Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“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.”