Rupee Millionaires Read online

  The next day, Tuesday, I drove lazily down to Taunton. Unlike Spud, who blitzed through at least six shops a day, I drifted into one, had a leisurely chat with the owners for an hour or two, shared a nice lunch with them, and only got round to talking business around 3pm.

  ‘At this rate,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ll be lucky to see six shops in a week!’

  Spud thought the same thing and was mad as hell. ‘If you got up earlier,’ he shouted down the phone, ‘you could squeeze in three shops before lunch! Why don’t you do what I do?’

  ‘Because I’m not an insomniac like you!’ I shouted back. ‘And anyway, I’m making more money from one shop than you do from six! Why don’t you spend more time with your customers? Then they might buy more from you!’

  On the Wednesday, I travelled from the West Country up to Wales and saw three shops in quick, pleasant succession.

  ‘In our business,’ I noted in my diary, ‘being liked by one’s customers is pretty important. Every shop I’ve seen so far has been ‘alternative’ and anti-establishment. They don’t like salesmen with suits and briefcases, or even ties. They like relaxed, non-pushy people who have obviously been to Asia and who dress down for the occasion. They don’t blink an eye when I turn up in a tie-dye hat or a grungy old pair of ripped jeans. They also like my mud-splattered van and for everything in it to be all over the place, not in nicely arranged plastic boxes. In short, they like to plunge into a chaos of stock and have a jolly good rummage. Something else they like—and Spud will never get his head round this one—is to chew the fat for at least an hour before even bringing up the subject of business. It’s a virtual family, this small band of new-age shops and their respective wholesalers, and it is important that we exchange lives and laughs, that they feel I’ve come just as much to see them as to sell them stuff. I’ve only met these people once, but already, because of the same “language” we speak, I can see them becoming long-term friends.’

  I liked Wales, so I stayed an extra day. I had been to university there, and I still fondly recalled its beautiful scenery and kindly inhabitants. For two years out of three it had rained, but in humour and disposition Wales reminded me of one other country: India.

  Even the Welsh police were nice. I got pulled over by a squad car that morning as I attempted to find my way to Swansea. They wanted to know what I was doing, driving at 80 miles an hour, rolling a fag with my elbows on the wheel, and looking at a map set between my legs instead of watching the road.

  ‘I’m lost,’ I told them haplessly. ‘Can you give me directions?’ To my surprise, they did.

  In Swansea, the shopkeeper, a dapper little gent named John, insisted I sing some Welsh hymns with him. In exchange, he bought exactly one hundred of everything he liked and nothing of what he didn’t like. The Welsh, I recalled, were fairly superstitious.

  John then put me on to a new shop, ‘Equinox’ in Tenby, to whom he himself wholesaled.

  ‘You’ll do well there, boyo,’ he informed me. ‘It’s a cracker. The biggest shop in Wales!’

  I limped into Tenby around dusk, my gearbox shot to pieces. Only the first and third gears were still intact, and I couldn’t find reverse. Megan and Philip, the owners of Equinox, were very helpful. While I rang the AA for assistance, they went through my van and bought practically all of its contents. Then, as the van was towed away to a nearby garage, they took me out for a slap-up meal and put me up overnight.

  The following morning, while my new gearbox was being fitted, my new friends gave me a guided tour of Tenby, a cosy little seaside spot with perhaps the best beach in Wales. One of the Georges (George the Third?) had converted this into a popular bathing spa in the 18th century, and it still retained many of its original features, including cobbled backstreets, pastel buildings, seafaring inns and quaint nook-and-cranny bookshops. It was easy to see why Equinox did so well. It was the biggest "alternative" shop in Wales, offering four floors of goodies from all around the world.

  There was no need to linger longer – I had nothing left to sell. So as soon as I got my van back from the garage, I returned to London without stopping. Along the way, I wondered what Spud was making such a fuss about. This wholesaling business was a piece of cake. All that was required, I reflected, was to work out what my customers wanted—which might include anything from doing their horoscopes to singing Gaelic hymns—and give it to them. It was an act—a performance if you like – but as long as I managed to stay cheerful and look interested throughout, they seemed to forget the recession and plied me with friendship and lots of money.

  Spud couldn’t believe the size of the cheques I brought home. Especially the massive cheque from Tenby. ‘You haven’t been selling on the cheap again, have you?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Of course not,’ I lied glibly. I lied because Spud couldn’t have taken the truth, which was that nobody liked either him or his high prices, and I had been giving generous discounts. Especially to ‘Equinox’ for paying up front, rather than waiting the standard thirty days. I was confident in the lie, too. Spud had lost patience with stocktaking. He no longer had any idea of what was in his van or what it was worth.

  But my lie promptly backfired. Spud whisked me off my beloved market stall in St Martin’s, replaced me with a cute little redhead named Anita, and sent me wholesaling fulltime. From then on, Spud only visited new shops once. After that, very shrewdly, he sent me in to ‘make friends’ with them.

  *

  A month or so later we were at Glastonbury, the biggest rock festival in England. Every freak, hippy, groupie, and eco-warrior in the country came to this place in June to rock on, space out, and jump up and down to bands they couldn’t remember in the morning. We had pitched here, Spud and I, twice before, but this time we had come to wholesale to other stalls who couldn’t afford, in the current economic climate, to go to India themselves.

  This particular Glastonbury, ironically, spelt the beginning of the end of our partnership. We were at the peak of our powers, at the very top of our game. We had seventeen market stalls in and around London, were wholesaling to hundreds of shops nationwide, doing all the major festivals, and presenting at the most prestigious shows and fairs. We had become rupee millionaires several times over, and Spud speculated that we were single-handedly setting the youth fashion for the whole of the UK.

  It was too good to last, and it began to fall apart for the most trivial of reasons.

  We had finished our business, attended to all our customers in the Green Field, and I was bored. I gathered up a pile of useless trinkets, mainly cheap bead bracelets, and threw down a blanket at the entrance to the main Pyramid stage. Here, donning a headscarf and a ratty old T-shirt, I posed as an itinerant hippy and began fly-pitching.

  Business was slow to start with. I’d never sold to the masses before and felt intimidated with the process, but it picked up massively with the arrival of Dwell. Dwell was a freak in every sense of the word. He was extremely stoned, he wore nothing but a loincloth, and he had covered himself in ash and mud in order to look like a tree. His deal was a wheelbarrow full of melons which he had purchased somewhere for fifty pence each. He cut each melon into sixteen pieces and sold each piece for a quid.

  ‘So what’s with the name?’ I asked, making room for him on my blanket.

  ‘Iss my name, innit.’

  ‘No, why do you call yourself Dwell?’

  There was a long pause, as Dwell considered the question. ‘Because that’s what I do, man,’ he said at last. ‘Dwell!’

  Over the next hour, as the sun rose high in the sky and everyone became melon (and trinket) happy, Dwell and I filled our pockets with more cash, booze, and drugs than we knew what to do with.

  Then a couple of security guards came over. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ warned the first. ‘If you’re still here when we come back, we’ll confiscate your stuff.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the second with a wink. ‘But give us a melon to slow us up a bit.’
r />   An hour later they were back. This time there was no discussion. They ripped up my blanket with its few remaining trinkets inside, and marched off with it.

  ‘Please don’t take that, man!’ I moaned after them. ‘That’s all I got left in the world!’

  Dwell and I exchanged a secret smirk. I had a whole vanload of stuff left, if I cared to use it, and he had a back-up wheelbarrow full of melons.

  Returning to the van, glowing with triumph, I found Spud unexpectedly miffed. ‘Anyone can do that!’ snorted Spud. ‘Watch and learn!’

  With that he vanished, his bald pate covered in a rasta wig of rainbow string chokers. He was gone a long time too, as he tried to sell the chokers off his head for £5 each. But nobody wanted them - he was too pushy, the price was too high – and he returned in a major sulk. In his mind, he was the salesman, not me. And he had just been shown up as a rank amateur.

  To put things right, to show me who was boss, he ‘accidentally’ locked me in the van that night, forcing me to piss into two empty beer cans. The following morning, shortly after I was released, I was horrified to see two drunks fighting over those two cans, thinking they were fresh lager.

  As the sun came up, and the wheel of karma turned, Spud found himself equally horrified. The van was now surrounded by a field full of cats, vegetarians, and astrologers, the three things he hated most in the world. One particular couple sitting just below the van finally pushed him over the edge.

  ‘My cat’s a vegetarian!’ remarked one of them, to which the other replied, ‘That’s nothing. My cat’s an Aquarian vegetarian. He’s born the same day as Ronald Reagan!’

  ‘That’s it!’ declared Spud and stormed off to the bridge below the Green Field to score some drugs. He returned soon after with a big smile on his face and an even bigger rock of cocaine between his teeth. That was the first time I saw Spud do drugs.

  It was the stress, I guessed, the non-stop grind of work and business, that was getting to him. Plus the growing realisation that pots of money hadn’t made him the babe magnet he had expected. He was a rupee millionaire, sure, but still no woman liked him.

  Spud was due a trip back to India. He needed to see a country where people could be happy with no money just to restore his perspective. But sending him there was easier said than done. He didn’t want to go.

  ‘You fly ahead,’ he told me, ‘and I’ll follow on in a week or so.’

  I should have questioned his motives, but I didn’t and that was a bad mistake.

  Little did I know it, but Spud was starting to crack up.

  Chapter 14

  The Pushkar Posse

  I flew back to Delhi on 10th September 1993. It was the tail-end of the monsoons, and while the temperature was only 25 degrees, it was still very humid. The sultry weather matched my mood. Just before flying, Spud – still smarting from his humiliation at Glastonbury – had suddenly turned on me.

  ‘What the fuck are these?’ he demanded with a sneer, poking with distaste at the five hundred dolki bags that had just arrived from India.

  ‘They’re dolki bags,’ I replied. ‘You wear them as shoulder bags. And look, there’s a drawstring at the top with tinkly bells on it. All the kids wear them in Pushkar.’

  Spud gave a hollow laugh. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘and I suppose they’ll “go a bomb” at our markets. Just like those three hundred floppy hats you bought last year, the ones which are still sitting in my closet!’

  I was confused. Spud had never questioned my buying decisions before. It was an unspoken rule that I was in charge of the buying and he of the selling. Even when the damn dolki bags had sold, the day before I flew, they remained the subject of barbed and sarcastic comments.

  ‘How much did you punt them out for?’ Spud asked, glaring. ‘Tuppence each?’

  I let that one go with difficulty. Spud couldn’t help it, I reasoned to myself. The business was escalating so fast he was hardly sleeping at all. And the more he drove himself, the more grumpy and bad-tempered he was becoming. Little things were getting to him—little things like the dolki bags—and they were assuming disproportionate importance. But I was rapidly running out of excuses for Spud. One day soon the tightly stretched elastic of my patience would just snap.

  I was a careful buyer. I knew the way forward was beads – cheap Tibetan beads. That’s what had had sold so well during my first year on the markets. That was also what had netted me over a grand at Glastonbury.

  Without telling Spud, who was conveniently absent, I stopped in Delhi at the bead centre of the capital: the Old Tibetan Market of Janpath. Here I found my old friend, Pema, working in a shop called Tibetan Arts. Always calm and serene, his round moon face fixed in a beatific smile, Pema was the most laidback person I had ever met. He was wholly unflappable. Even when I laid five grand worth of rupees on him and said, ‘Can you make me 20,000 bead pieces in ten days?’ he barely twitched a muscle.

  ‘I will make it,’ he said, then returned to contemplating the cockroach on his desk.

  My business complete, I returned to my hotel and dashed off a letter to Spud, telling him to truck this massive order of beads to Jaipur when he finally flew in from England.

  ‘Don’t take the bus,’ I wrote urgently. ‘There’s far too much of it, and they won’t let you on.’

  I was speaking from experience. A few trips earlier I had tried to stuff the entire back boot of the bus to Jaipur with something like three thousand of Pema’s bone bracelets. That hadn’t worked. There hadn’t been room for anyone else’s luggage.

  The following morning I travelled down to Paharganj to meet up with American George, who was hanging out at the dingy but friendly Major’s Den. The Major’s Den was located just off Main Bazar and was run by a genial old gentleman whom everyone—including his much younger wife—simply referred to as “the Major.” George liked the Den because it was cheap, clean, and full of young hippy chicks to whom he could play his ukulele.

  Despite his strict army training, the Major was tolerance incarnate. George was allowed to drink, smoke blow, and entertain girls as much as he liked, without the slightest reproach. This was partly because the Major liked Americans, but mainly because George fussed endlessly over the old man’s baby daughter, who had been born—much to the Major’s surprise—after twenty years of marriage …and with him just planning on a wheelchair.

  When I arrived the Major was sitting outside his lodge, his daughter on one knee and the Times of India on the other. He was wearing his familiar blue blazer and ironed slacks, and he peered at me quizzically through his thick spectacles until recognition dawned.

  ‘Ah, my good chap!’ he croaked benignly. ‘How good to see you! Mister George is on the roof.’

  Mister George was indeed on the roof, and he had a new friend: an impish little ruffian named Lal, whom George had plucked out of an alleyway off Janpath. Lal was seven years old, and his parents were dead. The little boy spent his working days crouched between two taxi cabs outside Palika Bazar, shovelling dollops of green slime onto the shiny new shoes of passing tourists so that his chum, located twenty yards further up the road, could charge them ten rupees for a shoeshine. It really was a great scam, and George had brought Lal up here so he could write a song about it. Fortunately, it was a very short song: ‘Lal is my pal, but check your shoes, for doggy doos …’

  The next day, George and I rode a deluxe bus bound for Pushkar. I had suggested a taxi instead, but George had been outraged at the idea.

  ‘No way!’ he’d howled petulantly. ‘Going down National Highway number 8 in a taxi is equivalent to a speck of dust trying to get through an asteroid belt!’

  He had a point. Highway 8 was the most dangerous stretch of road in India – over 1000 kilometres of dead straight tarmac, all the way from Delhi to Bombay, with all three lanes occupied by speed-crazed lorries trying to overtake each other. Most taxis spent half their time bouncing along the hard shoulder, hoping to get access to the actual highway.

 
While George fell asleep in the back of the bus, I examined his outfit, noting that my strange American friend had now got his ‘world traveller’ apparel down to a fine art. His compact munchkin figure wore a short-cropped jeans jacket from Nepal over a ratty pink T-shirt he’d picked up in Bangkok which was decorated with the simple message, ‘Fuck You.’ Beneath a pair of worn out, fashionably torn Levis from Dharamsala poked a brace of dusty hiking boots obtained second-hand from a hill porter in Manali. All this was topped by an expandable Afghani hat, into which he tucked his long, matted dreadlocks.

  As for his bespectacled features, these were rendered quite dwarfish by a wispy little beard, cut short at the cheeks and running wild below the chin. A glittering array of chunky ethnic rings adorned each finger. He actually had an extra one—fortunately out of sight—which had been inserted into his penis during his last foray into Paharganj. Around his neck hung a final touch: a valuable Zzi-bead necklace purchased from a Tibetan family in Ladakh for the considerable sum of 1600 dollars. Nobody looking at him would have guessed that this was the foremost wholesaler of hippy goods into America.

  For the next six hours George was totally comatose. Having pulled out his bus ticket so it protruded slightly from the top pocket of his jacket—thus preventing the conductor from waking him—he propped himself up so his head rested on a three-kilo bag of silver he’d bought in Delhi. A beatific smile played across his lips, suggestive of a pleasant end to his night with the silent Norwegian.

  When he finally came to, five minutes from Jaipur, he made a profound (for him) comment. ‘You’re much more fun on your own, Frank. Why don’t you dump that motherfucker?’

  ‘Who? You mean Spud?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean Spud. You’ve been bitching and complaining about him ever since we hooked up. Why don’t you just cut him loose?’

  It was a good question, and one for which I had no easy answer.

  ‘Well, there’s two things,’ I said at last. ‘First, he’s the driving force behind my business. Without him, I’d still be sitting on a market stall selling nose-studs. Second, and more importantly, he knows where I live.’