He returns to his meeting with the guru.
“Anyway, the other mistake that guru told me I had made had to do with my uncle. I had taken my uncle to court, and my guru said, since my father was dead, my uncle was the head of the family and you should always keep peace with the head of the family.
“This house was divided between my dad and his brother. My uncle owns the back half and since my father died he has been trying to get the whole thing. His part is painted a different colour from ours: one night he had the roof of the entire building painted his colour to try and indicate that my grandmother had wanted him to have the whole house. Then he used his contacts in the police to intimidate me: they threatened to arrest me if we didn’t vacate the property. And then they issued death threats to my mother. You can imagine if someone can go down to the level of fucking sending my mother death threats when I’m sixteen years old. To a widow, you’re doing it to a fucking widow. I can’t even imagine what goes on.
“My uncle is a very toxic influence in my life. He’s got a fucking crazy family. His elder daughter is a very good-looking woman. Foxy fucking hot chick. Tall, very fair, very slim — very arrogant. She had a lot of guys chasing her so her ego got inflated even more. She had one of the biggest industrial families offering her to marry their son to her — an offer she should actually have accepted if she’d been sensible and humble. She got engaged to some guy whose mother is a big socialite — then she broke off her engagement with that guy, he went nuts, he’s never been the same since. Then she got married to a leather exporter, sweet guy, moved into his house in Nizamuddin, a year later got out of there, took all the fucking furniture with her, took all his family’s diamonds, divorced him.
“She was friendly with a woman who owned this company that became famous for big scams and fraud and shit. At one point that woman and her entire family were in jail for some scam, or they were on the run. She used to live at the Maurya Sheraton because she was making so much money, and she used to have a Rolls-Royce parked outside which became like a landmark for us boys. Anyway when she went to jail that Rolls-Royce was parked outside our house, because my cousin was her best friend and she was doing all the paperwork for the company. While she was working for that woman she met her nephew, fell in love with that asshole, and one day we come home and find that she’s getting married to him. That marriage went on for a while and she made that guy’s life hell. I believe one of the servants who later left them told us that she physically kicked her husband in front of him one day. Then there was another divorce. Now she’s living in the other part of my house. I have very pleasant company around me.
“Anyway so her father, my uncle, sold one of my father’s factories without telling me or my mother. Our side of the family were 50 per cent shareholders. I took him to court and eventually used strong-arm tactics to get our share of the money from the sale. But when I went to see my guru, he said that some of my problems stemmed from this. He said that traditionally, in Hinduism, anybody who takes the head of the family to court will be not treated well by the spiritual ancestors.
“There is a period in the Hindu calendar called the ‘sharadh’. This is a period when all the souls of your ancestors are supposed to come down to the earthly plane. And you’re supposed to win their blessings. Somebody who has the ancestors on his side is supposed to have amazing good fortune. And when you don’t have their blessings, when you have annoyed them, the opposite happens. Everything you try to do there’ll be an obstacle. So I believe the reason I’ve faced so many blockages since my father and grandfather died because I’ve had what in spiritual terms is called the curse of the ancestors, or ‘pitra dosh’.
“The philosophy is like this. After they have died, the same father or grandfather who would have loved you in life, if their souls haven’t proceeded to the next plane, they will keep fingering you and bothering you, compelling you to do whatever is necessary for them to be released. In India we have two or three holy sites where you’re supposed to go to release your ancestors from whatever earthly plane they’re stuck at. Only a son can do this ceremony. That’s why Indians are so fucking crazy about having a son, because they believe they can’t get their salvation or move to the next level until their son actually cremates them and gets this ceremony done for them. So I did this ceremony finally this year to clear my pitra dosh, which is like twenty-two years after my grandfather and my father died, and I definitely do feel a tangible difference. And after that I went to my guru and he said, ‘Half your work is now done.’ And I can actually feel one of my channels is absolutely completely clear which is exceptional. I mean basically when you’re becoming a master all your three channels have to be absolutely clear — that means you have no pitra dosh, you have no ancestral problems, even your ancestors’ sins, which accrue to you, you’ve paid off. In Hinduism the ultimate son is supposed to be a guy who is so auspicious that he actually releases twenty-one generations of his ancestors from a certain plane and grants them salvation. That’s the ultimate son that can be born into a family.
“That bathroom-fittings guru has totally broken me down and rebuilt me, which was the only way I could have been saved. And now things are looking up. My lawsuit is near to completion, and the government has forgiven me the tax, which is an acknowledgement that the money is going to come back to me soon. But I’ve changed totally in the process. Some experiences I cannot even tell because people would think I’m insane. My ego has been broken down. I’m celibate. My rich friends come to me to find peace. They admire me, because part of them wants to be living the spiritual life like I am, dude. People with money are so attracted to me. Sometimes they have problems in their business lives — they make massive money off two deals and then nothing else happens — and I find a quote or a lesson that will unblock them.
“You see during the period of money-making in Delhi everyone lost their way, dude. My best friend’s become a coke addict who spends his time fucking hookers. He just sent me a picture of himself in the Ritz in Singapore with these two hookers. All my friends are going through crazy divorces. Money’s all they cared about and now they’re realising they don’t have anything else. So they come to me.”
I have asked Puneet to take me to see his guru this evening, and it is now time to leave. We get in the car and set out for Punjabi Bagh, one of the business enclaves of west Delhi, which is where the guru lives. Puneet is light-hearted on the road. He makes observations about the people in the cars around us. We pass two cops on a motorbike, a man in front and a woman behind.
“That woman cop is giving me the eye, man!” Puneet says. “She wants a piece of me.”
A white Bentley limousine powers past us, and we watch as it parts the traffic ahead. It crouches low on its massive tyres; the winged “B” on the back looks like a rapper’s medallion. Bentleys and Rolls-Royces used to sit upright like pillared country mansions, but those were the days when wealth aspired to the style of the English aristocracy. Now Bentleys and Rolls-Royces are made to look like vehicles for gangsters, because the aesthetic of twenty-first century money is different. The question of what ‘taste’ is, is no longer clear: from Los Angeles to Beijing, the rich assume a style of criminality.
We arrive at the ashram, which is packed with waiting people. We are informed that the guru is asleep. We decide to wait in the line, which snakes back and forth across the large basement, up the steps, and around the house outside. Volunteers hand out steel plates of rice and daal to the patient congregation. We wait.