Rupee Millionaires Page 11

  ‘You’re going where?’ Spud demanded. ‘You’ve only been back a month!’ Spud had no grounds on which to complain. He had, after all, only just returned from his own unauthorised holiday.

  But Anita was incensed. ‘You’re doing what?’ she shrieked. ‘We’ve only had three weeks together! Don’t expect me to be here when you get back,’ she warned. ‘I’m fed up with being messed around by men!’

  The hardest thing I had ever had to do was leave Nita on such short notice. But the moment I boarded the plane I felt an immense wave of relief. ‘No more worries for a while,’ I thought. ‘Time and space to consider my options.’

  Then I touched down in Delhi airport and stepped into a smouldering, suffocating cauldron of heat. I was back in the capital at the height of summer, sweating through 44 degrees in the shade with not a hint of a breeze.

  To make matters worse, I was on holiday, and I hated holidays. I was too restless a soul to sit in a beach chair. With ten days to kill before I could return to the UK, and with boredom already setting in, I needed a plan.

  So I did a bit of chanting and remembered an old plan I had been putting off for years. In a rare mood of spontaneity, I decided to take a twenty hour taxi ride down to Bhuj in search of old embroidery. Bhuj was the capital of Kutch state, and it was the last place likely to have the antique zari bedspreads which sold so well in the UK.

  A day or so later I stood at the travel desk of the Pushkar Palace, haggling with the manager, Deepak, over taxi hire. It was incredibly cheap by western standards—only £2 an hour—but since I would be travelling long distances each day, I was being charged a lot more for extra diesel.

  ‘I’ll pay you a flat daily rate of 1000 rupees,’ I declared at last. ‘Subject, that is, to a 200 rupee penalty for every problem I have with your taxi or its driver!’

  When Deepak enquired what constituted a problem, I reeled off the following list for him:

  1. Uninvited drunken passengers

  2. Uninvited pets or animals

  3. Bald tyres and even balder spare tyres

  4. Loud blaring Hindi music on warped car-stereo systems

  5. Non-English-speaking drivers with no sense of direction

  6. Unlicensed taxis making long detours to avoid policemen

  7. Taxis turning up an hour early, an hour late, or not at all

  8. Unsolicited stops in Ajmer while driver’s wife has a baby

  Deepak regarded me quizzically, but I was having no argument. I spoke from experience.

  The following morning I set off for Bhuj, already 1000 rupees in credit. The car was late, it had three bald tyres, and a cat had taken up lodgings on my seat. Furthermore, not only had my driver never been to Bhuj, he didn’t even know where it was. I told Deepak all this, and he shrugged.

  ‘I can do nothing,’ he said.

  My driver was named Pintoo, and, like most rural taxi drivers, he had his own agenda. The first thing he did was go to a gas station and fill up, which was something he should have done beforehand. The second thing he did was take a ten kilometre detour to his family house to pick up a spare shirt. We finally left Ajmer around noon, with me studying a roadmap and an anxious Pintoo asking, ‘Which way?’ every five minutes.

  As darkness fell, Pintoo switched on his headlamps – only to find they didn’t work. As I began sellotaping the full-beam indicator to the steering wheel, hoping to produce enough light to proceed, Pintoo squatted at my side and began happily filling me in on local temples. He wanted to go do darshan at one of them and when I said no, he got quite sulky. I think he wanted to apologise to dairy-god Krishna for the cow he had nudged into a ditch earlier.

  We plunged on into the night, and I let my mind wander. I found myself replaying a conversation I’d had a few nights before with Gordhan back in Jaipur. He had driven me to an air-conditioned restaurant, force-fed me a vegetarian thali, and said, ‘You have big tension in your head, Frankie. What is problem?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I’d confided. ‘I have new girlfriend, Anita, and she is enemy of Spud. One person must go, but who should it be?’

  Gordhan’s response had been typically Indian. ‘No life without wife,’ he’d declared with authority. ‘But girlfriend is not wife. And Spud is money-maker, lucky for you. My advice is keep the Spud and lose the Nita!’

  I wasn’t convinced. ‘Really? But I love her. And it’s been four years of backbreaking hard work since I’ve had time to love anyone. Also, she counts on me for just about everything: food, clothing, money, and lodgings. Why should she go?’

  ‘Then you are free ox!’ Gordhan stated pragmatically. ‘No expensive cow!’

  I had to give him that. Anita certainly was working out to be expensive. The Oberoi hotel in Delhi now had my record phone bill stuck to its reception wall. It amounted to £293, which related to a three-hour call I’d made to Anita trying to persuade her not to leave me just yet.

  ‘What are you doing out there?’ she’d shouted in the end. ‘If you don’t come back right now, I’m off!’

  ‘Off where?’ I’d asked cautiously. ‘You’ve got no job, no money, and nowhere to live.’

  ‘Don’t remind me!’ she snarled. ‘I think it’s about time I took responsibility for my own life, and I can’t do that when I’m living on your charity!’

  ‘It’s not charity,’ I told her. ‘I want to look after you!’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she concluded. ‘You’re just like my dad. First you spoil me rotten, then you up and leave!’

  Two hours down the line from Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, Pintoo announced he had a ‘big stomach problem.’ I asked if it was something he had eaten, but he said no. He blamed the bottle of mineral water I had given him in Pushkar. I told him it had been thoroughly filtered and purified, but Pintoo was insistent.

  ‘No more tourist bottle!’ he moaned. ‘I like tap water. It is good for tummy!’

  He might have had a point. Maybe pure bottled water had the same effect on Indians that local tap water had on foreigners. If so, I would soon be giving away my last toilet roll.

  Too tired by now to read any more maps, I handed them forward to Pintoo, then fell, exhausted, into a long, deep sleep on the back seat.

  This was not one of my better ideas.

  I awoke six hours later to discover I was not in Bhuj. In fact, I was not even in the right state. Pintoo had merrily plunged us deep into the heart of Gujarat, not the Rann of Kutch. He was 300 kilometres off course.

  ‘Nice sleep?’ he enquired with a smile, and I felt like slapping him.

  ‘Why you make like this?’ I snapped. Pintoo handed me back my map and I noticed the entire state of Kutch had been erased by the remains of his thali dinner.

  We eventually rolled up at the five star Gir Lodge in Sasan Gir. The lodge had been built recently to accommodate the busloads of rich Indians wanting to see the Asiatic lion roaming his last natural refuge on earth.

  All I wanted to see was a hot bath and a soft bed.

  I was relieved that I had only paid half the trip upfront. The other half, I phoned Deepak to say, was now forfeit. Pintoo’s total lack of direction had added a whole day to my tour, and I was paying £70 for a luxury hotel in which I didn’t even want to stay. Deepak’s response, when it came, was curiously satisfying. There was a strangled cry at the other end of the phone. ‘No pay? Why no pay?’

  I didn’t bother answering.

  The next morning, much refreshed, I went down for breakfast. I took a seat, then slowly became aware that if I thought the waiters in Pushkar were bad, I hadn’t seen anything yet. The Gir Lodge was the only five star property for hundreds of miles. And it took me thirty minutes to get a three-minute egg out of them.

  To be fair, the hotel had only just opened, and it hadn’t had time to properly train its staff. The waiter I got had a month before been herding goats in some nearby village. And the reason he took so long with the three-minute egg was that he didn’t know how to turn the gas o
n. When he eventually drifted back to ask for help, I took a long hard look at him and decided he was in the wrong job. He should have stuck to goats. His smart khaki uniform sat uneasily on him, and his feet squirmed inside his new patent plastic shoes. His hair had obviously been plastered down early that morning, and it was beginning to fly out of shape. But it was his eyes that really told the story. They were flitting all over the place, like a jackrabbit caught in a trap.

  ‘Butter?’ he intoned forlornly, and when I said no, he nearly burst into tears.

  There was nothing to be done, I decided, but sit back and wait. The cook had arrived, and I felt reasonably sure that if anybody could make a three-minute egg, it would be him. Sure enough, eight minutes later, the egg appeared. Actually, there were two of them. They sat small and lonely in a soup bowl the size of an army tureen. As I chased them round the bowl with a tiny teaspoon, my tousled waiter reappeared.

  ‘Drink?’ he offered hesitantly.

  ‘Beer?’ I replied hopefully.

  ‘Yus!’ said the waiter and came back with a lemon soda.

  ‘Is this man deaf?’ I asked a passing receptionist.

  ‘No,’ came the answer. ‘He is just not thinking very much.’

  An hour later we were back on the road. And what a long, long road it was. Even haunting Pintoo with my new roadmap and shouting repeated directions over his shoulder, we didn’t roll into Bhuj until midnight. Too late to get any food, and too late to get even the most basic of lodgings, I drank the last of my Black Panther rum and scrunched up on the back seat of the taxi, silently cursing Deepak as I slid into oblivion.

  The trip to Bhuj was, ironically, far more exciting than actually getting there. Upon waking, I made a quick reconnaissance of the town and came to one conclusion: I had just driven two days for absolutely nothing. A German buyer had just bought every scrap of old embroidery for miles around, and there was nothing left but tat.

  But I liked Bhuj. It was, even at cursory inspection, the most atmospheric town to which I’d even been, full of mediaeval charm and character. I would have liked to stay longer, but Pintoo had other ideas. He wasn’t feeling well, he said, and he wanted to go home. So we loaded up with more toilet rolls and sellotape (for the head beam) and set off back to Pushkar.

  Along the way my passenger window suddenly detached itself from its moorings and fell into the road. This happened, ironically, just as Pintoo was exalting his Ambassador taxi as being ‘positively the finest car in all the world.’ It took him ten minutes to retrieve the missing glass, then he couldn’t get back in the car again because the driver’s door was jammed.

  I didn’t hear any more about the Ambassador for the rest of the ride.

  We limped into Pushkar after dark, my head stuck in Pintoo’s lap as I tried to re-tape the erratic head beam, and Pintoo yelling ‘Bastard car!’ out the window at startled locals. This phrase, which he mimicked with uncanny accuracy, was the only new English he had learned throughout his time with me.

  I was finished. Totally exhausted. I collapsed onto my bed at the Palace Hotel and fell into a long, dreamless sleep.

  Back in Jaipur the next day, I braced myself and phoned up Spud in England – something I had been putting off ever since our fracas over Anita. This call took 50 minutes and cost an alarming £160. It only cost that much because I caught Spud at his stubborn, most obnoxious worst. All I wanted to know was whether he had put my delivery van in for service yet, since it was due for an inspection. There was a long pause at the other end of the telephone, then Spud asked, ‘Do you know what a full service involves?’

  I told him I didn’t care what it involved, I just needed one.

  There was an even longer pause before Spud tried again. ‘You don’t know what a full service involves, do you?’

  Sure enough, when I eventually got back to London, I found my van exactly where I’d left it. When I took it to the garage and had it serviced myself, the bill came to a lot less than it had cost to phone Spud from India and not get it done at all. I reckoned he had not got over his humiliation at the hands of Anita, so he hadn’t dared face the diminutive harpy again to ask for the van keys.

  On my last night in Jaipur, Girish drove me—with manic carelessness—to see a film entitled Prodigal Son. He said he wanted to take my mind off things. Gordhan had already described the movie to me as being ‘half good and half bad.’ When asked which half was good and which half was bad, he had replied, ‘The first half is half good and half bad, and the second half is half good and half bad.’ This was a problem, since Hindi films were so long that I could usually only endure the first half. But I didn’t want to miss the half-good bit of the second half, so I reconciled myself to seeing the whole film. All five hours of it.

  In the end, neither half had much to recommend it except that the villain couldn’t have been more villainous if he tried. Not only was he fat, greasy, and aggressive, but he didn’t go anywhere without a shotgun. He also carried around three other props: a cigarette drooping off his bottom lip, a pair of reflecting Raybans, and a snivelling lackey with bad teeth. What distinguished him from every other screen villain I had seen before was his appalling taste in clothes. His jackets were particularly nasty, progressing from garish Laura Ashley prints to nerve-jangling colour-clash geometric designs. I was fairly sure it was his dress sense, rather than any personal shortcomings, that finally drove the flute-playing hero to shove him off a cliff.

  On leaving the cinema, I asked Girish whether he had enjoyed the film. He shook his head doubtfully. ‘This one not last two weeks.’

  *

  My time in India was now up, and it was crunch time. I could no longer avoid Spud or Anita. I had to go home and make that fateful decision between the two of them.

  But in my absence, the decision had already been made. After spending ten long hours in a plane, every minute full of agonising and soul-searching, I stepped back into my house in Peckham and found three things: an empty wardrobe, a pair of hungry cats, and a ‘Dear John’ letter from Anita. Yes, she had decided to leave me. Not for the obvious reason – Spud – but because ‘I think I’m happier by myself. I just don’t have the talent for being half a couple.’ She wanted to be alone to resume her acting career, she wrote, and would I look after her pussies? The cats were no problem – I had come to love them dearly – but her abrupt departure most certainly was.

  ‘My only regret is that I might have hurt you,’ concluded the letter. ‘If I have, I’m truly sorry. But I think you are also a fairly self-contained type of person. Neither of us will be lonely, I’m sure of that.’

  I was not so sure. In our short time together, Anita had become a light in my life, a sweet but fragile companion, and I was really going to miss her.

  The only person happy with the news was Spud. He left me alone for a couple of days, just so as not to appear too happy, then he turned up with the following fax from Gordhan.

  I hope this finds you in a healthy and cheerful mood after your business tour. Also, I wish this day to be as happy and gay as a lily in May. We shall ship your jackets at our earliest possible!

  Spud and I laughed out loud, and in our laughter we were reconciled.

  Chapter 19

  Mister Order Cancel Man

  It was January 1995, and Spud had been in India for two weeks. His idea had been to fly ahead and ‘lay some groundwork’ so that when I arrived all our goods would be under production. Something told me it wouldn’t work out that way, but I had decided – a year or so down the line – to give Spud one last chance at buying. After all Spud had done for me, rescuing me from a lonely market stall and making me one of the biggest wholesalers in the UK, I figured he deserved that much.

  I had just settled into the Oberoi in Delhi and was watching a ‘best-dressed cow in Madras’ competition on TV, when Spud burst into my room.

  ‘It’s all done, mate!’ he proclaimed. ‘You’ve only got about two hours’ work in Pushkar, then you can have a holiday!’
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br />   He flung a load of orders and a bundle of mixed currency at me, and ran off to catch his plane back to England.

  The first rumblings I had that Spud’s attempt at solo buying in India had gone awry came three days later, when I arrived in Jaipur. Gordhan wasn’t happy with Spud, who had accused him of ‘running a circus, with Sharma and Rakesh as the chief clowns.’ The reason for his declaration was because Spud had ordered 2000 metres of block-print material to be made, and after two weeks Sharma and Rakesh had produced just twenty-four metres—all of it in the wrong print.

  ‘So much for “only two hours’ work and then you can have a holiday!”’ I sighed to myself. It would take me two hours just to calm Gordhan down, then to cancel Spud’s order.

  The trend continued in Pushkar, where Spud had dropped several more bombshells. I spent my first day there cancelling orders. The only order I didn’t cancel, even though I wanted to, was for 2000 Dennis the Menace T-shirts from Mendu. These had been made already, and Spud had ordered them in just one size: his own.

  ‘How many people you know in size like Spud?’ I asked.

  Mendu replied, ‘Not one possible!’

  I had no choice but to cancel Spud’s orders. Spud hadn’t left clear instructions, so the clothes hadn’t been made well. The worst offender by far was the short dungarees he’d dreamt up in some Delhi toilet. Satish had attempted a sample, but when he’d tried it on some hippy chick in the market, it looked like a pair of tie-dye incontinence pants. By the end of the day, I had cancelled all evidence of Spud’s ‘buying’ trip and resigned myself to starting again from scratch.