Puneet is led away by one of the guru’s helpers. The man puts his hand on my head. It feels good. I can sense his power. He looks into my eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he says gently.
I look humbly at him.
“Please tell me,” I say, “what it is I still have to learn.”
He stares for a second.
“What did you say?”
I am embarrassed to repeat it, but I do. He smiles. He says, “Are you making fun of me?”
“No!” And it’s true.
He looks at me inquisitively. Then his face breaks into a grin.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.
I cannot believe it. He says, “Go away and lead your life. Stop making fun of me.”
He is laughing now.
It is over. He looks at the next person in the line. I get up and wander away.
I am devastated.
What did I do wrong? How did he see through me?
My feet lead me through the door and into the dark night outside. I run into Puneet. He is bent over and weeping copiously. I understand now why these encounters bring out people’s weakness. I put my hand sympathetically on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “They sprayed fucking lemon juice in my eyes, dude.”
I laugh, despite myself. He is so serious about his damn eyes. We walk back to the car. He lights two cigarettes and we stand under the trees smoking.
I ask him what went wrong between me and the guru.
“Did he see through me?” I ask. “Did he realise I was a fake?”
“It’s difficult,” he says. “You don’t get to ask a question like that the first time around. It takes a lot of work to get there.”
This street is tranquil save for the crowds milling around the guru’s house. The electric gates open next to us to let a BMW convertible glide out.
Puneet says, “And anyway it’s intimidating at one level. You have to get used to it. It’s easy to fuck up because it’s not a normal situation. You know he’s looking at you, you know he can take you on a spin if he wants to. You don’t want to be fucking with that. Even I looked away from him because I just didn’t want to get messed up with that energy today. You might have noticed that I blink less than most people. That’s because I’m spiritually clean. But today I didn’t want to get into that.
“Normally I’m one of the few guys who, when I’m spiritually completely clean, can stare him down. I’m one of the few guys that he knows of. Usually, when he looks a person in the eyes he can completely fuck them up and they have to look away. But not me. There have been times when we’ve exchanged energy eye to eye for a good five minutes and people are like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ And then he has to tell me, ‘Puneet. Look down.’”
Seventeen
And now we move to the rhythm of this restlessness
On these streets many people dead they drive with recklessness
8% growth has some people flex with Lexuses
In South Ex shop for Rolexes and diamond necklaces
Land developers come down hard build power nexuses
They build more malls and shopping complexcesses
State militia vacate villages — next Exodus
So you can cash checks of Sensex indexes.
What did ‘ordinary’ middle-class people feel in those years?
As we noted at the beginning of this book, middle-class people were still not really, in this context, ‘ordinary’. But there were a lot of them nonetheless. In Delhi they numbered in the low millions. And as in any other group of that size there was essentially an infinity of experience. Happy, unhappy. Extraordinary, ordinary.
But the city was a powerful force of its own, and it did supply certain kinds of consistency to middle-class moods. It was possessed of immense energy, and energy is magnetic, whatever its effects: so people were animated and industrious to an unusual degree — until they were claimed by fatigue, which was also prominent in the city. In its protean shifts and transformations, Delhi was also fantastically interesting, and people were extremely preoccupied with their own urban condition, discussing the city’s moods, developments and events all the time, ad nauseam, for good and for ill. But Delhi was not particularly hospitable to the more carefree moods. It was unusual to find contentment, except in the old. Pure joy was rare, except in the very young. And there was a diminution of spontaneity, too, over the course of the century’s first decade, so that these lighter moods became more endangered over time.
During the 1990s, the middle classes had seen a lot of immediate, and mostly gratifying, changes in their lives. Many of them had been relieved to see the end of state controls: they had been stimulated by new jobs, TV channels, products and travel possibilities — and they had reached the year 2000 with a sense of ever-expanding horizons. They felt this was their moment, not only in a local but in a global sense. The world’s age-old domination by the West was coming to an end, and with it their country’s indignity. They looked out with imperial hopes on the rest of the world, and relished every story of Indian corporations buying Western companies.
But the festive atmosphere turned considerably more gloomy and cynical in the second half of the decade. The middle classes continued to make money, and they were the beneficiaries of a substantial re-allocation of resources from the country’s poor. But their lives also became more risky and expensive, and their expanded capitalist incomes did not buy as much as they had thought. Wealth and opportunity seemed to have been won at the expense of a parallel escalation of savagery in their city, and they found themselves more fearful and anxious even as they owned better cars. Wondering what kind of society they were creating, they became wistful for things they had resented while they were still around: cows in the streets, and pavement vendors with improbable trades. Their own get-rich-quick ethos came back to sting them, because in this period of astonishing wealth creation rather little care was taken of the future; and when the new economy’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ had all been plucked, it began to seize up for want of long-term planning and investment. After verging on double digits several times during the decade, GDP growth slowed to around 5 per cent in 2012. One of the reasons for this stalling was that the boom had remained too confined to the educated minority, and had offered rather little opportunity to the great numbers of the unskilled — and it had done frustratingly little to alter the situation of the majority of the Indian population. Development indicators for the country as a whole were lower than in much poorer Bangladesh next door — sixty-one children out of every 1,000 born live still died before the age of five (even in Delhi the number was twenty-eight; China had achieved a nationwide fifteen)56 — a fact which itself went some way to quelling any excessive pride in the nation’s economic achievement. But in their own lives, the middle classes found that infrastructure remained terrible, it was almost impossible to secure a world-class education for one’s children, bureaucracy choked all entrepreneurial whims — and the middle classes realised that their own continued rise was far less dependable than they had come to believe.
They also came to the unpleasant realisation during this decade that they were not the ones in charge. It dawned on the Delhi middle classes that their emerging urban society was administered, to a great extent, by a shadowy cabal whose interests were very different, and even inimical, to their own. As time went on, this backroom elite seemed to monopolise more and more of the opportunities and resources of their city, for even very modest entrepreneurial ventures — such as opening a café or a bookstore — demanded levels of political connections that were difficult or impossible for ordinary people. The new consumer landscape of designer bars and fashion boutiques, which might have signalled some multifarious capitalist heterogeneity, therefore felt oddly uniform and, indeed, sleazy: just more profits for the same corrupt gang. By the end of the decade, many middle-class people were blaming these unelected managers for the fact that Delhi, despite its influx of wealth, was still so dilapidated and under-resourced. They began to feel that Delhi was being run as a private racket, and with a depressing lack of care for its development. They felt that their own feelings and opinions were entirely irrelevant to Delhi’s evolution, and that many of the things they had dreamed of for their city were never going to materialise. They felt that they were living in a kind of fantasy and that reality was elsewhere, for even their newspapers hardly mentioned the enormous proportion of the economy that operated invisibly to the state and to the financial community because they had no independently verifiable information about it. The picture one got of Indian business from the press was therefore an entirely corporate one, but this picture said nothing about the great eruptions of new power and money in India, and it therefore failed to explain why life had taken on the bizarre contours it had. This is why society was so awash in rumour and conspiracy theories, which seemed the best way to express the doubts one has about the fiction of reality.