Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“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.