Corporate Carnival (17 page)

15

European Holiday

W
hen I got back to office the next day, I was greeted with the dumbest piece of news I had heard in a long time. Our budgets had been further slashed and the bank had decided to forget about Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, and even Shilpa Shetty for that matter. Peggy told us that CEO Peter had decided to rope in ‘Pickle’.

‘Pickle?’ I repeated blankly when I heard. ‘What do you mean, Pickle? Is he a pop star? Rap prince? Or a drag queen?’

‘No, Jack! I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him. He appears to be a well-known entertainer from Mumbai. I’m sorry about this, Jack, but Peter says he’s all we can get at this stage.’

‘But Peggy! We’d rather not have anyone then.
Pickle!
We’ll be the laughing stock of Dubai. And there’s no one called Pickle, anyway. So it probably doesn’t matter. This must be Peter playing a joke on you, or someone playing a joke on Peter.’

Peggy looked at Gavas helplessly. Looking sheepish, Gavas turned towards me.

‘It’s not my fault, Jai,’ he said. ‘Peter asked me if I knew any Indian entertainer who would perform for 5,000 dollars. Our budget is 40,000 dollars. He said the venue, food and drinks will cost 35,000 dollars. That left only 5K for the perfomer. So I suggested a relative of mine who mimics film stars and politicians. It’s not my fault!’ he said defensively. ‘Who else will come for this little money? I thought I’d do him a good turn by getting him a Dubai trip. He’s not bad, actually. There’s this act of his where he sort of mimics God and does a take on international celebrities. It’s quite popular in Mumbai. By the way, his name is not Pickle, it’s P-i-k-l-e, pronounced Pik-lay.’

When I mentioned this half-jokingly and almost apologetically to a few clients,Saxena burst into uncontrollable laughter and was still laughing when I left his house.

Sunny Singh was most disappointed. He was a Bachchan fan and had been looking forward to an evening with the Big B. ‘If not our Bachchan, you could have got Bipasha, Katrina or Malaika. They would have gone crazy for a chance to dance with your Sunny Singh Bali. You could have had banners saying
Bollywood meets Baliwood
! What will we do with this Pikle-shikle? Your bank is a loser. Better you leave, Jai, and start something on your own. I will support you. Let us do some business together. Don’t associate with these cheapos
.
You will also go down with them.’

Kochar was even more forthright. He came over to my hotel when I visited Nairobi later that week. ‘Babaji ka ghanta! Screw them, I will not come. Who does your bank think we are? Hume kya paagal kutte ne kaata hai? Have we been bitten by mad dogs that we will think of leaving our business and golf and wasting time on some buffoon? Do they think we can be bought with alcohol and food? Kanjoos
,
miser bank. Bunch of lafoots. I will close my account. You tell them I will show them…’

What he would have shown them will remain a mystery because, at that moment, Kochar suddenly stopped mid-sentence. He was staring at a brochure he had been reading in my hotel room. He let out a sharp cry. ‘
Ayee!
What’s this? They are giving you
free
wife!’ He spoke as much in envy as in shock. ‘Now it has become legal in hotels? Fantastic! Kamaal hai, bhai!’

I took the brochure from him curiously.

‘Not wife,’ I told him. ‘It’s w-i-f-i. Wifi. That means internet connection.’

When I got back to office on Sunday – the first day of our working week in Dubai – I found the place abuzz with talk about Jan and Peter and their night out at the hotel.

‘Yaar, Jack,’ Ahmed asked me, ‘did you tell anyone about that incident in the hotel that day? When I took that cash from you? Did you know I had arranged for some entertainment for Jan and Peter?’

‘Actually I learnt about it only later from someone else.’

‘Damn it, yaar, you Indians are all hypocrites, just like the goras. What is the big deal in this? I had submitted my claim for the hotel bill and other expenses to finance. That guy Nathan has gone and rejected it. He has sent it to London and Amsterdam, creating a big hue and cry. Who the hell is
he
? If he had a problem he could have just talked to me, yaar. If he was feeling left out, I could have arranged something for him as well. What is his problem? Sab hypocrites hain. What is the harm in some simple entertainment? Everybody does a little buttering of their bosses
. Thhodi bahut spot-fixing kar di to kaunsi badi gunaah ki hain humne?
What’s wrong with a little bit of spot-fixing? It’s all in the game.’

He left in a huff and I took a deep breath. This, I told myself, was one heck of a bank. There was always something or the other happening. And very little of it was actually connected with business.

Kitch too was feeling a bit low. A few days later he, Kapoor and I met for a bite at a café at Bur Juman. ‘It’s such a fucking mess,’ he mourned. ‘The management is all mixed up, we don’t have any clarity, the structure is unclear, everyone has his or her own agenda. On the business side, Europe is sinking deeper into shit by the day. It’s beginning to look like another 2008. Everything seems so insecure. I don’t know what to hold onto and there’s no relief in sight.’

Kapoor grinned. ‘You just hold onto that,’ he said, pointing at Kitch’s crotch and making a crude hand movement. ‘It will give you relief.
Apna haath Jagannath.
’

I left for London on training the next day. Mina decided to come along too, as a treat. It was her birthday in less than a week. Since the time she had done her studies in London, she had never gone back and was looking forward to it. She would catch up with friends while I was at the programme and then we could take a few days off to tour the English countryside and a bit of Europe.

The training course, which the new management had made mandatory for all those connected with investments, was abysmal. The trainer was a Scotsman who spoke with a thick accent that made listening a strain and gave me a throbbing headache. He went on and on about definitions of various investment terms, about sales theories and several tedious cases which we had to read and then answer questions at the end. I could not even muster up enough enthusiasm to read the cases, let alone answer the questions. On the third and final day, the new CEO of the bank came over to meet us. We thought it was just to say hello, but no. He had brought a presentation on what he called the ‘push-pull theory’. It was something to the effect that a client would shift to a new bank if he faced problems with his existing bank while simultaneously being attracted to the other. This he explained to us over three hours, with the help of several flow charts, a hundred slides and a good bit of theory.

Consequently, it was doubly refreshing for me to rest my head in Mina’s lap the next day, watching dreamily the clear blue sky above and listening to the sound of the ducks as they splashed and waded in the lake in front of us. We were at Windermere in the Lake District. The setting was calm, soothing and picturesque. If Mina hadn’t been talking to me most of the time, I might have tried my hand at poetry that very day. After all, Wordsworth’s residence Dove Cottage was just around the corner from where we stayed. How could one not be inspired to try and get some words to rhyme? Lakes, birds, ducks, grass, trees and delightful weather; it was sheer bliss. We did almost nothing for three full days and derived immense pleasure from it.

Our stay in Europe was more eventful. We did a Eurail trip, including a night train ride during which my beauty sleep was ruined by the fact that the train authorities took away our passports. I have always been a little paranoid about losing my passport and have this habit of patting my pocket every few minutes just to make sure it’s there. To have to hand it over to a stranger and, worse, be told that someone else would give it back to me the next morning was enough to keep me up all night – though Mina insists I was asleep every time she woke up during the night.

Mina’s birthday dawned fair and bright in Salzburg and we were pleasantly surprised when the staff of the hotel presented her with a bottle of champagne at the breakfast table; they had noted her date of birth from the copy of her passport. They stood there waiting for us to open it, so we did. They clapped and seemed genuinely happy – they must have been either extraordinarily good people or extremely talented actors.

After we popped open the bottle, there was a problem. I didn’t feel like drinking champagne at eight in the morning and Mina doesn’t drink in any case. So while the staff was looking elsewhere, Mina poured a good bit of it into the milk which remained in the cereal bowl.

The next thing we knew, there was a loud fizz and a mild explosion. The champagne had some sort of chemical reaction with the milk and, having bubbled over out of the bowl, was rapidly spreading across the tablecloth. Some of the staff screamed and others laughed, but all of them rushed to our table.

‘I dropped the bottle by mistake!’ I told them, my brain fizzing like the bubbly itself. As we left the room a few minutes later, they gave us another bottle and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

That night we went to an Indian restaurant where we had the most expensive Indian meal we had had in a long time. ‘The chapattis were so small!’ Mina complained when we were on our way back to the hotel. ‘And their portions of vegetables were like pickle.’ My mind went back to Dubai and I wondered what had come of our proposed client ‘do’ and Gavas’s cousin.

The poetic inspiration from Windermere lingered on and in honour of Mina’s birthday, I managed to put a little thing together. It will not compare favourably with the works of our good friend William Wordsworth, but before you start smirking and giving it one on ten, see if you can do any better in twenty minutes. I did it while Mina was in the shower. In any case, she loved it when I presented it to her that night along with a rose and – I might as well admit it – a heart-shaped box of chocolates. For those readers who are not easily nauseated and who don’t mind rhyme, it went like this:

That last line, for those who need to be told, is Hindi for ‘What is life without you’.

That night Mina was in a pensive mood. Thoughtful, even tense. But she brushed aside any signs of solicitous concern from me. I found out the reason the next morning.

Mina is one of those people who struggle to find words that rhyme. If my attempts at poetry are bad, hers are pathetic. On my twenty-eighth birthday, she sent me a bouquet of flowers with a poem so terrible that if she had not turned up in person shortly after, looking like an angel in a tight sweater and miniskirt, I might have been tempted to let the matter of our love story drop then and there.

On this occasion, she had decided to reply to my poem with one from her side; hence, the frown at night. When I woke up the next morning, I found a note from her. Don’t get me wrong. Mina is a wife to die for. She is a great friend, a good cook, kind to animals, loved by everyone in my family, has a green thumb and is terrific in bed, but she cannot rhyme. This is what she had written:

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but I can assure you that she was not dropped on her head when she was a baby. She’s very bright in all other aspects of life. It’s just that the moment she tries to make something rhyme, her mind kind of goes blank, like how I freeze if there are more than six people in the same room as me.

News trickled in from Dubai. After much deliberation, our off-site was going ahead as planned. We were still going to Udaipur, but they had reduced it from a three-day off-site to a two-day one. Since it was off-season, the bank was getting special rates from the hotel. But the economy class and the room-sharing rule stood, despite waves of negative feedback from staff. If spouses came along, they would have to be paid for by us.

The other irritant for me was that Nathan had kicked up a bit of stink about my taking days off after an official trip. Granted, I saved a bit of money, in that my London trip was paid for by the bank. I only had to pay for the European leg and, of course, Mina’s entire trip. I didn’t see why it mattered as long as the bank didn’t lose money, but Nathan was miffed that I ‘had not sought approval’. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

On a far brighter note, Rachel, Andy, Kitch and Galiya had visited Chennai and things had gone remarkably well. So well, in fact, that a priest had already been approached and he had given them a super auspicious date, one that he assured them came one’s way only once in several years. ‘Don’t miss it for the world!’ he had told them. The marriage was now just a few days away.

The other thing of note from among Kitch’s tidbits was that Rachel’s mum and aunt had visited Dubai, and Rach had thrown a party for them where Andy was introduced to them and some of her friends.

‘Did it go well?’ I asked Kitch eagerly.

‘Well, it wasn’t a huge success, but it was okay. They didn’t try to stop the wedding or anything.’