DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [39]
12
A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 2001
By the year 2001 Renu had not seen his parents and siblings in nine years. Yet even young men like Renu, who have taught themselves to survive with the loosest familial links, are occasionally obliged to respond to the entreaties of a mother. After much cajoling, he promised her he would find the funds to fly to Tamil Nadu in the south of India to visit the whole family.
Funds, however, were hard to come by. While at Westminster University, Renu had taken a job with Pizza Hut as a delivery man. He worked until about midnight or one o’clock in the morning and then had to get up early to attend his first lecture (although his punctuality slipped steadily as the year went on). The job had given him some extra cash for the first time in his life. But it wasn’t sufficient to allow him to save: what he had left over was being absorbed by his drug habit, which now included cocaine and before long would embrace that most devastating narcotic, crack cocaine.
Unable to muster the fare, Renu borrowed it from friends, and for safety purchased £3,000 worth of American Express traveller’s cheques before setting off on the long flight to Chennai.
Nobody knew what to expect from the encounter: when he had left his mother, he was still a boy. Now he was a young adult whose life was punctuated by bouts of intense solitude. His social life had picked up since college, but he was given neither to easy talk nor to any great expression of emotion. And, although youthful, he was also rapidly creating a patchy past. There was much that he would not be sharing with his family.
The trip began inauspiciously. From Chennai, he had to take one of India’s overstuffed, clammy buses into the countryside, sharing his space with too many people, too many chickens and too much luggage. Halfway through the journey, his eyelids drooping after the long plane ride from London, he felt a slight tug that woke him momentarily. He thought nothing of it. But the joy of being reunited with his mother was tempered when he left the bus – his little purse had been slit open and the £3,000 of traveller’s cheques were gone.
There was worse to come. When he visited the Amex office in Chennai, the staff refused to reimburse him (which he had understood was the whole point of taking cheques rather than cash in the first place). Before they would stump up the replacements, he would have to provide written confirmation from the local police that the money was gone. He was also told that Amex did not guarantee to return the money, but would pay it back ‘at their discretion’.
Once back in England, the bureaucrats at Amex were similarly stony-faced. Renu, they adamantly maintained, had failed to provide the requisite documentation that would prove the cheques had been stolen or lost. There would be no payout.
The people he had borrowed money from were friends. But only up to a point. They sympathised with Renu’s plight, but they still wanted their cash back. The only way that Renu could stump up the money was by taking out credit cards – this was after all the Age of Plastic, and the banks and credit companies were as keen for Renu’s custom as they were for anyone else’s.
The lousy job at Pizza Hut could not cover his increasing financial demands: the debt; the drink and drugs; the college costs; the rent. Renu’s world began to wobble. College assignments were the first to suffer. Having passed the first-year exams at the Harrow campus of Westminster University, he started turning up to ever fewer classes. He failed the second-year exams and failed the retakes.
To escape the despair, he started obsessively downloading songs from Napster, before discovering the sites where members of The Scene would share the games and programs they had cracked. The nights became