“Why?”
“Because the prime minister can’t sleep. These engines make so much noise they keep him awake. So he calls us to complain, but obviously there’s nothing we can do.”
As I drive away, I cannot help thinking of prime minister Manmohan Singh tossing and turning in bed, his snowy hair unturbaned on the pillow, his dreams interrupted by the rich boys’ Ferraris screaming up and down the roads outside. Manmohan Singh is of course the man who, long ago, as finance minister, opened the window to the storm of global capitalism and set the course for a new oligarchic elite.
Sixteen
You like this table? I designed it myself. Brilliant white. If anyone comes in to the room unexpectedly they’ll never be able to spot the cocaine on it.
— Delhi millionaire
“Parties in Delhi are no fun, dude! In Mumbai, even when they’re doing coke it’s fun to be with them. Here it’s not like that. In Delhi people are crazy, and they go to parties to escape themselves because fundamentally their shit is fucked up. When you go into it with that mentality, you’re heading for some morose shit. You go to Delhi parties, and you see two sitting in that corner, three in that corner, four smoking outside. No one’s talking. It’s like that here.”
I’m speaking to Krish, who, as a retired drug dealer, knows something about all this.
“I started out dealing in Goa and Manali but I quickly got connected to the cities. If any party happened in Delhi, I used to be there. Nothing works without drugs in Delhi, so without me there was no party. Without me, there was no Fashion Week. When Fashion Week happened, they called me up to make sure I was coming, and they booked me a room in the hotel where it was happening. Any designer who was having a show would call me before to say, ‘Dude, you have to be there on that day.’ For Fashion Week you needed 100 or 200g easy in one or two days. I used to get everything. I was perfect. People used to trust me because I never messed up. I would just finish my job and walk away.
“Everyone is using, boss! Big politicians, big industrialists, fashion, media — all of them. But in Delhi you don’t see it out much: it happens in farmhouses. The people who do so much coke don’t go out. The farmhouse area is a fucking junkyard. I don’t care to go these days. Delhi used to be fun. Before 2001 we used to have rave parties in farmhouses. And it was fun, people wanted to listen to music, and the parties were outdoors. And yeah, all kinds of stuff used to be around but nobody used to do coke. Ecstasy or MDMA. Not cocaine. People loved each other and there were only a few people in the scene, they didn’t give a fuck what other people thought, they just wanted to dance. Now the parties are all shuttered up and no one cares about music. Everyone’s got their expensive clothes on, so they need air conditioning. You can’t do MDMA in a closed room, you know: you need to be outside dancing. You can’t fucking do it in a room and sit there. So coke is more convenient for people nowadays.
“Coke has taken over everything. People want the feeling of cocaine. To catch a girl, to catch people. Rich people who do a party in their farmhouse, they can’t have it without that feeling. They are rich but they don’t feel rich without coke. If people do a farmhouse party they put down 5 lakhs on the coke.
“And coke is good for all these people who have to work. If you do Ecstasy or LSD the whole night, the next day you can’t do anything. Coke, you work the next day. I know so many people who have twenty-four-hour lives. Like that fucking politician — he doesn’t sleep for two or three days. He just finishes the night, puts some water on his face and a suit on and then he turns up at meetings fucking hyper, you can tell, you know. Coke is good for that. With other drugs you can’t. You are shattered next day. So now there’s no weekend: now every day is a weekend. People will call, ‘Dude, can you hook me up?’ and I’m like ‘Today is Monday!’
“Go to all the five-star hotels, the toilet’s always busy, mate! Even like all these lounge bars, it’s the same thing, everybody knows. They know if they tell one person not to do it then ten others won’t come. They don’t want to lose business. So they tolerate it. You need to have a crowd in your bar, so you can’t fuck around with the dope. Otherwise, next time they won’t come and they’ll tell everyone else too.
“You can get busted. But it doesn’t really happen. The cops take money and then they leave. It’s mostly just these black guys who get caught, they get really fucked. Most people who use coke are connected. So even when the cops arrest someone, they somehow get a call from somewhere else like, ‘Dude, that’s my friend, so take care.’ So they just say to him, ‘Pay us and fuck off.’ It’s a kind of business for them. Whenever they catch a politician’s son, it’s a jackpot.
“It’s much more in Delhi than other cities because the people who run things in Delhi are the people who already have money. They have property and businesses, and they live off that. So it doesn’t matter whether they work or not. No one sits at home doing nothing in Mumbai because you won’t find anyone else around you. Everybody else is at work. Even if they’re rich, they still work. They do all this shit and all, but the next morning you’ll see them in the office. Here in Delhi, it’s like more royal style. Delhi people call each other up in the afternoon and say, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ — ‘Nothing really’ — ‘Okay, come for a drink love’ — and there you go. You go to their house, fucking every evening you will see ten or fifteen people. Mumbai doesn’t have time for that kind of stuff.
“The rich here are really fucked up. These people don’t even pay their servants and the people who work for them and all. But they can like spend on drugs like easily 50,000 rupees [$1,000] a night. Especially the boys — they spend too much money in Delhi: go to clubs, find a chick, buy a drink, buy coke. Partly because Delhi has fewer girls out than Mumbai. Guys are going crazy with competition. Girls are more sheltered in Delhi, they mostly live with their parents. In Mumbai they rent their own places like boys.
“I know this guy who lives in a farmhouse. I was in his house just yesterday. He doesn’t work. He’s all alone. When you enter his gates, you have to drive a kilometre to reach his palace. And he made his house like one of those old houses in London. The cars are fanned out in front. When he buys a car he spends more money than the cost of the car on modifications. Like whatever car he buys, he calls them and he’s like, put this shit, put that shit. So he’s got this row of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Maseratis, Range Rovers. Vintage cars too. And all this guy thinks about is, ‘Okay, what guy can get me the best coke? Which girls are new in town?’ That’s all he does. And his friends are like that too. All of them are like that. They don’t need to work like a hundred years and they can spend so much money and still it won’t go away. He has a big big company and his money is made. So many of them in this city like that. They are fucking smart enough dude! A couple of them studied in Oxford and they’ve done like super things, but once this thing is in your head, everything is dead, everything.
“I see people lose everything. You lose your friends, you lose your family. You lose yourself. You go nuts. You go fucking nuts. People destroy everything, they don’t work, they lose themselves. So many of those dudes have done too much, they’re wired all the time, they can’t handle people you know, they’re fucking shivering and all, they start shouting. Like Trainspotting you know, they fucking freak out.”
• • •
Was this oligarchy happy? Strangely, perhaps, happiness did not seem to be among its more pronounced attributes. In order to understand why, we might ask another question: “How do you know you own what you own?”