How a professional Indian pickup artist gets women to sleep with him

Sid’s taking in the Bonobo crowd, nodding, the odd breath sucked through his teeth, and gets to checking out a Tamil-maybe Kannadiga-girl across the space: early twenties, slim build, with a Pulp Fiction Uma Thurman kind of bob — attributes for which Sid assesses her at "about a seven". She is also surrounded by the same number of largish men, arms like stevedores, who seem to have had their Lacoste shirts taken in around the biceps for the occasion.

But this does not deter our Lothario.

"How about her?" says Sid.

"F*ck off," I snort. "No way."

"If you don’t believe I can do it you can ask a former Miss India," he says, burden of proof by text message. "See?" he smiles, showing me the WhatsApp window on his iPhone. "She says she’ll be here in ten minutes."

And she is.

Lithe and long in a white V-neck T-shirt and pleated blue miniskirt, skin as pale as Paris winter, doe eyes off the pages of a wank rag Japanese manga. And she’s coming this way.

Former Miss India sits on a bar stool, back hunched, legs apart, feet dangling, unaffected by what she knows she’s here to do.

"She’s a ten," whispers Sid.

Sid only goes for tens.

"Tall, slim, pale" is his preference — "Pale as in white?"

"Yes, I prefer white girls. Blondes," he says — but right now, this South India Seven is the first step in proving his scientific method.

To run this "night scenario", Sid’ll be using the former Miss India as a "pivot" to deflect the dudes and "open the set".

I want to call foul. A former Miss India is going to distract any number of men while Sid gets up to requisite skeeve on their lady folk. It’s going to increase his "value" to perhaps the highest of any guy in the bar. The men will be impressed. The Seven will be impressed. But even with a beauty queen scrambling radars, Sid’ll still have to extract this Uma from the danger zone somehow, without the lugs catching on that Miss India is there to disarm them, and that’ll take a while.

So as Sid and the pivot walk the 20 feet or so towards the group, I turn around, order a beer, exchange pleasantries with the bartender and fumble a few 100-rupee Gandhis out of my wallet. In  the thirty seconds it takes for a few sips and a turn to see if Sid’s been satisfyingly punched out, however, he’s vanished. That eminently spottable head, that slicked-back mane always a couple of hairlines above the crowd, is gone.

So is Uma.

The seven men are as they were, deep-sipping beer as much for competitive arm flexing as getting lashed, exhaling cigarette smoke like circus tent fire-breathers. All that macho shit with no one but themselves to impress — and no objections to Uma’s absence.

How did Sid do that?

Another thirty seconds and former Miss India materialises next to me, her big doll eyes blinking, and she’s back to sitting like a twelve-year-old wood sprite on her bar stool, clicking her knees together, pointing a few feet down the bar, where Uma is nuzzling into the crook of Sid’s elbow.

"I’ve seen it with my own eyes a million times," says former Miss India, giggling at what must be a bit of a dozy bovine look on my face. "And he opens with the same routine for every girl, whether it’s an eighteen- or a forty year-old. And it always works."

Before I can ask what this universal hoodoo might be, what unimpugnable wonder words would work for Harold and Maude as much as Humbert and Lolita, Sid’s shifted proceedings to a cosy, low-lit table in the corner, right by the bathrooms — facilities I now visit without actually needing to — and I catch him running his fingers up the soft inside of Uma’s forearm.

Not only does he get her number to arrange a later rendezvous — a "digit-close" — but ten minutes after she’s left and I’m sitting at the table with Sid, wondering what kind of auto-suggestive hypnosis he’s used on this poor girl, she comes back up, swishes over and makes Sid promise, once again, that he’ll meet her next week.

Neither the former Miss India or I even blip on her infatu-radar.

"You see?" smiles Sid, as Uma floats away back to the elevator.

"Holy f*cking shit," I garble through a mouthful of beer.

"Told you I could do it," grins Sid.

"But I’m not sure I believe it," I say.

What just happened, in Sid parlance, was a lesson in the "night scenario" cold approach, emphasising generic value by peacocking with a pivot to disrupt and open a set, run a script, isolate and escalate with some kino to gauge indicator of interest and create an opportunity for later F-close in a controlled environment.

"What’s an F-close?" I ask.

"I’ll tell you," says Sid. "But first let’s order some food. This has made me hungry."

***

"Bandra’s great. It’s like this big human supermarket where I can pick up whatever I like. There are all these hot girls and I can just choose."

"So for you, picking up girls is like shopping for cabbage?"

"More like melons," says Sid.

***

Pickup artists. How déclassé. The more I learned about Sid and these faffers in The Game, the more the whole thing sounded like a Dungeons & Dragons collective with even dumber nicknames — Style? Mystery? Extramask? Juggler? Grimble?

Considered by my current self, a non-starving artist fairly well adjusted while speaking with women, The Game is a slog. Even as 400-plus pages of wilful penance, the thing is a lot to plough through.

It’d be a lot to plough through even if you’re using it the way every other sexual failure and social cul-de-sac says he’s not using it: as an instruction manual.

Even if you’re reading it as research for writing a GQ story about a secretive Indian womaniser, once the piece gets popular, every girl you go out with will sneer at some stage of your date and say, ‘Wait. Is that something you learned from that pickup artist?’