life imagining his future windfall while living off the dwindling rent from his property. Another half believes he may be the kind of nondescript guy who, against all probability, lands something astonishing. It’s the kind of thing that can happen here.

We pay up and set off for Anurag’s house. As we pull up outside, six dogs come running to greet him. He gets out with the packages of meat, opens up the foil and lays them on the ground. The dogs set to eating, and he strokes them.

“Look at them,” he says. “They’re so innocent.”

I bid him goodbye. He enfolds me in his arms. I get back in the car, jerking the driver’s seat forward so I can reach the pedals, and set off for home. I have a vivid dream that night about enormous piles of dead dogs being incinerated in a Gurgaon corporate office.

The next morning, Anurag calls me.

“Did you really like my idea about the house?” he asks. “Or were you just saying that not to hurt me?”

“I don’t think it will ever work,” I say.

“No,” he says. “Maybe not.”