Rupee Millionaires Page 10

  Unfortunately, one of the crutches broke in half and Ram issued me with an interesting challenge: how to find a new one in Jaipur on a Sunday when everything was closed.

  Later on, as I watched Satish’s shirts being loaded onto the hotel van, I thought of Gordhan and his super efficient computer mind. If anyone knew, he would.

  *

  Six hours later I arrived at Gordhan’s house and found Spud waiting for me. I was not happy to see him and bluntly told him so.

  Confronted by my displeasure, Spud just shrugged and said: ‘I received no instructions.’

  Of course he hadn’t. His instructions were still sitting in the lobby of the Oberoi hotel in Delhi, I told him, but the nearest I got to an apology was, ‘I decided to come incognito this time.’

  To Spud’s credit, he had just generated £12,000 at a London show, so I couldn’t be too hard on him. My only concern was the traces of white powder around his nose, and the way he kept sniffing all the time.

  If I was in a bad mood, it was nothing compared to Spud’s. He was hungry, he said, and he’d just learnt that his favourite restaurant in Jaipur, Niro’s, was closed due to a BJP rally. He simply couldn’t understand why a bunch of communists should have come along and deprived him of his long-awaited fish and chips.

  His mood darkened further when Gordhan offered us lunch at his house instead. He served us rice with little green apples, which he insisted were ‘not so hot.’

  Several glasses of water later, I regained the power of speech and croakily enquired about his staff. ‘Last time I came,’ I reminded Gordhan, ‘all your workers had eye flu and were wearing dark shades to stop the bug from leaping out and infecting us. They looked like hit men.’

  ‘Yus,’ laughed Gordhan. ‘Pup Fikshon!

  He was far less happy when I showed him Ram’s broken crutch. Then he spotted an injured worker and snatched the poor man’s crutch from him. ‘He break leg last week,’ said Gordhan carelessly. ‘No need now.’

  Later on, Spud and I joined Girish in his upstairs grotto and began checking his silver. We were just about finished when Spud dropped a bombshell.

  ‘I’ve got to go to Thailand,’ he casually informed me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ he asked, innocence personified. ‘I’m going to Southeast Asia on a buying trip. I’ve got to hop on a train in ten minutes for the airport.’

  I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say – just sat there in silence while Spud made his exit.

  ‘Where go takala?’ enquired Girish, and I said, ‘He go crazy.’

  If I thought I’d seen the last of Spud, however, I was wrong. Three days later as I sat in the departure lounge at Delhi airport, waiting for my flight home to Gatwick, a familiar bald head popped up.

  ‘Hello!’ said Spud, grinning. ‘I bet you weren’t expecting me!’

  ‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Thailand or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ chirped Spud, ‘but unfortunately the Pink City Express from Jaipur wasn’t an express after all. It got into Delhi two hours after my flight left for Bangkok. I’ve been holed up here in the airport hotel for the past three days, trying to get out of India.’

  I was at my wits’ end. This trip had been one disaster after another. Not only had Spud missed Pema on the way into India, leaving Satish to do his job for him, but he had managed to miss Pema on the way out, too, leaving me with thirty kilos of bone bracelets to lug home on my own. To top it off, he had arranged this unscheduled trip to Bangkok—and who knows where else—without consulting me. What was wrong with this guy?

  Back in England, I came to understand Spud’s recent erratic behaviour. I asked Tim what my ‘partner’ had been up to in my absence, and why I had been unable to reach him during my first two weeks in India. The answer, which Tim reluctantly told me, was alarming. Spud had fallen in with a ‘bad crowd’. He had been doing not only cocaine, but ecstasy as well. He’d spent the whole fortnight whooping it up at rave parties along the M25 motorway. Spud had not done the London show; Tim had done it for him. Shock ran through me, then anger, then confusion. I had a loose cannon ‘enigma’ on my hands, and I didn’t know what to do with him.

  Everything we had worked for so long was about to go tits up.

  Or was it?

  Instead of following my first inclinations and confronting Spud with my discoveries, I decided to bide my time. Too much was at stake for me to rock the boat just yet.

  Chapter 17

  Monsoon Madness

  Nobody in their right mind goes to India during the monsoons. But I had no choice. It was either that or say goodbye to Spud.

  In the short three week period during which Spud was gone, I unexpectedly discovered romance. I had long admired Anita, the flame-haired beauty who manned my old pitch at St Martin’s, but with Spud around I had never found time to do anything about it.

  Now I had, but it was not that simple.

  I was crippled by a shyness that went back to my adolescence, to a time when I was a tall, thin geek with huge buck teeth, National Health glasses, and a stupid, pudding-bowl haircut. My attitude towards chatting up girls then was the same as my attitude to cold-calling on shops now: they couldn’t want me, so why bother trying?

  On the other hand, I had gained a lot of confidence since I’d started on the markets. Most of my customers were women, and they seemed to like me, so what was the problem? Now, with my hair swept back, my teeth fixed, and my skin perfectly tanned from India, I figured I had a chance. Besides, and I felt confident of this at least, I could make most any woman laugh.

  But Anita was not just any woman. She was edgy, high-strung, and intimidating. She was also the worst saleswoman I had ever seen. If a customer took too long to buy something, she would snarl, ‘Make your bloody mind up, won’t you? I haven’t got all day!’ If they continued to dither, she would simply turn her back and mutter, quite audibly, ‘Customers! I fucking hate customers!’

  I can’t explain why, but I was extremely taken with her. It’s true I had always loved challenges, and she was definitely one of those, but she was also the rudest, most outrageous woman I’d ever clapped eyes on. The most cutting and suspicious, too. When I finally asked her out, she sneered at me.

  ‘You’re not my type at all,’ she claimed. ‘And when you ask me “out”, what you really mean is “let’s stay in!” Why don’t you just bloody say so!’

  She was obviously too sensitive for this world, I thought protectively. She could do with some rescuing. And so, with a persistence born of wanting something I simply couldn’t have, I put aside her withering rejections and determined to try again.

  The very next day, I watched, amused, as a punter took too long to decide on a silver charm bracelet. His mistake was absentmindedly tapping the table with a pencil while he deliberated. The pencil snapped moments after Anita did.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ she screamed, smashing her tiny fist on the poor guy’s fingers.

  ‘What a madling!’ I thought, glowing with admiration. I decided to put the ‘making her laugh’ idea to one side, since Anita was decidedly short on humour. Small and furious, she was spikier than a fully grown thorn bush. Only a full-scale charm offensive—something I had perfected over spending three years on a market stall—stood any chance with her. That, plus a dash of cunning and subterfuge.

  She spotted me chanting round the back of the stall one day, and asked what I was doing. I seized my opportunity. ‘You wouldn’t be interested,’ I told her.

  That got her attention. ‘Try me,’ she said.

  So I charmed myself into her small flat on the pretext of talking to her about Buddhism. But I never got round to it. Just as I opened my mouth to explain the Four Noble Truths to her, there was a power-cut. And reaching out in the gloom for my mini-Maglite torch, I found something far more interesting – one of her generously-sized breasts. ‘Whoops!’ I said innocently. ‘I thought th
at was the light switch!’ And in the awkward silence that followed, as the heat unexpectedly rose between us, Anita reached down and grabbed my crotch.

  I would later quote this experience as one of the most conspicuous benefits of my entire Buddhist practice.

  *

  What distinguished Anita from all my previous girlfriends was her sheer presence. Though only five foot tall on tippy-toes, she oozed charisma. Heads turned wherever she went. Her pretty, doll-like face was framed by a mass of bright-orange curls, and she had an hourglass figure most women would have killed for. A fireball of fierce energy and quick intelligence, Anita reminded me of only one other person, and that was Spud. Except she was far more attractive.

  From the very start, I was in love.

  Anita was an actress. She had studied at RADA, the prestigious London drama school, and had just split up with her soon-to-be-famous boyfriend Gary Oldman. Anita would have liked to be famous, too, but her diminutive frame (along with her temperament) made her unsuitable for most parts. Moreover, she was convinced that she was ‘too good’ for small roles. They were beneath her, she said – she would only consider ‘major Shakespeare like Lady Macbeth’. Her agent, an owlish figure named Bunny, was in constant despair. So far he had only managed to get Anita fleeting cameos as big-bosomed barmaids in soaps like Eastenders. It was this lack of productivity, more than anything, that prompted Anita to leave Gary. He had just had his first big movie break, playing Sid Vicious in the punk film Sid and Nancy, and she couldn’t handle the competition. It made her even more insecure than she was already.

  Anita’s main insecurity concerned her weight. She had been fat as a child and was still fat inside her own mind. That first night together, after we had collided in the dark, she told me, ‘You can make love to me, but leave the lights off. I don’t want you to see how fat I am.’

  I had tried to persuade her otherwise, but she had uncharacteristically burst into tears, and I’d had to hold her for hours until she calmed down. I was disappointed to discover that the lovemaking, when it finally happened, was good for me but not for her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffed defensively, ‘but I’ve got trust issues. My father left when I was very young, and I’ve never found a man I can truly relax with.’

  ‘I can be that man,’ I reassured her. ‘I’ll do everything in my power to make you happy.’

  With that I took her off the market stall, paid her rent and all her expenses, and generally removed every trace of stress from her life.

  ‘You’re worth it,’ I said softly, pulling her close. ‘You’re warm and funny and cuddly and cute. You’re everything I need.’

  The next day, very cautiously, she held my hand in public.

  I met her ex, Gary, just once, at Camden Market, and found him surprisingly candid. ‘She’s a real head case,’ he said, ‘but never boring.’ He then handed me the twin cats he had reared with her, Thomas and Rhetty. ‘The same goes for these two,’ he said.

  The cats moved in with me the same day that Anita did, and suddenly, from being a lone wolf banging about in a huge house full of Indian clothing, I found myself part of a rowdy rat-pack. Tom and Rhetty may have been brother and sister, but it didn’t stop them fighting all the time, and it was the same with me and Anita. As Gary had intimated, Anita was a total diva and super-sensitive to criticism. She also had a formidable temper. In the first week of our relationship, I had a dustbin, two ashtrays and a bag of cat litter thrown at me. And I was lucky.

  *

  When Spud returned from his sojourn of Southeast Asia, I had a new roommate in Anita, and Spud found himself cut adrift. He still wanted all my time and attention, but he couldn’t get it. Anita demanded a whole lot of both.

  Anita reserved her special scorn for Spud. Her first words to him, as he tried to invade the house one morning, were, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ She then slammed the door in his face and returned to her karaoke tapes while he vainly tapped at the window.

  It was even worse when I returned and put the two of them together. At one point Anita caught Spud helplessly gazing down her fulsome cleavage and demanded, ‘What are you looking at, you walking cock?’

  Sadly, that was almost true, for Spud’s bald head turned quite purple with lust and was wobbling phallically as he strove to contain it. Totally lost for words and embarrassed beyond belief, he charged out of the house and unleashed his rage on the helpless van parked outside. He emptied all its contents into the road, stomped on them, then rammed the vehicle into a tree.

  ‘Is he always like that?’ asked Anita, intrigued.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Maybe you just bring out the best in him.’ Then I headed outside to have a chat with Spud. ‘Have you quite finished?’ I enquired with a smile.

  ‘No, I fucking haven’t!’ raged Spud. ‘Who is that mad bitch?’

  ‘That’s Nita,’ I informed him. ‘You gave her my job at St Martin’s, remember? And you’re going to have to put up with her, because she’s just moved in. And so have her two cats.’

  Spud’s head went purple again, but this time with rage. ‘Next you’ll be telling me she’s a vegetarian astrologer!’ he ranted. ‘Get rid of her! We can’t run a business with a woman in our warehouse!’

  ‘You tell her!’ I said. ‘You’re the one she caught staring at her tits!’

  I was secretly having fun. It was the first time I had seen Spud, so very good at scaring other people, scared himself. I knew Spud wasn’t going back in that house. Nobody who had experienced the dark side of Anita ever wanted seconds. It had been like watching a Pit-bull and a Doberman going head to head, that first exchange of my two ‘partners’, and I couldn’t wait for it to happen again.

  That night at around 2am, I stopped having fun. Anita, ever sensitive to noise, shot up in bed. ‘I heard the door,’ she whispered urgently. ‘There’s a burglar downstairs!’

  I didn’t think twice. While Anita bolted for the bathroom, scooping up two cats as she went, I grabbed my trusty air-pistol from under the bed, ran stark naked to the top of the stairs and—with no spectacles to help me—fired blindly down. I obviously hit something, because I heard a pained squawk before the intruder fled the house.

  The next morning, Spud appeared, nursing a large bruise on his neck. ‘I only came to borrow your van keys,’ he snarled. ‘You didn’t have to fucking shoot me!’

  ‘You could have been anybody!’ I protested. ‘And besides, what’s wrong with your van?’

  Spud sniffed and glared blackly at me. ‘My van is inoperative owing to “action of tree,”’ he said. ‘Besides, “anybody” wouldn’t have had your front door key, would they?’

  There was no point continuing the discussion. Both of us knew Anita was the catalyst for both events: Spud crashing his van and Spud being shot as an intruder. And if she had caused such chaos in just one day, what was she capable of next? As Spud retired to lick his wounds, I sat Anita down and patiently explained to her that I had a business to run, and that since Spud was a necessary part of that business, he had to be tolerated.

  ‘He’s a rude, insolent little pervert,’ sniffed Anita. ‘I don’t like him.’

  I shrugged. ‘You don’t have to like him,’ I persisted. ‘Just let him in occasionally to restock his van, and stay out of his way.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Anita. ‘But you told me I was moving into a house, not a warehouse, and staying out of his way isn’t possible. He’ll be in and out of here on a daily basis, putting up shelving, restocking your markets, and generally turning this place into an Indian godown.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve been watching you two for a while, you know. That little git thinks he owns you. But as far as I can see, it’s the other way round. He relies on you for just about everything: money, friends, contacts in India, this huge stock-palace, even the goodwill of your customers. No wonder he controls your every move. Without you, he’d be nothing!’

  I had never before looked at things that way. Up until now I had considere
d myself to be Spud’s equal in every respect. But then I remembered half-forgot events, like the time Spud had made me erect scaffolding despite my badly twisted ankle, or the time he dragged me off my sickbed with the cynical remark: ‘You can’t pull a sickie on me now. There’s work to do!’

  Was Spud really that much of a control freak that he felt the need to regularly put me down, to show me who was boss? If Anita was right in her assessment, Spud was so afraid he might become a ‘jilted lover’ and be left behind, that he was seizing control wherever he could find it. It struck me now, for instance, that Spud had sole say on the company finances. He, and only he decided who got paid and how much. I knew there was a joint chequebook out there somewhere, but I hadn’t seen it, let alone been allowed to sign it.

  The thing that worried me the most was how Spud had taken over the buying end of things, when he obviously had no talent for it. Spud’s solo tour of the Orient had been a disaster. After leaving me stranded in Jaipur, he had spent six days in Bangkok, of which at least four had been spent blowing up condoms in bars and getting free drinks for putting them on his bald head. When he had arrived in Vietnam, he’d found it ‘closed’ for Chinese New Year. Finally he had gone to Bali and spent a whole week chasing tailors, trying unsuccessfully to get them to make batik clothing for him. To top it all, every gram of silver he had bought in his travels had been impounded when he’d flown into London three days ago.

  Anita’s comments hit home. For the first time, I realised how ineffective Spud was on his own, and how close I had come to allowing him to completely take over my life. I also realised that if Spud had thus far been my protection against the likes of the Petrovs, Anita was now my only protection against Spud.

  Chapter 18

  Spud vs Nita

  In truth, I didn’t need protection. I needed the freedom to consider a very difficult choice. Spud and Anita, one of them had to go. And since neither was willing to be number two on someone’s list of priorities, I had to decide soon. On impulse, I booked myself a flight to India during the hottest, wettest, most uncomfortable time of year.