Take an underprivileged young man from the backstreets of a subcontinental metropolis. Add the ambition to escape from a hardscrabble life. Throw in close encounters with the rich and famous, making sure to reveal their hypocrisies. Season with generous doses of misconduct and lawlessness.
Those, more or less, are the ingredients of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Vikas Swarup’s Q&A, better known as Slumdog Millionaire. The same elements are also to be found in Rahul Raina’s just-published debut novel, How to Kidnap the Rich.
What, then, makes it worth reading? In a word, its tone. All the novels mentioned above have degrees of dark humour, but Raina dials it up to a ferocious level. The style of How to Kidnap the Rich is a flamboyant, take-no-prisoners approach to Indian realities of inequality, caste, class and corruption.
The book has already been optioned by HBO for a TV series. The best adaptation would be one that finds a way to depict not just the plot but also Raina’s caustic comments which drip off almost every page.
How to Kidnap the Rich is the first person account of the travails of Ramesh Kumar. As he puts it at the beginning, his story isn’t like one of those Bollywood films which “start out as comedies, where Shah Rukh and Preity are friends at university, and then after the intermission everyone starts getting cancer and mothers start weeping about family honour until finally there’s a wedding where everyone dances their troubles away. There is no tragedy here. Just me getting my finger chopped off. And a series of kidnappings.”
Mohsin Hamid’s protagonist started out as “a non-expired-labelled expired-goods salesman”; Raina’s hero is “an independent educational consultant”, which means that he takes exams for the offspring of the rich and famous. It’s a profession he excels at: “I am one of the best exam-takers in Delhi, and so I must be one of the very best in the world.”
He hasn’t become a star in this “fast-moving world of educational impersonation” by choice. The son of a vindictive tea-seller who’s subsequently taken under the wing of a nun at a convent school, he arrived at this means of making money through a series of unfortunate events to do with medical fees and missed opportunities.
His life changes with the results of an all-India competitive exam he’s taken for one Rudraksh Saxena, fondly known as Rudi, the surly scion of a wealthy couple with high net worth and low self-esteem. It turns out that Rudi is one of the “toppers”, and almost overnight becomes a sought-after product endorser, social media influencer, and then a reality TV star.
Always quick to seize an opportunity, Ramesh threatens to reveal the truth unless Rudi and his family give him a cut of the proceedings. He becomes Rudi’s factotum and, unlike Vikas Swarup’s underdog, doesn’t appear in front of the cameras but ensures that Rudi is prepped for them.
Though Ramesh starts a dizzying social climb, with perks like a mutual attraction between himself and a production assistant, his potshots continue. “We argue, endlessly,” he says about his country. “We speak eight thousand different kinds of shit, we insult each other, we make things happen. This is the country of deals. This is the country of talk.”
In this way: “We are the handmaidens of the brown takeover of the world.” Even his similes are loaded. Speaking of why he can’t stand tea, he proclaims that it gives him headaches and palpitations, “like Indian-American parents get when they hear their kid is dating a black girl.”
However, Ramesh does show sensitivity, sometimes descending to sentimentality, when it comes to his relationships with the two women in his life: the nun who nourished his potential and the production assistant he has feelings for. As a result, their portrayals can be standard-issue.
Events take a turn, as they tend to do, when Ramesh and Rudi are kidnapped. After all: “You’re not someone until someone tries to kidnap you. What an honour! Better than the Padma Bhushan.” While in captivity they figure out who is actually responsible, which leads to another round of kidnappings and shenanigans. This occasionally involves ludicrous scenes such as Rudi on the run in a wig and a saree. In Ramesh’s words, “just a total khichdi from beginning to end.”
By this point the book has become what film publicists love to call “a caper.” The have-nots want more from the haves, and the haves want more of what they already have. Government officials and politicians get involved – cue more barbs from the irrepressible Ramesh – and there are several ups, downs, U-turns and twists before our hero can extricate himself from hustlers, grifters, and hangers-on.
This makes the second half of How to Kidnap the Rich a little unwieldy, but there are always those sardonic asides to look forward to. One reaches the end of the book in the way one steps off a carnival ride: a little giddy, with a rueful smile and a renewed realisation of how the world looks from different angles.