Dig deep, Gautam, dear boy, but beware!
Here be monsters.
What do you know?
Whaddayaknow?
You despise Sunny Wadia, but cling to him like a life raft.
Like a Saint Bernard, with his little barrel of brandy giving you succor in the snow.
Sunny, who turned up one afternoon at your apartment flaunting a bottle of rare Japanese hooch!
“Ah,” you said, ever facetious, “you speak the lingo? Zenshin massāji wa ikagadesu ka? Waribiki shimasu!”
Sunny, pretending to look past all the mess, the carnage, the fall from grace, the lurid tales. Sunny, the latest Prince of Delhi, the young stud, the hot ticket in town, turning up with no warning, offering whisky to a man who just . . . didn’t . . . give a damn.
What’s your game?
Gautam took the whisky. Poured himself a glass and swallowed it down.
When was this? Seven or eight months ago? Eight whole months. August 2003 or so? God, your memory is shot to hell.
Has it been eight or seven months since Sunny nudged into your life?
Offering cash, whisky, and what else? You know what.
In exchange for?
Advice? Friendship?
Consultancy fees.
* * *
—
“Consultancy fees?”
“Yes,” Sunny said. He wanted to build hotels. This was his pitch. And Gautam had been in the hotel line, once upon a time, in that brief, bright window of his life when he had neither succumbed to his vices nor exhausted his father’s credit line. Oh, those glory days. A thick head of hair, a virile pout, snipe-hunting calves, and polo thighs. A standard, upper-class addiction to booze. The keys to the kingdom! How had it gone so wrong?
* * *
—
Well, appetites, my darling.
He had a few.
When he was born, he sucked his wet nurses dry. He could never get his fill. Just as well his mother never spilled a drop. It would have been White Russians all the way. And his father? Prasad Singh Rathore. A shrewd man, his only addiction a vice that cleans up its own trace.
Power.
* * *
—
He was the second generation of modern India, Gautam’s father. In 1948, his father—Gautam’s grandfather, the venerable Maharaja Sukhvir Singh Rathore (adored by the British, resolutely indifferent to the Independence cause)—saw his kingdom dissolved into the Republic, newly formed. How to compensate for this royal loss? Why, a “princely purse,” a stipend designed for upkeep, which was used to barter feudal power and control.
It was good while it lasted. But then the ’70s came along. Those Soviet times. The dictator Indira abolished that concession, and the Rathores were left with little more than a begging bowl and a handful of forts between which to string their washing lines.
Asset rich, cash poor.
It scarred them all.
Only Prasad, first son, Gautam’s father, was wily enough to change.
Prasad Singh Rathore understood that politicians were the future kings. So he threw his hat into the ring, with noble disregard for his family’s distaste of such grubby, earthen things, and was duly voted in as a hallowed MP. Soon after, he persuaded three of his cousins to stand for the legislative assembly. It wasn’t long before Prasad’s second cousin Sunil became chief minister of the state. Better the Devil, don’t you know. And here they were, the family where they belonged. This was the world into which Gautam Rathore, Prasad’s only son, was born.
2.
He reclines on his sun lounger under an umbrella on the terrace beside his private pool, impatiently awaiting his booze. Still trying to remember. He arrived here at midnight.
Really?
There’s no way this timeline adds up.
He was with Sunny at midnight. This much he knows.
Why can’t he remember why? Why, when he tries to dredge through the muck can he see nothing but some simpleton’s face?
She reminds him of someone though.
He doesn’t want to dwell on that.
He fixes on Sunny instead.
* * *
—
Their “whisky summit” wasn’t the first time their paths had crossed, truth be told. They’d schooled together, very briefly. It was the early ’90s. Gautam had been Sunny’s senior by two years. He was cock of the walk, old money when old money talked, spiced with a dash of his father’s political clout. And who had Sunny Wadia been? Just a nobody little gangster’s son from UP, his English as coarse as his manners, someone to belittle, besmirch, an upstart who bought his way into school and snatched its good name like a common thief.
“You didn’t last too long though, did you?” Gautam scoffed, Nikka in hand.