There were endless rumours as to where this money went, but most people imagined that it was being used to strengthen the grip with which the corrupt elite held onto society and its resources. Some would undoubtedly be used to fund politicians’ re-election campaigns, some to invest in new business ventures. But a major slice of it the middle classes could detect for themselves, because each time a new tranche of the Commonwealth Games budget was released, it sent Delhi property prices leaping further out of their reach. Delhi’s property market, in fact, was not like those of other places. Delhi property was a sink for billions of dollars of corrupt money, which could not be stored in banks, and this was why prices bore so little relationship either to the nature of the building or indeed the buying power of ‘ordinary’ people. The media reported those moneymakers who set themselves up in $8 million homes during the Commonwealth Games preparations, but this was just the sensational iceberg tip; most of the money was invested in more discreet purchases — a few $500,000 apartments here and there — which brought the financial elite head-to-head with the middle classes, to the increasing disadvantage of the latter.
At the beginning of the decade, it had still been possible for the middle classes to imagine buying property in Delhi. But by the end, the formula had become impenetrable even to very successful corporate employees. Leave aside the mansions selling for $30 million and $40 million: newly built three-bedroom apartments in south Delhi, even relatively ordinary ones, cost half a million dollars, which was out of all proportion to all but the highest salaries. Not only this but, considering the fact that these properties suffered from all the normal Delhi problems — poor-quality construction, power cut-outs and water shortages — this seemed dismal value for money compared to what that money could buy even in London or New York. Much more than this, however, was the fact that in order to buy property in Delhi you had to come up with some 50 per cent of the price in cash. Now, clearly it was not those who worked in the brightly shining corporate economy as PR executives or TV newscasters who could lay their hands on a million dollars in cash. No: the people with the suitcases of cash were, as likely as not, black money businessmen, criminals, or corrupt public servants. These were the people who expanded their hold very substantially over the physical assets of India’s capital during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and if there was a shift in the feeling of the city, towards something darker and more lawless, it was in part because of this. It was generally entertaining to ask restaurant owners who their landlords were: for it was a Who’s Who of India’s black money elite, from paid assassins working for the Mumbai mafia to publicly pious politicians. The professional classes, meanwhile, had no choice but to move out to the new suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida, where the corporate ethos meant that the quoted price was pretty close to the real price, and people with salaries could get a loan to cover their purchase. In practice then, the beginning of the twenty-first century saw a substantial hand-over of India’s capital from those who had acquired property after 1947 to a new black money elite, and it was this group that increasingly set the tone — aesthetic, commercial and ethical — for everyone else.
The financial gains that the middle classes made distracted many commentators from the increasing dislocation they felt in those years, from the controlling apparatus of their society, and from the lurking discontent that ensued, even among otherwise thriving people. That they lived in a society controlled by oligarchs was itself a significant factor in their quality of life, for this fact troubled their mind and sapped their energy more than one might expect. They did not know anymore what to believe about the place they lived in, and it became bewildering to them, and laced with threat. Everything seemed to be an optical illusion created by Mephistophelian magicians to mask their own dark purposes — but what these might be it was impossible to know. Delhi became a surreal place to live, because as time went by people lost their faith that the purported nature of anything was the true one. They knew their society not through what they could see and read but through what they speculated or dreamt on fevered nights. Middle-class people worked and prospered in this society, but they had no image of what, who, how or why it was, and this left them fretful and unmoored. By the end of the decade there had begun a mass movement of protest and petition aimed at breaking the stranglehold of the shadowy elite. Corrupt power became the number one resentment of middle-class people, not only because it sucked money and resources out of their own economy, which it certainly did, but also because it denied them any sense of their own reality: the world they operated in was not the real world and they seemed to flail, Matrix-like, in empty space.
But this resentment of the oligarchs alternated, in middle-class life, with their own fantasies of total wealth and power — for it was difficult to believe in any other route to freedom. The middle classes did not generally entertain mild, democratic sentiments. ‘Middle-class contentment’ was anathema to them too. They were a ravenous class of people, and they read newspaper stories of their neighbours’ billion-dollar fortunes not just with resentment but also with jealousy. They repeated tales of astronomical sums of money with a curious kind of relish, and in their imaginings the power of corrupt politicians reached superhuman, diabolical proportions. They did not believe that power and money would ever be equitably distributed in their society. They felt that the middle-class life would always be one of servitude and illusion, and only the super-rich were in a position to really see what this whole story was about. But since money floated free of intelligence and hard work, since there was widespread disbelief that those who had it were more qualified for it than anyone else, it was also possible to believe that it would one day just pour in to one’s own life, too, unannounced. The conclusion that many people drew from the distribution of wealth in their society was that fortune, in every sense of that word, was totally random — a conclusion which made hard work seem slightly less meaningful, and which fuelled hopes of low-probability, high-value windfalls. People who earned $400 a month felt it was worthwhile deciding which Mercedes they would buy if things came to that.
• • •
My first conversation with Anurag happens in a bar. Afterwards he calls me to say, “I can’t talk in bars. If you want to hear what I feel, you have to follow where I go.”
We arrange to meet again. He asks me to pick him up by the side of a main road. Despite the nocturnal neon haze, I easily recognise his six-foot form kicking desultorily at the kerb as I approach. I pull up and he gets in. He directs me to where he wants us to go. Within a few minutes, however, he changes his mind.
“Stop the car,” he says. “I’ll drive.”
We change places, he slides back the driver’s seat to accommodate his long legs, and he pulls away at enormous speed.