Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A young woman is preparing to deliver the opening speech at a film festival when she realises she has left the text at home. She asks her boyfriend to rush home and get it. He speeds off on a bicycle: the house is nearby, and he is able to make it back within ten minutes.

Guards stop him at the entrance to the cultural centre, telling him that bikes are not allowed inside. He protests that he has to deliver something very urgently. When he makes to hurry past them, they set upon him with sticks, beating him around his head and body.

By the time he has recovered himself, he is too late to deliver the piece of paper. He enters the auditorium and sits down next to me as his girlfriend improvises onstage. He is hyperventilating; when I turn to look at him, I realise his head is running with blood. We go outside and make our way to the office of the director of the centre.

“I am sorry about your injuries,” he says, after hearing the story. “But I would say to you that if you had spoken in English none of this would have happened. They saw that you were on a bike and you spoke to them in Hindi. How were they supposed to know you were middle class?”

The mountain of garbage at Bhalswa Colony is awe-inspiring. Only nature, one would imagine, might produce something so vast. It towers over the landscape, a long, gruff cliff along whose flank zigzags a shallow road where overflowing trucks rumble slowly to the summit. From below you can see them driving along the cliff’s flat top, unloading their cargo of trash, feeding the mountain with more. All around them, mere specks from down below, are the people whose work it is to pick out from this megapolis-scale pile of refuse what can still be used.