Rupee Millionaires Read online

  Four years on, and I had written guides to not just India, but half of Asia too. I was now 35, and my mother was putting pressure on me to ‘get a proper job’, since I had never had more than £400 in the bank. That was when the business thing, the market stall, happened.

  And it happened in the most peculiar way.

  Chapter 4

  Market Days

  It was a warm spring day in 1989, and I was sitting on the lawn of the Megh Niwas Hotel in Jaipur, talking to my old friend, Colonel Fateh Singh, the genial proprietor. I had been introduced to the Colonel a few years before by “Bubbles”, the Maharajah of Jodhpur. The three of us had played nine holes of golf out in the desert, each shot played off a small, square piece of green lawn produced from Bubbles’s filing cabinet. Tall, balding, and irrepressibly jovial, Fateh had brought two bottles of whisky along with his golf clubs. None of us finished the game.

  I was telling the Colonel about my very first day in India in 1985. I had been stuck on a traffic island in the middle of a busy Delhi thoroughfare, too scared to cross the road. Out of nowhere appeared a thin, dapper little Sikh dressed in an immaculate black suit and carrying a matching sleek briefcase. He looked me up and down, then, with no preamble at all, politely enquired:

  ‘And sir, what is your purpose in life?’

  I hadn’t known what to say, so just stuttered, ‘Erm … to cross this road?’

  Hearing this, my new ‘friend’ grabbed my arm and ushered me, like a tiny turbaned sat-nav, through the maelstrom of traffic until we reached the other side. From there I walked alone to the safety of my digs at the YMCA, considering the little man’s words with every step.

  ‘The whole way back,’ I told the Colonel, ‘I kept asking myself, “What is my purpose in life? What am I doing here?” You see, I came to India with one idea: to check out the birthplace of Buddhism. But right from the get-go, all everyone wanted was either to buy my watch and walkman, or to sell me something!’

  The Colonel laughed, eyes twinkling. ‘Yes, we Indians like to do business. It is in our blood. It is the key to our soul. You should try business, Frank! It would be a most spiritual experience!’

  That is how it started. One minute I was a struggling travel writer with five guides in print but not enough money to pay the rent. In the next I was checking out semi-precious stones with the Colonel in Jaipur’s seedy Johari Bazar.

  ‘Buy my packet! Buy my packet!’ shouted a throng of grimy gem cutters, climbing over themselves to sell me stones they had smuggled out in their mouths or under their armpits during their lunch breaks.

  I was mesmerised. ‘What a buzz!’ I shouted to the Colonel. ‘Spiritual or not, I was born to do this!’

  I couldn’t have set up shop at a better time. It was the start of the yuppie ’90s, and Maggie Thatcher was encouraging new businesses through her popular Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I applied for it without much hope—after all, I looked like a hippy and my work c.v. was one long catalogue of disaster—but I figured it was worth a shot. In my experience, when I really wanted something, I always performed well. So I got a haircut, shook the mothballs out of my one and only suit, and spoke like a toff to the powers-that-be. It worked. I was given a bank loan of £3000 and a weekly stipend of £40 to get myself going. And I spent it all on silver jewellery handpicked by the Colonel in India. Six months down the line, when the Scheme called me into its offices to see how I was doing, I brought the whole place to a standstill by selling trinkets hand-over-fist to bored secretaries. That was when I knew I had it made.

  Shy and solitary by nature, I blossomed as a market trader. I had my mother to thank for that. She didn’t approve of my new vocation (‘You don’t want to be a barrow boy all your life!’) or my repeated visits to India (‘What’s with the earring and the hippy scarf?’) or my girlfriends (‘Where did you find this one—on a beach in Goa?’), but while she was short on praise, she was unstinting in her support, no matter what I decided to do.

  So it was, one wintry day in 1989, that she helped set up my very first market stall in St Martin’s. It didn’t look like much at first—a bare 6 x 4 table with a rainproof awning—but she waved me out of the way and quickly arranged it into something reminiscent of an oriental boudoir. She set a neat pile of exotic cushions in one corner and a tempting array of glittering jewellery in the other, then hung a colourful portrait of a Chinese dragon as a striking backdrop. I stood timidly behind the table as she set things in motion, storming into the stream of pedestrians and tackling passers-by. I watched in silent awe as she stopped them dead in their tracks, barraging them with stream-of-consciousness inquisitions about their lives, hopes, and dreams, generally making them feel like the most important people on God’s earth.

  Her charm was irresistible. Nobody she spoke to ever left without buying something, and by the end of the day the stall was virtually empty. It had been amazing, seeing her in action, like watching a hypnotist at work. And what she taught me was this: you can sell anyone just about anything if you talk long enough, and if you take a real interest in their lives.

  My mother was entirely wasted as a housewife. She should have been an estate agent or a stockbroker.

  My first year was a grind. I had never really lost the tall, thin physique which had attracted so much negative attention back in school, and with this new business enterprise I grew leaner still. Even my hair thinned, so I took to wearing a bandana. But I was determined. I travelled to India six times that year, doubling my stock on each occasion and lugging everything home by hand. On my final visit I gambled everything I had on a good Christmas and ended up overextending myself, turning up at Delhi airport with no fewer than seventeen suitcases of clothes, crafts, and jewellery. I stared at the bags, almost overwhelmed with despair. I’ll never get this lot through! I despaired, but then the Air India check-in lady beckoned me over.

  ‘Are you on this flight?’ she enquired. When I nodded unhappily she asked, ‘How many bags do you have?’

  I pointed at the three bags standing in plain sight, then—very reluctantly—indicated the long line of bags placed strategically out of sight. She asked what they contained, and I lied. I said they belonged to a sick girlfriend in a Delhi hotel, and they contained rock samples for her forthcoming archaeological project.

  Her expression brightened. ‘Well, you are fortunate!’ she exclaimed. ‘Today is lucky day, the festival of our Independence!’ She gave a complicit wink, labelled all seventeen bags “Fragile”, and sent them through.

  My gamble paid off. Every other vendor in the market had bought stock from London wholesalers, forcing them to charge a lot more for their merchandise. Not one had been able to compete with my prices. Having made no profit all year long, I found myself on Christmas Eve with £10,000 in my pockets. I had worked, slept, and breathed on my stall for three weeks solid, leaving me tired but triumphant.

  Life on a market stall was however no picnic. Even I had my good days and my bad days. And for every good day—when I might sell a £100 bedspread or a £50 marble chess-set—there were far more bad days. Days when it rained down in sheets and I sold one backpack for £5, not even enough to cover the rent of my table. Getting up every morning at 6am was yet another drag. Sometimes I was so tired that by the time I’d finished putting up my stall, it was time to start taking it all down again. Then there were the customers, who ranged from the kind and enthusiastic to the downright tedious. The most tedious, in my experience, were the beach freaks from Goa who lit up bongs on my stall and complained about the price of my nose studs.

  ‘One pound for a nose stud?’ they whined. ‘What a rip-off, man! They only cost ten pee in Goa!’

  ‘Go back to Goa then!’ I snarled in reply. ‘And put that pipe away. We’re not in India!’

  I got ripped off from time to time, too. One enthusiastic woman with a shop in Bournemouth liked my Tibetan bone bracelets so much she ordered eight hundred of them. It was only after I’d lugged them all the way home from Delhi th
at she decided to buy only fifty, saying she’d take the rest ‘later on.’

  At first I was distraught, having so much money tied up in unwanted trinkets, but I soon turned the situation to my advantage. I displayed a single bracelet on my table and placed a “Not for Sale” sticker on it. The next day a busload of American students turned up and were drawn like iron filings to a magnet. When they asked why the bracelet was not for sale, I shrugged with apology.

  ‘It’s my lucky bracelet,’ I told them. ‘It’s been personally blessed by the Dalai Lama, and it protects my stall. I couldn’t possibly sell it.’

  Of course after that, they all wanted one—at any price. I waited until the bidding went crazy, then I sighed with dramatic resignation. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ I said. ‘There’s a Tibetan lama in town, and he might have some more for sale.’

  Come back they did, and I offloaded one hundred bracelets in an hour—at 20 dollars apiece. In the weeks that followed, word got around. Further busloads of Americans arrived, and all seven hundred and fifty bracelets were snapped up. I made a real killing on that one. And when the shop lady from Bournemouth rang up for the rest of her order—some six months later—I cheerily informed her, ‘They’re all gone. So sorry!’

  It may not have been entirely ethical, but I didn’t feel bad about telling the odd ‘story.’ As long as my customers were happy, I didn’t see anything wrong with stretching the truth to make a sale. Besides, there were plenty of other traders around with far fewer scruples—and far sharper teeth. Ruthless traders like the Petrovs who were looking way beyond St Martin’s to expand their businesses. A new decade was dawning, and as London’s banks and stock markets started filling with young entrepreneurs known as ‘yuppies,’ a completely different kind of wheeler-dealer – the world traveller merchant adventurer – was emerging on the other side of the world, in India.

  At the end of 1990 the tiny dot in the Rajasthan desert that had been Pushkar suddenly became the small business hub of the Asian world. No one knew why it happened or who started it, but this once sleepy hippy resort, my favourite place in all India, began trucking in vast quantities of second-hand sarees from Bombay and making them into cheap, funky clothing. The profit margins, for anyone with a market stall or a shop back in the West, were huge and traders from all over – the US, Canada, Germany, Israel and France – were soon pouring in to place large orders. The whole town was instantly transformed into a Mecca of multi-national mass production and the so-called ‘saree wars’ of 1991/92 kicked off.

  Chapter 5

  Life with Spud

  I knew I was onto a good thing when I put my first rail of silk tops out for sale. The refashioned sarees had cost me twenty pence each, and they all flew off my table in one day for £5 apiece. I couldn’t believe it. A quick mental calculation showed 2000 per cent profit on each top. I immediately booked a flight back to India.

  Then my luck ran out. When I returned to my market a week later, six large cases of silk in tow, I discovered it wasn’t my market anymore. The Petrovs were in town and so was their silk. There was also a new guy on the stall next to me, selling jewellery. This was Spud. And the very first words Spud said to me were, ‘I think you’re screwed, mate. You need a partner.’

  I shook my head. ‘No thanks.’ After all, I was doing just fine on my own.

  At the same time, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by my new neighbour. The guy appeared to be totally fearless. And for some reason I couldn’t fathom, he spent more time under his table, polishing his silver and sorting out stock, than above it. In fact, he only surfaced when he heard a customer approach—rather like a small, hairy spider, hiding in wait for his prey. The only place he was not hairy, I noted with amusement, was his head, which was entirely bald. His whole appearance was such that when he did pop out from under his table, anyone who happened to be standing there was panicked into an immediate purchase.

  ‘Competition is good,’ declared Spud, and he knew what he was talking about. Every day or so, shortly after facing down Viktor, Spud strolled up to Ivan’s stall in Covent Garden and checked out his prices, which rose all the time. A silk saree dress, for instance, shot up from £7 to £15 in just one week. Spud adjusted his prices accordingly, and everybody was happy. The only person not happy was the taxman, who saw hardly any of the profits. Ironically, the enterprise allowance scheme Ms. Thatcher had set up the likes of Spud and me had failed to account for one thing: market traders, unlike shops, had no cash tills to ring through sales. Most of the money we made went straight into our pockets.

  It didn’t stay there long, though. At Spud’s insistence nearly all of it went straight back into stock. ‘Stock is power!’ stated Spud importantly, and he gutted his whole house to accommodate it. He then handed me three grand—his half of our initial investment—and sent me straight back to India to buy as much silk as possible.

  Spud wanted to become a rupee millionaire. He figured that if he had a million rupees—about £20,000—everyone would forget he was a small, fat, bald plumber from Peckham, and scores of nubile women would flock to his cash and shag him senseless.

  One can tell a lot about a man by his heroes. Spud’s heroes were John Belushi, Suggs from “Madness” and, in particular, Alexei Sayle. That’s right – three crazy comedians. But Spud wasn’t actually crazy. He was just crazed. That’s why I took him on as a partner. Nobody messed with Spud, not even vegetarians. A hard-line vegetarian appeared at his stall one day and pointed with disgust at the stream of oily burger grease running down his chin.

  ‘Uuurr!’ she complained. ‘Don’t you know that meat is murder?’

  ‘Meat may be murder,’ he snapped back, shoving the burger in her face, ‘but veg is TOR-TURE!’

  *

  I heard later that Spud’s sister, who had bequeathed him her stall, advised him against going into partnership with me.

  ‘That Frank is a lone wolf,’ she cautioned her brother. ‘I don’t think he does partners.’

  But Spud thought otherwise. In the short while before the Petrovs showed up, he had watched me at work and had been impressed.

  ‘This guy is like a crocodile,’ he’d told someone. ‘He sleepwalks his way into work, lures his customers to his table with inconsequential chatter, then snap! He suddenly wakes up to make that crucial sale. I could use him!’

  On the surface, Spud and I were the original odd couple: one small, brash, and belligerent; the other tall, polite, and absent-minded. We were in fact such polar opposites, both physically and temperamentally, that nobody thought we could work together.

  But work together we did. In later years, when I saw a film called The Big Lebowski, I would recognize myself in the ‘Dude’ – calm, laidback, empathic – and Spud in the Dude’s best friend, Walter – violently proactive, anal, socially dysfunctional. In short, although we couldn’t have been more different, Spud and I perfectly complemented each other. When style and tact were required, I stepped in. When threats and bullying were called for, it was Spud’s turn. It was, in effect, the ideal business marriage.

  At least...to start with.

  My only criticism of Spud, apart from his talent for crashing into people’s lives, was that Spud didn’t want my friendship. He enjoyed my company well enough, respected my ability to get things done through charm and humour, but he held me at arm’s length. I, on the other hand, was interested in just about everybody. Sure, that was partly because being personable sold more stuff, but deep down, the main reason was that I wanted everybody to like me. Ultra-sensitive and raised on criticism, I made a point of doing everything possible to put other people at their ease using praise, flattery, and compliments.

  It was difficult for me to accept Spud’s rejection of friendship, but the problem was entirely his. He was emotionally shut down. Not even once did he ask, ‘How are you?’ or ‘Can I be of help?’ And it wasn’t just with me. He didn’t seem interested in anybody, which is why I found Spud, the ultimate social nightmare, so baffling.
How could he block out the rest of humanity and be such a moon-blank face, when I could not imagine stepping out my front door without greeting the neighbours?

  By the end of our first week together, I had all but given up on solving the mystery of Spud. Imagine my surprise then when a short, chubby lady turned up at my stall one day, asking for Spud.

  ‘I’m Lou, his ex-wife,’ she informed me, ‘and I’ve come for my divorce settlement.’

  I looked her up and down, and decided that she looked exactly like Spud, but with a yellow wig. ‘He’s out to lunch,’ I replied, ‘but can I be of help? I’m his new partner.’

  Lou made to leave, then turned back. ‘It’s none of my business,’ she said quietly, ‘but do you know what you’re getting yourself into? I spent two years with that nutter. The minute we got married he turned all cold and hostile on me. All I wanted was kids, and he kept putting me off, saying, “You’re too fat, girl! Lose some weight!” Me fat!’ She blew a dismissive snort through her nose. ‘He should’ve looked in the mirror! Give him a message, will you? Tell him I’m over the disease he brought home from that prostitute, thanks very much, and I’ve got a kid by a new man now. So cough up some cash, or I’m taking him to court!’

  I felt sorry for Lou and confronted Spud with her demands, but he just laughed. ‘She’ll be lucky. I’m not paying that bitch a red cent!’

  One thing about me bothered Spud, and he made sure I knew it. He didn’t like being hugged. This was bad for him since I—the only child of a doting mother—was used to hugging everything, be it human, animal, or invertebrate. Spud didn’t mind this tactile bonhomie when it came to our customers – they seemed to love being cuddled and called ‘darlin’ and ‘pet’ and ‘mate’ all the time, so it was good for business – but he himself hated it. He hated even being touched, Lou told me later. Nobody in his family had hugged each other. It was a sissy thing, a weakness, and he had only got this far in life (apparently) by not hugging anyone. Once, and only once, I’d tried to get close, saying: ‘Don’t you want to be friends then?’ And Spud had snapped back: ‘Fuck off! I don’t want to be “known”. I want to be an enigma!’ The hugging stopped.