—
He was the second generation of modern India, Gautam’s father. In 1948, his father—Gautam’s grandfather, the venerable Maharaja Sukhvir Singh Rathore (adored by the British, resolutely indifferent to the Independence cause)—saw his kingdom dissolved into the Republic, newly formed. How to compensate for this royal loss? Why, a “princely purse,” a stipend designed for upkeep, which was used to barter feudal power and control.
It was good while it lasted. But then the ’70s came along. Those Soviet times. The dictator Indira abolished that concession, and the Rathores were left with little more than a begging bowl and a handful of forts between which to string their washing lines.
Asset rich, cash poor.
It scarred them all.
Only Prasad, first son, Gautam’s father, was wily enough to change.
Prasad Singh Rathore understood that politicians were the future kings. So he threw his hat into the ring, with noble disregard for his family’s distaste of such grubby, earthen things, and was duly voted in as a hallowed MP. Soon after, he persuaded three of his cousins to stand for the legislative assembly. It wasn’t long before Prasad’s second cousin Sunil became chief minister of the state. Better the Devil, don’t you know. And here they were, the family where they belonged. This was the world into which Gautam Rathore, Prasad’s only son, was born.
2.
He reclines on his sun lounger under an umbrella on the terrace beside his private pool, impatiently awaiting his booze. Still trying to remember. He arrived here at midnight.
Really?
There’s no way this timeline adds up.
He was with Sunny at midnight. This much he knows.
Why can’t he remember why? Why, when he tries to dredge through the muck can he see nothing but some simpleton’s face?
She reminds him of someone though.
He doesn’t want to dwell on that.
He fixes on Sunny instead.
* * *
—
Their “whisky summit” wasn’t the first time their paths had crossed, truth be told. They’d schooled together, very briefly. It was the early ’90s. Gautam had been Sunny’s senior by two years. He was cock of the walk, old money when old money talked, spiced with a dash of his father’s political clout. And who had Sunny Wadia been? Just a nobody little gangster’s son from UP, his English as coarse as his manners, someone to belittle, besmirch, an upstart who bought his way into school and snatched its good name like a common thief.
“You didn’t last too long though, did you?” Gautam scoffed, Nikka in hand.
He was talking about Sunny’s expulsion.
Sunny: a tight-lipped smile.
Gautam poured himself another glass. “But old Malhotra, he never saw it coming! He was never quite the same after you. He’d quiver anytime he so much as sniffed the crotch of a hockey player. It’s a shame you didn’t get to see the fruits of your labor, you would have enjoyed it, but I suppose one can’t get away with such violence unpunished. What was it he did to you again?”
Sunny crossed his arms but said nothing.
Gautam could see he was pushing his buttons.
“Ah yes, I remember now . . .”
“I’m not interested in talking about the past,” Sunny said. “I’m here about the future.”
* * *
—
After school (Sunny vanished, forgotten) Gautam was sent off to Oxford (Brookes) to read finance. He had no interest in his books; by then he’d developed a rapacious appetite for sins of the flesh. In his teenage years he’d notched up several servant girls on the family grounds, local prostitutes outside the boarding school, and even one of his mother’s friends with his louche cutting ways on the polo grounds. In England he bedded some minor royalty—the niece of an earl, the daughter of a baron, etc.—while developing a sideline in transactional sadomasochistic coke, using the “tart cards” in red phone boxes in town. He liked the schoolmistress. His weekend trips were pure bacchanalia. “Lashings of discipline,” his favorite card. Alas, those salad days had a worm in their heart. His dismal 2:2 drew a recall to the family bosom, whereby he was lined up for marriage with the pliant daughter of a royal turned politician from Himachal. Desperate to escape the horrors of domestic life, he negotiated two years of grace, in which he would put himself to use transforming one of the family’s dilapidated forts into a boutique hotel for the discerning elite of the world.
It was a triumph. At least at first.
He turned out to be a fine host. He organized press junkets, and during these, he plied the good men and women with precious vintages and exquisite meals, hosted elaborate dinner parties in Maharaja clothes. Gautam the raconteur, posing for photographers with his grandfather’s big-game skulls, regaling journalists with tales from the Indiana Jones Playbook, massacres in courtyards, man-eaters, beautiful princesses in jewels tossing themselves into wells so as not to be defiled by rampaging hordes. It was a mishmash of true history from elsewhere and legends from his own mind. He followed it up with visits to the village to see the dancing girls, their gauzy pink veils, their shy smiles.
He enjoyed his success verily. Gained exposure in the right magazines.
He was Prince Gautam Good Times.
The Maharaja.
The Dynamic & Flamboyant Rathore.
The Remarkable Royal, Transforming Madhya Pradesh One Fort at a Time.
He partook in a glossy shoot for a fashion bible, posed by a renowned Armenian snapper before his deceased grandfather’s portrait, wearing a turban to complement the Versace Cornici-print silk blazer he well adored, a tiger skin draped strategically around his loins.
The portrait was beamed around the world.
India was Shining.
But all the while, the stories began to swell, not only of the unspeakable amounts of coke he served along with the tawny port, or priceless vintage cars he wrecked on the potholed roads, or the antique gun he’d used to wing a journalist in a drunken duel, or the time he climbed on the table in the middle of a feast and relieved himself into the goat brain stew, but also of the staff—young girls who drew water from the nearby wells falling pregnant. One night one such girl threw herself off the fort wall.
She was three months’ gone with child.
She left a note.
Word spread.
Mobs were formed. Vehicles were set ablaze.
The foreign guests were smuggled out in the night.
Some obscure local dispute took the blame.
Her family was paid off.
The police were employed to silence dissenters.
The media was sternly warned.
It all died down and went away.
But Gautam’s father took decisive action.
He packed off his son to Delhi, to one of their apartments in a great building on Aurangzeb Road. He would cool his heels with a modest allowance—one lakh rupees a month—in quiet disgrace.
* * *
—
You would’ve thought he’d learned his lesson.