“After that all my bank accounts were frozen and my money was inaccessible. I had 500 crores [$100 million] sitting in the bank but I couldn’t touch it. So I didn’t make anything during the boom while everyone else was putting money in real estate. There were four years of questions. I became very frustrated — I’d worked to earn the money but couldn’t enjoy the fruits of my work.
“At the same time my girlfriend left me and began an affair with one of Delhi’s most insane men, the son of a cabinet minister. She knew he was very violent but she also knew he was about to become very rich because her brother was in on the same deal. So she went to be with him.”
Now thirty-four years old, Puneet has not worked for more than a decade. He stays at home, mostly, since his friends are all rich and he has no income. Today, in anticipation of my visit, he has put on a shirt, newly pressed trousers and a pair of leather brogues. We sit together in the spacious living room whose walls are hung with hunting scenes and antique engravings of Indian cities as they appeared to English nineteenth-century travellers.
Puneet’s improbable windfall was helped along by the fact that he went to one of Delhi’s most prestigious schools, the preferred choice of the political and business elite. His school friends were the sons and daughters of the most powerful people in the country, and they revelled in their shared invulnerability. The school provided, essentially, an apprenticeship in power-mongering.
“There was this guy who married into an army family, which enabled him to become a successful arms dealer. His two sons were at school with me. One day we were at the nightclub at the Hyatt and the sons got into a big fight. The bouncers started fighting them and they called their dad. He rushed over there — he’s a huge guy himself — and he beat up the bouncers. He picked up big plant pots and threw them at them. Then he got his sons out. After that he planted a fake picture of his sons bandaged up in hospital in the newspapers to get sympathy for them, and filed a lawsuit against the Hyatt.
“That kind of stuff happened all the time. Whenever trouble broke out, boys would be competing with each other over which of their fathers had more power to intervene: ‘I’ll call my dad. No, I’ll call my dad.’
“One guy was the son of the minister of external affairs. So his father had control over passports. One day my friend gets off a flight into India and he turns up at the immigration desk. His passport was folded in two in his back pocket. He put it on the desk. The immigration guy said, ‘You can’t treat your passport like that. You’re defacing government property.’ My friend replied, ‘You want to see how I treat my passport?’ and he started ripping pages out of his passport and tossing them one by one in the face of the guy behind the desk.
“Another friend wanted to get a driving license. When you’re eighteen, everyone is trying to get a driving license. So he walked into the transport authority. He started dropping the name of his uncle, who was the chief of police. As he went around the office, he moved from the lowest rung to the highest rung until he met the guy in charge, who organised for him to have his full license there and then. This was an incredible feat. Usually you have a provisional license first and a full license is only granted later, and at age eighteen a full driving license is the coolest thing you can get. But while this was going on, someone made a call to the police chief’s office, found out the guy was bullshitting about who his uncle was and cut up the license in front of him.
“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.