“Actually,” she said, as they reached her desk, “can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“There’s this guy.”
“Ah . . .”
“Not like that.”
“Good, because I’m the last one to give relationship advice.”
“I met him with my friend.”
“Last night?”
“Right. I wanted to know his deal, professionally speaking. I wondered if you heard of him. If he was worth writing about. Maybe doing a profile.”
“Name?”
“He’s bankrolling a lot of art projects in the city. Sponsoring musicians, painters, designers. Putting on parties, this kind of thing. Something different. Something fun. I thought maybe I could do a profile on him.”
“Neda, what’s his name?”
She suddenly didn’t want to say it.
“Sunny.”
“Sunny . . . what?”
She braced herself a little. “Wadia.”
“Sunny Wadia?” He shook his head. “That joker? Seriously, don’t waste your time. He’s just another rich kid in a sandpit. Empty calories. I don’t mean to rain on your parade—I do actually—but he doesn’t deserve your attention. He doesn’t deserve anyone’s.”
“I don’t know,” she was flustered. “I’m just saying it’s not all doom and gloom, it might be nice to cover some positive news once in a while.”
“Do you know who his father is?”
“Some kind of farmer, I thought.”
He clapped his hands together in glee. “Bunty Wadia, some kind of farmer? That’s a hoot.”
She hated him when he was like this.
He went on. “He’s one of Ram Singh’s mob.”
“The Ram Singh?”
“Yes, chief minister of UP Ram Singh. None other. He’s one of his cronies, and by all accounts he’s a nasty piece of work.”
She thought of Sunny, charming her in his suit, being a “citizen of the world.”
“Still, you can’t blame the sins of the father on the son.”
“Listen, I know you think I’m old-fashioned. Or maybe just old. But these guys, with their dirty money, they get treated like gods now because money talks, but it stinks. They’re gangsters, however you want to dress it up. And kids like Sunny, throwing their cash around, whatever they say, whatever they do, in the end it’s always the same, they’re always doing more harm than good.”
* * *
—
She searched online for news articles on Bunty Wadia. There were surprisingly few, and none with photos. In the handful of pieces he was routinely described as “liquor baron Bunty Wadia.” Or else the “controversial businessman” and once “the reclusive businessman.” Another talked about his being the “chief beneficiary of the surprise election victory of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Ram Singh.” According to reports, he bagged several lucrative contracts in the proceeding years, ranging from transport, sand mining, liquor, and construction, and had successfully completed the distress purchase of two apparently unprofitable state-owned sugar mills.
* * *
—
Another name kept popping up in her search. Vikram “Vicky” Wadia. He was a politician, an MLA out in Eastern UP, with a whole range of criminal charges against him: six of kidnapping for extortion, one of torture, four of rioting, three of attempt to murder. There were no convictions, only cases pending, stacking up, stacking up. No doubt about it, Vicky Wadia was a gangster, a dada, a rough-hewn country godfather. Several articles talked about the “Kushinagar incident,” but none of them could tell her what it was. Eventually she found a grainy photo of him from a lurid piece on a Hindi news website, where he was referred to as “Himmatgiri,” and my God if he didn’t look like a more brutish version of Sunny.
* * *
—
She turned her attention to Sunny, but there was nothing there. He seemed perfectly anonymous—he didn’t even appear in the photos of the society pages. And when she searched for the name of the foundation—the ?ūnyatā Foundation, wasn’t it?—she was disappointed by a simple page with no links and only a line of hackneyed, ungrammatical text espousing the transformative power of art in the urban landscape. Really? This was him? She examined the page more carefully for a sign, a hidden doorway, but it was bricked up and mute. She printed all the articles on Bunty and Vicky, put them in her drawer to read later, and returned to work.