THE DEBT COLLECTOR'S DUE

By Adhirath Sethi

There comes a day in every boy's life when he needs to sit down and decide what to do with the rest of it. But our layabout hero, Samay, slept through it, as he did most days growing up. Waking up aged twenty-nine, he finds that he barely has any money left in the bank and the only job anyone is willing to give him is as a debt collector for small businesses.To top it all, he has had no luck with his college flame, Amrita. They were close friends once but are not even in touch any more. His less-than-ordinary life takes a mad turn when he is mistaken by mob boss Pande for a hitman and given Rs 75 lakh as payment. Samay wants to take the money and flee the city, but he discovers that Amrita, now a journalist, is next on the hit list...The Debt Collector's Due is a wild ride through the drama of college heartbreak and a terrifying murder in south Mumbai's Parsi colony to the sweaty alleys of Crawford Market and the mist-filled valley of Panchgani. This is a story about shifting fortunes and high stakes, a breathless read from the first page to the very last word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351368205

Adhirath Sethi

Adhirath Sethi is an alumnus of the Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh; Eton College in Berkshire, UK; and the London School of Economics. After completing his bachelor's in economics, he returned to India and joined the Boston Consulting Group in Mumbai in 2004. He later moved on to join his family business.He is now settled in Bangalore, where he balances his time between his work, writing and the demands of his five-year-old son.

Book preview

THE

DEBT COLLECTOR’S

DUE

ADHIRATH SETHI

To my mother, my most ardent fan and vicious critic

And to Hufriz, for being everything I need by

my side to feel infinitely successful

CONTENTS

1. SLEEP

2. A HISTORY OF HEARTBREAK

3. A BREAK OF SORTS

4. THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUCK

5. SAVITA VS SHAVITA

6. FLIGHT

7. HOBBY

8. AWAKE

9. THE MOVE

10. IT MUST BE HIM…

11. …AND THAT’S WHY YOU DON’T MESS WITH HIM

12. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIM

13. LESS THAN PRESENTABLE

14. WAGHMARE’S WAY

15. NOT SAFE YET

16. NOT FAST ENOUGH

17. LADY LUCK DEPARTS

18. LADY LUCK’S ENCORE

19. CLOSURE FOR SOME

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

1

SLEEP

There comes a day in every boy’s life when he needs to sit down and decide what to do with the rest of it. Is he going to be a lawyer, a doctor, a businessman, a beekeeper or an underwear model? It could be whatever he fancies; it doesn’t matter, because it need not come to pass. What it does is give him direction and set the course for his development into manhood.

Samay Agrawal slept through this particular day, as he did most days during his so-called ‘formative’ years.

Waking up aged twenty-nine, he realized, perhaps all too late, that he had missed the bus to success and that while his friends were on their way to reaching the top of various corporate ladders, his behind was firmly glued to the bottom-most rung, with no crowbar in sight to pry him loose.

He had no job, no degree, no relevant work experience and would fit the bill perfectly for a homeless bum, had it not been for the benevolence of his late uncle who had left in his name the lease to a small rent-controlled flat in central Mumbai, along with a modest sum of money. Even this, Samay had to consider, may have been pure happenstance, since it was often hypothesized by the family that his uncle—aged eighty-seven and rather senile—may have confused Samay with his elder (and immeasurably more sycophantic) brother, Amay, whilst writing his will, as elders are often wont to do. It had been the only bright star in Samay’s firmament for some time now.

Still, he at least had a roof over his head. A few reality checks post his twenty-ninth birthday had led him to rationalize that if he could at least manage some sort of basic vocation and earn enough to pay his bills, he could climb on to the lower middle class rung on the ladder. There he planned to cling on for dear life until dear life itself reached conclusion.

But despite his hugely watered down vision of an acceptable lifestyle, work was hard to come by. For those lacking ambition, Mumbai is a terribly unforgiving city. Every year scores of people land up on her shores, carrying with them an Indian adaptation of the American Dream and striving assiduously to make it a reality. This was the only city in the country where rags-to-riches stories were truly believed possible, fuelled by Bollywood and its endless narratives of slum dogs and angry young men making vast fortunes on the back of nothing but a sheer will to succeed.

And that Samay lacked even an iota of this will was something he was painfully aware of.

Within the viciously motivated hurricane that was the city’s working class, he was like a satin handkerchief; flitting around without much direction, but caught nonetheless in an unending tussle with the forces around him.

It wasn’t as if he was unintelligent, or even devoid of the capacity to work hard—characteristics he invariably noticed in other unsuccessful people but could never honestly recognize as being among his own shortcomings. In his own analysis, Samay lacked a lust for life, although finding a phrase to describe his malaise made it no easier to cope with. Nothing interested him enough for him to want to put in the effort required to master it. When he was growing up, his parents had always assumed that something would turn up eventually that would genuinely catch his fancy and allow him to focus. Samay trusted this assumption for a while and kept an open mind to new things; but nothing did turn up. As time went by, they altered their premise to believe that the sheer embarrassment of failing would certainly drive him to grab at the next thing that came his way, but they underestimated Samay’s capacity for embarrassment.

During his school days, he had been a bright student, often topping the class in maths and frequently sought out by weaker kids to help them with sums that they had problems with. He was even active in sports; despite not being vastly talented, he had a fairly secure position in the school cricket team (a gritty batsman was what they called him—a euphemism for someone who lacked great skill but strove hard to hold on to his wicket and carve out runs). He was witty, well liked and was from a well-to-do family—all the ingredients that one needed to be popular in school. And while he was not what you might call ‘conventionally good looking’, he was tall, fair, reasonably well built and had a certain confident cockiness, which easily appealed to the opposite sex. His eyes were dark and always appeared attentive, and his strong jawline led up to an enviable mop of thick black hair that seemed to effortlessly stay in place all day. As a result he was never short of female admirers, and this topped off what could be easily described as a very wholesome boyhood existence.

But somewhere between eleventh grade physics and twelfth grade economics, he simply lost interest in all things—bookish, extra-curricular or otherwise. There came a certain Saturday (which he could clearly remember years later) when he woke up, started to get ready for a cricket match, suddenly decided against it and went back to sleep.

Samay was never sure how sleep got such a strong hold of him after that. Whether it was a medical issue or simply his way of avoiding the inevitable realities of life or escaping the inexorable boredom of doing something he didn’t truly enjoy, he never knew. But he avoided resisting it, and it became to him a wonderful poison—a true passion in the years that followed. Even when his father’s business perished and the family had to sell their home, Samay had rolled off the bed so the movers could take away the repossessed furniture. Sleep ensured that he missed taking his college final exams and was content from then on to live off his parents until, out of exasperation, they kicked him out of their tiny flat, forcing him to live in his one-bedroom inheritance in Bandra, paying the meagre rent by chipping away at the money his uncle had left him. Sleep, when he finally understood how low it had let him sink, had left him with nothing to build his life on.

Still, he persisted, making long lists of jobs that he could potentially take up and gradually crossing each one off, as the obviousness of his un-employability gained prominence.

Day after day he walked from one office block to the next, hoping that the next person he met would be either extremely kind, or too sleepy to fully comprehend the emptiness of his résumé. The fact that the résumé had barely enough material to cover a postage stamp, however, did not escape anyone’s attention, regardless of how kind or sleepy they might have been. Rejection followed rejection, and Samay began to realize that the only challenge he may face during a given day—apart from actually getting a job—was learning to keep a smile on his face when yet another manager or secretary described to him the many, many ways in which he was thoroughly unqualified to work in their company. This skill—if you could call it that—would be greatly useful to Samay in the time to come.

2

A HISTORY OF HEARTBREAK

Samay woke that day with the bittersweet feeling that comes from having the perfect dream diluted by the sudden intrusion of cold reality. It was a dream that repeated itself on a weekly basis, and Samay was always glad when it did. It started with a cliff that Samay needed to climb. He would dexterously leap from ledge to ledge, fearless and completely in control. Tirelessly he would keep climbing until finally, just before he reached the top, he would come upon a ledge and be unable to go further. Then she would appear, her face peering over the edge of the cliff, smiling and holding out her hand. The moment he held it, Samay would feel himself rising weightlessly, joy infusing every pore of his consciousness as his feet landed on the ground next to her. He would feel her gaze wrap around him and know, for a second, what it was to be truly elated.

Then they would sit down, right there on the edge of the cliff and watch the sunrise—hands held and her head on his shoulder. And just as Samay would begin to consider that maybe this was real, the scene would disintegrate before him and he would awake.

Samay lay still in his bed and closed his eyes, hoping to re-create the scene and possibly hold it for a while longer; but it was gone. In its place a memory barged in—one that inevitably followed the dream, forcing him to come to terms with how far removed he was from Amrita. The memory was of the last time they had met.

‘Hey, Ami! You said you wanted to talk. Anything urgent?’ his voice was almost drowned by the noise in the tiny, grubby restaurant where they sat. It was a regular college hangout, just off the campus. The tables were crammed close together, and a solitary wall fan creaked endlessly in one corner to provide some basic air circulation, seeming almost apologetic in its inability to counteract the Mumbai heat. But the kids preferred this place to the air-conditioned coffee shops, partly because it was cheaper, but mainly because the tea was delicious. At the entrance, an elderly, grumpy-looking man sat at a rickety old table, taking down orders and passing them to a waiter to take forward. Occasionally the old man would bark irritably at kids he felt were being too boisterous, and things would quieten down for a bit.

Amrita was sitting at a corner table, her back to the rest of the crowd, and Samay walked around to sit opposite her. She was sipping tea from a small glass tumbler and scrutinizing a checklist. It was a grimy table, big enough for only two, and the metal stools they sat on rocked on the poorly levelled floor. Over her shoulder, Samay could see a few friends smiling and giving him the thumbs-up sign. Practically everyone knew how he felt about her, and Samay knew a lot of people had come simply to witness the moment the two of them finally started going out officially. The waiter brought Samay some tea, as he rocked on his stool excitedly, waiting for her to bring up the topic.

They had been friends through college, and Samay had passed up hundreds of opportunities to tell her how he felt. In his mind, they were meant to be; from the day they first met, Samay had never once considered otherwise. She was beautiful: petite, dark haired and feminine in every way possible. To him, she was perfect. But attractive as she was, Samay had initially been swept away by her confidence.

Sitting with his friends on a bench under a large tree on the college campus, Samay first heard Amrita’s voice from the other side of the tree. She was arguing with someone, fervently making a point about a dress code violation that had been raised against a friend of hers. It took a few seconds for him to realize that she was speaking with the college principal and that he was having a hard time winning their debate. Clearly she felt that her friend had been penalized unfairly and was imploring the principal to see reason and reverse the decision. Finally, Samay heard the principal relent exhaustedly and, from over his shoulder, saw Amrita walking away towards the classrooms. She was in a pair of jeans and an orange kurti; her hair was bunched up with a clip, but a few loose locks dangled playfully around her neck. She looked incredible, and Samay was sure every boy around was checking her out as she walked away.

‘Who is that?’ Samay asked his friends. They could see he was clearly captivated.

‘Chill, Sam. I’m sure she’s a butterface.’

Samay looked confused as they all sniggered.

‘You know… everything looks hot… but-her-face.’

They all laughed, but Samay ignored them.

He tried catching up with her, but she had entered a lecture hall. Throughout the day he looked for her everywhere, but it was