Corporate Carnival (6 page)

Nevertheless, the meetings continued and, if nothing else, it gave the secretaries of the heads a sense of importance. They took immense pleasure in informing callers that their calls could not be returned by their boss as he or she would be in a series of meetings all day.

While nothing much changed at the grassroots level or in the well-enmeshed bureaucracy across departments, our considerably better standing with CEO Fergs helped us win approval for four more private bankers to join. They were in place in a few days, which goes to show how easy it was to cut through red tape once the CEO had signed off on a document. The entire circus at AbAd revolved around pleasing the CEO. So there we were, more than twice our strength almost overnight. Who would have thought that a seemingly small matter of getting together a few guys for the chairman’s event would yield such positive results? The new members of the team were Rachel, Harry, Gavaskar and Omar. Harry Bauffeurhaugham (pronounced Boffam) was an Oxford boy, tall, well-built and usually serious. He was a former colleague of ours from Myers, a man of few words and a fitness freak. He was the type of Brit one associates with the likes of Alistair Cook rather than, say, Graeme Swann. There was a time when Rachel and another former colleague Melissa vied for Harry’s attention, but now Rachel seemed to be happily teamed up with her scientist fiancé.

For young Gavaskar it was a homecoming, in a sense. For the last two years he had been working with a sheikh in Abu Dhabi, after he was sacked from Abbott (prior to the merger) at Nathan’s behest. The finance head had apparently been scrounging around Gavas’s desk and had discovered in his wastebasket a caricature that Gavas had drawn of him. He insisted that Gavas be fired. Getting him back in a second time was not easy but once Fergs okayed it, Nathan timidly buckled down.

And that wasn’t the first time Gavas was fired. At his first job at an American bank in Abu Dhabi several years ago, he had been asked to leave after a very senior diplomat made a sarcastic remark about him to the head of retail. What happened was that Gavas had presented the gentleman with a diary. Just the previous week, Gavaskar’s Dubai-based colleague had presented the diplomat’s junior in Dubai with a similar diary but with his name embossed in golden letters. The senior diplomat had noticed his junior colleague’s diary during a visit to Dubai. He himself had been presented with one
without
the gold embellishment. He considered this not just a personal affront but something in the nature of a breach of protocol. He called the top man at the bank and gave him a piece of his mind. The next day, young Gavas was given marching orders.

Of course, we had no doubts about Gavas’s ability to bring in clients and mesh well with the team. He had been sacked twice before the age of twenty-six but according to us, he had just been plain unlucky. If anything, his little scrap with Nathan endeared him to us. He was an interesting character, prone to talking philosophy and always tending to fast. He fasted on Monday for one reason, on Thursday for another. He fasted for nine days during Navratri and did not eat dinner, ever. It was not good to eat after the sun set, he claimed. That was how the yogis of ancient India lived till they were a hundred and twenty. All in all, a very likeable guy but one who sometimes made you feel fat, flabby and unspiritual.

Omar Kazmi was a Pakistani; suave, friendly and impeccably dressed. He joined us from HSBC, where he had worked for several years, focussing mainly on the Pakistani and expatriate Pakistani segment. He had a few Indian accounts as well. He was very brand-conscious – everything he wore and used, from his shirts, pens and glasses to his socks and probably even underwear, was a well-known brand.

The winds were clearly blowing in our favour. I recalled something a colleague told me soon after I joined. ‘In this bank,’ he had said, ‘it is difficult to simply put your head down and work. There are different camps and you have to commit yourself to one of them. Camps either win or lose. If you are on the winning side, you prosper. If not, you wither and die.’

It wasn’t just the camps. I had also noticed that at the senior levels, almost every email sent out had two meanings. One would be obvious and the other hidden, its meaning clear only to the one concerned. Every email that had the potential to boost oneself or nail someone’s folly, snigger at someone or demoralize another was suitably cc’ed or bcc’ed to the appropriate persons. At Myers, it was considered poor email etiquette to bcc anyone. Here, I suspected, more emails were bcc’ed than not. It was as if the sender took perverse delight in doing so. Business remained firmly on the backburner. As Shakespeare might have put it, what held centre-stage were ‘treason, strategems and spoils’.

7

Pati, Patni and Vow

I
pushed Minnie Mouse’s nose and Kitch came to the door. On the dining table was a map of Karnataka that Kitch had been poring over.

‘Kitch, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’

‘Yes, machan?’ he said distractedly.

Kitch was planning a short trip to Chennai to see his folks and check on the restaurants. A friend had suggested he go across to neighbouring Karnataka. He knew a godman there, a rich guy called Putla Baba who, Kitch had been assured, would be keen on an off-shore account with a large European bank like ours.

He looked up at me. ‘Don’t tell me to remove that L-O-V-E photograph from the wall. Galiya has moved it to the living room because she wants people to see it. She loves that picture.’

‘No, no! Not that. She can make a wallpaper of it, if it makes her happy. I’ll just turn the other way. Er… it’s about Andy and that young girl he brought with him the other day.’

‘What about her?’

‘Well, I mean, who
is
she? Is there anything you and I need to do? Your folks have left him under our care, haven’t they? So…’

Kitch folded the map and scribbled down some names. He looked at me and grinned. ‘She is a waitress.’

‘A waitress!’

‘Yes,’ he said with affected nonchalance. ‘At a pizza place. With every bite of pizza, his love for her grew. Such an idiot he is. But there is nothing to worry about. Here he is in person. Let him tell you the story himself.’

‘What story?’ asked Andy, who had just entered the room. ‘Oh,
that
!’ he said, guessing correctly, probably from the bemused look on my face. ‘It’s okay, Jai anna. That’s off!’

‘Off! I thought it had just started. Have you left her already?’

‘Actually, no.
She
left me!’

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’

‘It’s okay. But it wasn’t really my fault. Hazel’s sister looks so much like her and, well, you know, many of them look alike, anyway. Besides, they share the same apartment. It was an honest mistake.’

My heart turned a somersault. ‘You mean you flirted with her sister thinking it was her?’

‘It was more than flirting, actually.’

‘Good heavens! B-b-but, this is… this is terrible. I mean, didn’t the sister try to stop you or anything?’

‘No!’ he said with feeling. ‘That’s the thing. She found it all very funny. But Hazel didn’t. So she chucked me.’

‘Good lord!’ I said, shocked to the core and trying hard to digest this piece of news. But I recovered quickly enough. With Andy, one had to. ‘Well, don’t worry about it, mate,’ I told him. I didn’t want the lad to fret and pine. ‘Maybe it’s all for the best.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ he said with a dismissive shrug. ‘I should have stuck to Svetlana right from the start. Anyway, we are back together now. She is Russian. She’s really nice.’ He walked into the kitchen even as Kitch and I stared at each other, aghast. Kitch buried his face in his map. Suddenly the nonchalance was gone.

A week later, I was back in Kenya on a two-day trip, again with Mina. This time it was to attend her cousin’s wedding and also to meet Madan Dodhia, another client of mine from Myers. Kitch and Galiya decided to take a short break and come with us to check out the African wildlife.

Dodhia had shifted from Kisumu to Nairobi, after starting a real estate development project there. He still went over to Kisumu on weekends. We had a good meeting at his house, laughing as we talked about the old days and recalled a conversation we once had about Barack Obama.

I first heard of Obama – in early 2007, I think it was – from Dodhia’s African driver and I had genuinely believed the man was off his rocker when he mumbled something about a man from the Kisumu region becoming the President of the United States.

‘Do you know, Jai bhai, the first time Obama came here, he actually went from Nairobi to Kisumu by matatu
,
public bus, can you believe it!’ Dodhia gushed. ‘Of course, in those days he was just a young man trying to find his roots, nothing more. I think that was 1988. When he came back many years later as a senator, things were so different. I shudder to think what will happen if he comes now as President. The entire country will come to a standstill.’

Dodhia’s Kenyan wife walked in just then. She looked at me through half open eyes, creased her forehead and then smiled. She had a lovely smile, like in a toothpaste advertisement. ‘You’re from the
baank
!’ she said in her East African accent. ‘Welcome
baack
!’ She placed two plates of samosas on the table. ‘These are mariakani,’ she said, pointing to one plate, ‘and these are lamb. I get you some tea.’ She flashed her million-watt smile at me again and went into the kitchen. Her bum left a few seconds later. She had the biggest bum I’d ever seen.

On the wall separating the room from the kitchen, I saw a large framed photograph of Amitabh Bachchan with somebody. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘That is a superstar from Hindi films. His name is Bachchan.’

‘I know that! I was asking about the other guy.’

Dodhia laughed. ‘That is one of my best friends. He went into partnership with Mr Bachchan on some media business, a TV channel it was. But it didn’t do too well and they had to sell it off. If only he had hung onto it, it would have been worth well over a hundred million dollars today. But my friend is making a film now, along with my son Chimpu. Some Bollywood movie… I forget the name. They want to launch a film with umm… oh yes, Mahadevan.’

‘Mahadevan? Shankar Mahadevan, you mean?’

‘Yes, yes, he is a south Indian star in Bollywood.’

‘But he is a music director,’ I said. ‘He must be composing the music for the film.’

Dodhia looked confused. ‘I’m sure he is acting in it,’ he said. ‘My son told me he is. Maybe he is doing both. These guys like to do different things, you know. They are very creative. I don’t know anything about films but my son is very interested.’

That evening Mina and I were at the Oshwal Centre with our relatives, serving food to our guests. It is a custom at Gujarati weddings for the guests to be served by family members rather than waiters. It was the reception of Mina’s cousin, a Gujarati Patel girl who was marrying a Gujarati Shah boy. Earlier that day, I had spent some time with the boy’s uncle who lived in London now, after spending fifteen years in the US. ‘One can’t be too fussy about these things,’ he confided in me. ‘In this day and age parents have to be happy as long as their son marries a girl.’

Kitch and Galiya missed the garba and dandiya dancing before dinner. When Mina and I saw them walking in looking rather sheepish, we beckoned to them and handed them plates piled with food. A few minutes later, Mina noticed them picking at their food and shouted out, ‘Eat well, guys!’ She despatched a relative to go over to their table and serve them some more. I think Indians like to force-feed. It’s our way of making guests feel welcome.

Towards the end of the function, we noticed Kitch and Galiya huddled in a corner, looking rather unwell. It turned out that the two of them had initially strayed into the adjoining hall – there was a Gujarati wedding going on there as well – where they had been ushered into the dining area at once. They had enjoyed a full meal there. It was only later, when they asked for us and no one seemed to know who we were, that they came out and noticed a second wedding party in the next hall. Kitch and Galiya were both lovers of good food, but two Indian wedding feasts in half an hour had done them in.

‘But why didn’t you tell us?’ Mina asked later as we escorted the now distinctly green couple to their hotel room.

‘We thought it would be rude,’ Galiya said, smiling ruefully. ‘We had planned to get away with eating just a little bit, but you forced us!’

A minute after entering the room, Kitch threw up.

Thankfully, there were no after-effects of these excesses the next day. Kitch and Galiya looked bright and raring to go, as we all went together to attend the traditional wedding ceremony at a place called Karen. It is named, I was told, after a Danish lady by that name. She lived in Kenya in the early twentieth century and married a Swedish baron, but was apparently best known for her affair with an English hunter – a real life story that was later made into a Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

The wedding took place on the green lawns of the Karen Blixen museum. The bride was delicate and pretty and made to look all the more so by the hundreds of bubbles floating all around her, created by half a dozen kids armed with small buckets of frothy water and a bubble blower. The match was obviously a case of opposites attracting because the groom was a stocky and decidedly tough-looking specimen with a shaved head.

Mina’s mother nudged me and whispered, ‘Earlier, people used to shave their heads only at funerals. Now it has become a fashion and grooms even shave their heads for weddings.’

‘Nowadays so many grooms get married in their thirties that there’s not much hair left, anyway,’ I conjectured. ‘Maybe that’s why they shave it off.’

‘Thank god
you
had a head full of hair at your wedding, Jai,’ my mother-in-law said, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy watching the video so much.’

The wedding went off well, with romantic Hindi film numbers wafting across the lawns and flower decorations lending a delightful touch to the proceedings. There were tens of young girls with freshly straightened and blow-dried hair imagining themselves as close substitutes for reigning Bollywood queens. Of course, where you have teenage beauty queens and wannabe beauty queens, you also have a necessary evil, that abhorrent species: the gawky teenage male, complete with gelled hair combed from both sides to form a ridge in the middle, and an earring to boot.

There were two small hitches, though. One was that when the bride and the groom were asked to light a lamp at the beginning of the ceremony, the groom – probably unused to such bending and stretching – pulled a muscle, with the result that he spent the next two hours clutching his side. The spectacle jarred on the romance a bit. The other was that the power supply went off towards the end. But without much ado and with the ease of those who have dealt with such things in the past, people placed half a dozen cars at various angles near the mandap
,
and left them there with the headlights on. The rest of the ceremony was completed as scheduled.

Kitch had his own perspective on the wedding and I was copied in on the email he sent his parents that night and on the reply he received the next day.

Kitch comes from an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family, so I didn’t quite understand all of it but it just shows how we all have a different take on life.

I’m reproducing his email. It went like this:

Dear appa and amma,

You won’t believe what fun these Gujarati weddings are in this part of the world. They don’t have it early in the morning like we do. They choose a convenient time during the day (or night). The wedding took place in the evening at a sort of park near a museum. Moreover, it took place
after
the reception! The groom’s head was clean shaven and there was only one pandit, a jolly Gujju Brahmin chap who didn’t know much Sanskrit. I think he was just a part-time priest. He seemed to know only the basic shlokas and even got that wrong. He kept saying ‘bakshanam’ instead of ‘bakshitam’ in the Gajananam prayer. And he kept repeating the same prayer every few minutes, he probably didn’t know much else! The puja itself didn’t take too long and it was interspersed with Hindi film songs. They also served alcohol for the guests, who incidentally were a varied group. There were black, brown, white and even a couple of Chinese people! By the way, the priest also wrongly translated – for the benefit of the lay public – the first line of the Gayatri mantra as ‘Oh god! The one who can swallow the whole earth!’ That’s completely wrong isn’t it, appa? And, do you know, the couple didn’t have to sit in front of a fire for hours, so they didn’t have their photographs taken with watering eyes. Nor did they have to sit cross-legged all the time. So how come they have all the fun, huh? How come
we
don’t have weddings like this?

Love,

Kitcha

In response to this outpouring of information, he got prompt replies from both parents. His mum wrote:

Dearest Kitcha,

I think you have not attended the wedding.

You must have attended the reception or some party after the wedding and thought it was the wedding itself. No Indian wedding can be like that. And how can they invite Chinese people and all, I cannot understand. They won’t even enjoy our food. I am glad you enjoyed it. But Kitcha, when I hear all this, I feel more and more worried about our Anand.

Kitcha, you and Jai have to take good care of him and make him more responsible. These days girls are so bold that he may easily be led astray. He is very innocent and trusting. Of course, we could not have wished for a nicer and more beautiful daughter-in-law than Galiya but it will be nice if Anand gets married to someone from our community. If he ends up with a Chinese or any such woman, that will be the end. Even thinking about it makes me faint. Looking forward to seeing you when you come here on Friday.

Yours affectionately,

Amma

His dad had sent only one line in reply.

How come
we
don’t have such weddings? Well, Kitcha, all I can say is ‘Thank god for small mercies’.

Appa