“What was in the story?”
“Wait. This is the story. I turned up for breakfast. And there he was waiting, sipping orange juice, his coffee by his side, at one of the tables by the window, the one that looks out over the lawn and the driveway, it catches the sun. He was facing the room. I sat opposite him. He’d been ill last year but he was much better now. He looked tidy, tanned. That was unusual, to see him tanned. I asked if he’d been on holiday, but he said no, he’d been swimming a lot these days in an outdoor pool, he’d caught the sun that way and found it agreeable, though his wife nagged him relentlessly about it. All this pleasantry, small talk. ‘So,’ he said to me, ‘what’s going on with you?’ And I told him I was about to send a story to my editor, a big one.” Dean took a sip of beer, touched his hand to his forehead. “He nodded at me. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘about that . . .’?” And my stomach flipped.
“He knew about it.”
“He knew the entire thing, paragraphs, sentences, the argument, the structure.”
“How?”
“Because he’d already read it. I hadn’t shown it to a single person, but he’d already read it.”
“How?”
“They’d been on my computer.” He threw his hands up. “He told me there was no profit in making this kind of trouble. No profit. I told him there was no profit in any of it. Profit isn’t the point. Surely he remembered that. He said: ‘It can be.’ Profit can be the point. This guy, who was like a father to me, who I modeled myself on after a fashion, whose ethical standards inspired me, told me profit could be the point. I’d done great work, after all, and I should be rewarded for it. As such, the concerned party would be willing to buy my story back, because it was their story in the end and I’d just done the hard work of stringing it up. Yes, they’d buy it. He could see how disgusted I was. I thought I could see a moment of shame in his eyes, but all he told me was that the world had changed. Journalism was a business like everything else.” Dean shook his head. “The distance between our thinking was not possible to bridge. The distance between the man who schooled me and the one sitting before me was unfathomable. But he was the same man. He had the same wife. The same dog he took for the same walks. The same routines, the same friends, the same restaurants he ate in. In fact, he’d always been this man. It was the world that had changed. But that’s not me. I know who I am. ‘What happened to you?’ I said to him. He seemed to consider the question seriously, as if no one had asked it before, but he offered no answer. Instead, he wrote a sum on a napkin and slid it over and said this was his client’s offer.”
“How much?”
“I’m not going to dignify it by repeating it out loud. It was obscene. I tore it up. I left the pieces there on the table and I walked away. I took the story to Venkatesh that day. He read it. He thought it stood up. He passed it through legal. They were nervous. But they looked through my evidence and, yeah, it fucking stood up. V. said they’d run it. But he told me I should brace myself. And then . . .” He pointed his finger to the ceiling. “God. The man upstairs. The managing editor. The board. The owner. They stepped on it. They refused to publish. Twisted as it is, I’ll give him credit, he came at me with the carrot first. Only later did he come with the stick. Well, I got stuck. The story got shut down this morning. I was put on paid leave. So I quit. Or I was fired. I don’t fucking know. All I know is that I’m free.”
She watched his face, trying to read his thoughts.
“What was in the story that was so bad?”
He gave a strange, polite smile, then reached into the satchel near his right leg and tossed a printout held together with a clip across the table.
“You tell me.”
She started scanning the pages, counting them. She stopped at fifteen, flicked to the end, flicked back to the start.
She read out the title. “Hiding in Plain Sight?”
“Not very catchy, I know. It was a placeholder.” He sank his beer. “V. was going to change it.”
* * *
—
It must have been five thousand words or more. The narrative was clear: Bunty Wadia was the biggest player in the state of UP. He was the chief minister in all but name, and then some. His business interests spanned the state. He held a significant share of the state’s wholesale and retail liquor business. For the sake of appearances, he ran the business through proxy members, who sometimes presented as rivals in public, but ultimately worked together and answered to him. They called themselves “the syndicate.”
She read it out loud. “The syndicate?”
“I know,” he said. “Straight out of a pulp novel. Though in fairness that’s technically what it is.”
She read on. It wasn’t just wholesale and retail. It wasn’t just vertical integration—sugarcane to sugar mill, distillery, distribution, wholesale, retail, the whole thing tied up, over the whole state, all the hundreds of millions of people, from nose to tail—it was monopoly. Sure, there were other players, other producers in the state, but since the Wadia Syndicate controlled the wholesale and retail licenses, they controlled who got to sell to the customer at all. Unless you paid handsomely, in cash, you were marginalized, made to disappear. At point of sale, Wadia’s own brands, either the ones he made or the ones he imported, gained prominence. If you wanted a look in—and most ultimately did—you had to pay the price, in cash. So for every truck of liquor coming in, a suitcase of banknotes went to the Wadia/Singh coffers. Fifty-fifty. What was anyone going to do? Go to the cops? Go to the Excise Department? They were taking their cut too. The industry generated billions of dollars in white and billions in black, it kept everything in order and kept everyone paid.
And that was just the start of it.
The first two pages.
It went on and on.
Through sand mining, through transport, through toll booths and infrastructure. Through the control of the police and judiciary.
At every step, the Wadias and Singhs skimming off the top, the bottom, the middle.