“I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. My basic principle is: Whatever goes around comes around. It will come back to you, you can be dead sure of that. I live my life in a Vedic way. Disciplined. No idol worship, no stupid acceptance. Also that you don’t just let someone hit you and take it from them. You give it back to them.”
I’m not sure if this last point flows from the basic principle, but I don’t question it. Mickey is deadly serious. He is letting me in on his knowledge. He tells me a story.
“I was at a party recently, and the waiter was handing out drinks and he moved the tray away a little too soon and this guy hadn’t got his drink. So the guy shook up a soda bottle and sprayed it in the waiter’s face. I went straight to the host, and I had him chucked out of the party. You have to know how to behave. Some people only feel they have money when they can screw someone else. You have to know how to treat normal people. You see, there are two kinds of rich. There are people who’ve had money for a long time and they don’t give a fuck who you are: they’ll be nice to you anyway. Like I’m nice to people. You may get bored being around them because all they talk about is how they’ve just got back from Cannes or St Tropez, but they will always be nice. But the people who’ve got rich in the last five years, they turn up at a party and the first thing they do is put their car keys down on the table to show they have a Bentley. They don’t know how to behave.”
Mickey is a little drunk, and he’s policing boundaries that are clearer to him than to me. It’s not the first time he’s said, ‘People have to know how to behave.’ Once again I feel that his stand against the nihilism of the Delhi rich is all the more fervent because he is assailed by it himself. He is intimate with all the thuggish bad boys who have given people like him such a bad name, and he is impressed by parables of restraint.
“I have a friend who’s a multibillionaire,” he says, “and I asked him about the best car to buy for your kids, because I’ve just had kids, and he suggested a Toyota Innova. He could afford to buy a jet for his kids but he doesn’t. They have to earn it. He just buys them an Innova. You see, people say there are bad kids but it’s all the parents’ fault. It’s totally the parents. They have fucked up their kids and once that’s happened it can never be undone. One day the guy is driving a Maruti 800, the next day he’s driving an S Class, and he buys Beamers for his kids when they’re ten years old and they just go crazy. The kids get fucked up.”
People like Mickey talk about Delhi as a kind of El Dorado, where fortunes pour in overnight, almost without your asking. In this country, at this time, they say, you’ve got to be an absolute fool to go wrong. But for all the talk of ‘new money’, most Delhi fortunes are not, strictly speaking, new. They have certainly exploded in the last few years, and small-town powerhouses have indeed turned into metropolitan, and even global, ones. But they rest on influence, assets and connections built over many decades, and in that sense they are wholly traditional. The sudden prominence of a new, provincial elite should not lead one to think that the economy has become somehow democratic. People like Mickey have always had money, and they see the world from that perspective. The gruelling, arid Delhi of so many people’s experience is not a city they know.
“Where do you place yourself in the pyramid of Delhi wealth?” I ask. “There can’t be many people turning over a billion dollars?”
“You have no idea.” He smiles condescendingly. “Most people don’t go public with their money. They don’t want scrutiny. I would never list my company.”
“Who’s the most powerful person in Delhi?”
“It all depends on politics. You can have a billion but if you have no connections, it doesn’t mean anything. My family has been building connections for two generations and we know everyone. We know people in every political party, we never suffer when the government changes.”
“So why do you travel with bodyguards?”
“The Uttar Pradesh police intercepted communications about a plan to kidnap me, and they told my father. People want money and they think of the easiest way, which is to take it from someone who has it. They can’t do anything constructive themselves so they think short-term. We need more professionalism in India. More corporate governance. Then we’ll show the entire world.”
For good reason, Mickey is grateful to India.
“Since I was fourteen I’ve realised India is the place. I love this place, this is where it’s at. Elsewhere you may have as much money as Lakshmi Mittal but you’re still a second-class citizen. This is your fucking country. You should do it here.”
Mickey tells me about his dislike for America.
“Why should Walmart come in here? I don’t mind Gucci and LV — they do nothing to disturb the social fabric. But keep Walmart out of here. We were under slavery for 700 fucking years. We’ve only been free for sixty. Give us another thirty, and we will buy Walmart. I tell you, I was at a party the other day and I had my arms round two white people and I suddenly pushed them away and said, ‘Why are you here? We don’t need you guys anymore.’”
Twenty-eight years old, well travelled and richer than most people on the planet, Mickey’s resentment towards white people is unexpectedly intense. I ask him how the world would be different if it were run by Indians.
“It will be more spiritual,” he says. But then he thinks for a moment and says,
“No. It will be exactly the same.”
I bring our conversation to an end. Mickey pays the bill, and we walk outside to the quiet car park.
“Thanks,” he says, shaking my hand. I don’t really know why.
His driver opens the back door of his BMW, and Mickey gets in. The gates open, the BMW sweeps out, and behind it an SUV full of bodyguards.
Mickey lives about 200 metres away.
I drive home, thinking over our conversation. I ponder a little detaiclass="underline" during my loo break he took advantage of my absence to send a text message to our common friend. Just checking that I really knew her. Somewhere in Mickey is something alert and intimidating.
I’m still driving when he sends a text message to me, asking me not to quote certain things he has said. I write back:
ok if you answer one more question. what does money mean to you?
He responds straight away:
one of the end products of my hard work, it does mean a lot I respect it, it gives me more hard work and on the side a bit of luxury (:
• • •
Like other political strongmen concerned with hygiene and reproductive discipline, Sanjay Gandhi had been consumed by the dream of developing for his country a ‘people’s car’.
Sanjay loved cars and planes. He had no academic inclinations, and did not attend college; instead he spent three years as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce Motors in England. In 1967 he returned to India, aged twenty-one, and told his mother, India’s new prime minister, of his idea for a new car company. He called it Maruti Motors Ltd, ‘Maruti’ being an epithet for the ultra-mobile monkey god, Hanuman. Using the power of the Congress political machine he also acquired 297 acres of land for a factory in nearby Haryana. The name and the land were his two significant contributions to the company at the time of his death. The subsequent partnership with Suzuki, and the revolution that Maruti brought about in middle-class car ownership in India, were the work of others.
But Sanjay Gandhi’s decision to locate Maruti in Gurgaon was, in the long-term, momentous. It came at a time when the city of Delhi was reaching the limits of its commercial real estate. Neither the British nor Nehru had allocated space in the city for the large number of businesses it began to host from the 1970s, and many of them operated out of houses and hotels. The developmental monopoly, the DDA, made one concession to this need: Nehru Place, a warren of now-rotting commercial buildings in the south-east of the city. But to anyone who could look at the city with the perspective of twenty years, it was set to overflow in a massive way.