Corporate Carnival (2 page)

The girls giggled. Galiya, who was halfway through a Breezer, ended up spitting a portion of it on the brand new carpet, and she and Mina spent the next few minutes trying to remove the stain.

‘You are such a rogue, y’know,’ Peggy told Kitch, dabbing some vathakozhambu on Kitch’s face. ‘You shouldn’t be let loose.’ The gravy formed a dark smear across his upperlip. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s more like the Kitch I used to know. What made you shave off your moustache? I thought you loved the thing.’

‘He loves sex more,’ I said, provoking another round of laughter.

‘It was just the
kissing
part!’ Galiya protested. ‘How can anyone kiss with hair in the way?’

Peggy laughed. ‘You have to focus on the lower lip and let him go for your upper lip, that’s how! I had the same problem with Rich.’ Rich was Peggy’s former boyfriend, the chap she used to see while we were at Myers.

‘By the way, Peggy,’ said Kitch, continuing to whine, ‘they are really buggering us out here at the training centre. I don’t think they plan to give us much room to operate. We have been saddled with some 600 pages of compliance requirements to write a test on tomorrow.’

‘Well, mind you do a good job, fellas. You don’t want to hear any sarcasm from old man Rutherford. And anytime you find yourself thinking this is painful, just put yourself back eighteen months and ask yourself where you’d rather be. 2008 Myers, or here in 2010.’

‘Please don’t even talk about it, Peggy,’ I begged. ‘If there’s one thing worse than losing your own money, it’s losing the money of someone who trusted you with it. We’ll sweep Dickhead off his feet, don’t worry.’

‘Y’know, the weird thing about this bank is that they don’t seem to have decided who’s going to be the boss, the Adriaan Dutch team or the Abbott Brit team,’ Peggy said thoughtfully. ‘I can sense a cold war in a thinly veiled slugfest, as both teams tussle for power. As a bank, the numbers add up great, the synergy seems good and that’s pushed the stock price up, but there are plenty of issues to sort out. Everyone thought it would be a friendly merger. I did too, but it doesn’t quite look like it. But the good thing is that as of now, we are on the side of the Brits and we seem to be winning.’

Living several miles away from ‘town’ in Dubai took some getting used to.

It was magical waking up to the musical chirping of the birds. It was what Mina had been used to all her life, but for me it was an altogether new experience. Mina would wake up at the stroke of dawn and get busy with her lemon, ginger and honey health drink followed by deep breathing and yoga. I, on the other hand, would open an eye when Mina got up, experience the early morning magic for a few seconds, and then promptly go back to sleep. By the time Mina had breathed deeply a few hundred times, stood on her head, tied herself in knots and rolled her eyeballs, I would be ready to stagger out of bed, with one single thought for starting the day on the right note: hot coffee with milk and lots of sugar.

Coming back to the magical chirping, there were all these birds whose existence in Dubai I had never suspected. I must confess, though, that on days when one hoped for a lazy morning in bed, the chirping seemed more like a cacophony. There was a nice patch of greenery behind the house where Mina and I enjoyed a cup of something sometimes. It was a luxury of space for the three of us – our dog ‘The Boss’, Mina and I – in this four-bedroomed ‘villa’. On the flip side, it was undoubtedly a bit of a pain to have to learn new routes, especially since the office was in town, closer to where Kitch lived. Also, at night, the house felt a little spooky, what with trees swaying unexpectedly outside or a tiny bird flying past the window, the light effects causing a large shadow to flash across the bedroom wall.

This was the first time I had ever lived in an independent house and it took some getting used to. Like most cities with a large immigrant population, Dubai is a city of dreams. People stream in with optimism in their hearts, aiming to work hard, live comfortably and save well. The ultimate materialistic executive dream for most youngsters remains a villa and a spanking new four-wheel drive, that widely accepted king of the road that brooks no nonsense from either man or machine, on or off the asphalt.

Apart from Mina and myself, our newly acquired villa had its fair share of guests from the reptile world, mostly ants and flies. And if you happened to be a fly on the wall of our house last week, you would have spotted me standing, initially on a dining chair and then on the dining table. A minute later, you would have seen me make a miraculously long leap to the sofa, emitting simultaneously a terrified yell. Mina would have been darting around, concentration writ large on her face, a long-handled brush in her hand, trying to persuade a small lizard to leave the room, urging me to remain calm and not behave like a baby. My next move, prompted by a sudden about-turn by the creature, was to attempt to fly to another sofa and the upshot of the whole thing was that I landed on its edge and crashed to the floor with another piercing scream that scared the lizard back to the garden. I have no issues with tigers, lions, elephants or bears. And I love dogs. But for some reason I have always been petrified of lizards.

That one forgettable incident apart, both our families settled down fairly quickly within a month of reaching Dubai. We were well and truly ensconced in domestic bliss and comfort, aided undoubtedly by the very welcome amount of 50,000 dollars, the sign-on bonus Peggy had negotiated for us.

It was office life that was creating problems. We were finding it difficult to get used to the new working methods at Abbott-Adriaan (popularly known as AbAd). Unlike Myers, which was a brokerage house with a simple, flat hierarchy, this company seemed to have a complicated matrix structure, a three-dimensional one at that. There was the private banking outfit which Peggy had been asked to form and lead, but there was also an ‘NRI’ team and a ‘Premier Banking’ team, both of which had several clients who would have qualified for private banking. Some clients had separate accounts with each team. Some had only one account but both teams claimed it as theirs. There was also a team known as ‘Investment Services’ which overlapped these two teams and now ours as well. The management hierarchy chart had lines all over the place – clear lines, dotted lines, straight lines and curved lines.

The structure apart, the bank had a bureaucracy that was all-powerful. There was an internal audit department that focussed on routine procedures and processes. There were compliance people whose job was to interpret regulatory requirements and ensure adherence. Post crisis, most banks had swung like a pendulum to one extreme where controls ruled the roost, Abbott-Adriaan probably more than most. The staff in the compliance and audit departments strutted about with an arrogance that one normally associated only with immigration officials from the developed world before the crisis. One would have expected the guys in finance to remain firmly in the background, but no. Out here, they too behaved like they owned the place, spoke rudely, interpreted petty internal rules differently at different times, and generally made life difficult for employees. And they seemed to gain perverse pleasure from doing so. Business trips had to be sanctioned not just by the business head but by finance, who had to approve the estimated cost,
and
by compliance, whose job was to ensure that marketing guidelines were followed for all countries where we did business.

When I made a business trip to Kuwait, I stayed at a hotel other than the one that had been officially approved, because I could not get a booking at the approved hotel. The finance chaps pinned their ears back and refused to reimburse me. After a lot of back and forth, Peggy had to talk to the local head, Chris ‘Fergs’ Ferguson, to get them to do it. When Kitch spent two days each in Nigeria and Zambia during a business trip, they questioned his laundry bill because their policy stipulated ‘minimum three days’ stay’ to be eligible for claiming laundry expenses. They claimed he had not ‘stayed’ in a place for three days. Again, they had to give in because it was, after all, a single trip, but it resulted in some friction and wasted a lot of time. Compliance approval was required even to open an account. Three of my new accounts were still pending with them two weeks after submission. Phone calls made to them were stonewalled by the compliance secretary, a stuck-up Irish woman whose breasts and nose both pointed upward, defying all known laws of gravity. ‘Miss Up-titty’, we named her.

Sometimes it seemed like the office was packed with heads. Every other guy was head of something or the other. There was a head of corporate bank, retail bank, compliance, finance, internal audit, credit, private bank, NRI, premier bank, investment services, loan recoveries, technology and several others. Within each of these, there were sub heads and unit heads. Separately and laterally there were regional heads, sector heads and country heads. Being a head was everyone’s goal. There were so many heads that you wondered where the other body parts were. It was a Ravana of a bank. But who did all the work if everyone was a head? Despite all this, business remained steady, predominantly, I suspect, because of the brand name, general risk aversion and the fact that retail accounts continued to grow.

In the middle of all this, Peggy told us that the chairman of the group, Sir Sidney Wilkinson, was visiting Dubai and would formally inaugurate the private banking business during a client ‘do’, part of a series of visits organized by the group as a public relations exercise. They called it the ‘Back to Growth’ campaign. It was supposed to announce and demonstrate to the world that AbAd had come out of the recession strongly and was poised for growth in a world that was recovering. The CEO of the Middle-East region wanted ten of our ‘top clients’ to be at the venue to meet the chairman. He would not take no for an answer and Peggy herself was quite upset about the way the matter was thrust upon her without even a discussion. We hadn’t even opened that many accounts yet. ‘This place is all about politics,’ Peggy grumbled, ‘politics and perception. Everything else takes a backseat, especially business.’

2

In Search of Business

B
usiness didn’t take a backseat for long, however. Just a few days later, I was on a flight to Uganda thinking about the giant sniffing dogs I had seen at the airport the last time I went there. In my previous role at Myers York, I could attribute a good portion of my success and my subsequent troubles to my clients from East Africa, many of whom had been introduced to me by an old friend and well-wisher, Yashpal Kapoor. My experiences there – particularly in Kenya and Tanzania – had been richly varied and exciting, if not always pleasant. The clients I met there ranged from a whisky-swigging, womanizing, safari-suited potato chips manufacturer in Nairobi to a buck-toothed, miserly shop owner in Dar-es-salaam whose wife took an unexpected fancy to me.

It was in Kenya that I first met Mina and her family. I had some wonderful times there. But when I recall some of the things that happened during the financial crisis, I can still feel a chill going down my spine. It is not funny to have a client who also happens to be your prospective father-in-law raging at you, accusing you of being a thief and driving you out of his premises in full view of curious onlookers!

This time around, Mr Kapoor insisted on my meeting a very wealthy, elderly gentleman whom he knew in Uganda. He had apparently lived in Europe for several decades, but had decided to settle down on an island just off Uganda. The son of an Indian father and Spanish mother, he had been born and brought up in Africa and moved to Europe after getting married.

I had tried to get Kapoor appointed as a consultant by my new employers, but they wouldn’t consider it. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t quite fit into our scheme of things,’ the British HR lady told me with a shrug. It was what people at this bank often said whenever they had to consider anything new or different. But Kapoor insisted on helping me, nonetheless. ‘If I can help with something, I will do it, Jai,’ he told me. ‘Money is not everything. You can’t take it with you, can you?’

At the Uganda airport, the dogs were still very much present, but they seemed much smaller now than they did when I first saw them. Perhaps because I had got used to being with ‘The Boss’, who, in the space of just over a year, had grown quite huge. Outside the terminal, a lady from the hotel was waiting with my name on a board. She asked me to wait for the other guests to arrive, so she could put all of us in one vehicle. I waited quietly in a corner for about twenty minutes before approaching the lady again.

‘How long do I have to wait, ma’am?’ I asked.

She looked at me blankly. ‘Are you staying at our hotel, sir?’ she enquired.

I reeled. ‘You asked me to wait!’ I told her, peeved. ‘I have been waiting for almost half an hour.’

‘Oh! Oh, my god! But, but…’ She was completely flustered, looked repeatedly at her list and darted about here and there. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, coming back to me after a few minutes. I thought that other Indian was you. He looked exactly like you.’ I had closely observed everyone coming out and could swear there had been no one even remotely resembling me. It occurred to me then that just as most Chinese, Japanese or African people look pretty much alike to Indians, it was possible that most Indians appeared alike to others. It was a humbling thought. I mean, to be just one among some 700 million brown men in the world…

At the hotel, I met Kapoor along with his elderly friend whose name, rather amusingly, was Prospero Pindoria. An appropriate name for a private banking client, I thought. He looked pleasant and amiable, fair-skinned and rather European in appearance. He had a bald, dome-shaped head with just a few wisps of grey hair at the sides, eyes puckered at the edges into a series of crows’ feet wrinkles, and a mild smile on a slightly vacant face. He and Kapoor were seated in the crowded coffee shop, occupied mostly by African businessmen and executives, with a handful of Indian and white men for variety.

As Prospero placed his order in a high-pitched voice, Kapoor whispered to me in Hindi, ‘You need to be patient with him, Jai. Don’t give up.’ I wondered why. Maybe the old man would talk a lot. He looked the rambling type.

My new acquaintance beamed at me. ‘Nice of you to come!’ he said in a loud and shrill voice, making me feel very conspicuous.

‘It was good of you to give me time,’ I replied suavely, recovering fast.

He looked at his watch. ‘The time is a quarter to eight,’ he shouted.

I was taken aback. ‘I said it was very good of you to give me time,’ I repeated, a little louder.

‘A quarter to eight!’ he hollered. ‘Eight forty-five.’

I dumped a sachet of sugar into my coffee and took a grumpy sip. I had figured out what Kapoor had meant by his bit of advice. I could sense several pairs of eyes focussing on us. Prospero’s voice had a tremor in it, like the bleating of an excited sheep, and it cut through the general drone with the effectiveness of a gunshot. It had the added advantage of both continuity and comedy, thereby attracting even more attention.

‘Kapoor told me the name of your bank,’ he announced, ‘but I have forgotten.’

Several curious ears turned in my direction to find out the name of my bank.

‘Er… AbAd,’ I mumbled.

‘What was that?’ he shouted, tilting his head. ‘Can you talk louder? My hearing is a little weak.’

‘AbAd. Abbott-Adriaan.’

‘Abbott! I know Abbott!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘It is the Queen’s bank. The Queen has an account there. Did you know it is the Queen’s bank?’

I shook my head meekly.

‘You don’t know your own bank!’ he admonished me, while eighteen eager listeners stopped their sluicing and browsing and revelled in this free entertainment show.

‘Yes,’ he shouted after a brief lapse into deep thought. ‘Yes, I’m quite sure. Abbott is the Queen’s bank. Queen Elizabeth,’ he added, to make it amply clear, ‘or maybe Queen Victoria. I am not very sure. My memory is a little weak.’

I looked at Kapoor helplessly. ‘Jai is a family friend,’ Kapoor told Prospero, leaning into his ear in a bid to keep his voice as low as possible. ‘He is looking for clients like you in Switzerland…’

‘Switzerland! I was in Switzerland last month!’ Prospero informed me, Kapoor and the other occupants of the coffee shop. ‘Holiday! I go there every March. It is not too cold and not too warm. Just the right weather.’

‘… or Singapore,’ Kapoor concluded.

‘Very clean city! I was in Singapore in 1995. Or maybe ’96 or ’97. They have very strict fines there for littering.’

There was a pause. Prospero seemed to have gone into hibernation. The audience went back to what it had gathered there to do.

Suddenly Prospero returned to this world. ‘You must come to my house,’ he shrieked. ‘You will like it.’ His face broke into a smile.

‘Prospero lives on an island. They have a lovely colony of houses there,’ Kapoor told me, trying to uses his hands to maximum effect to make it clear to Prospero what he was talking about.

It worked. Prospero nodded his head vigorously. ‘Twenty blocks with three houses in each row. I am at number T1,’ he shouted. ‘T for tea,’ he added and then, deciding that he rather liked the simple comedy involved in this, repeated it. ‘T for tea,’ he screamed and lifted the teacup and pointed it in every direction, first towards Kapoor, then me and then the guests at the tables nearby. ‘T for tea!’ he chuckled.

This was followed by another long silence. ‘I need to put my feet up on the chair. My legs are a little weak,’ Prospero announced, and then allowed me to help him.

Over the next few minutes, waiters brought two more tables into the coffee shop and several chairs. The place seemed to be the city’s most popular destination that evening. Meanwhile, the crowd was regaled with information about Prospero’s vacations. Among other things, he told us that he went to Pamplona in Spain every year to take part in the ‘running of the bulls’ event.

‘I live the rest of the year for that one day,’ he trilled, suddenly eloquent. ‘It is about life and death. Life and death, hand in hand. Take it from me, young man, you are most alive when death is staring you in the face. Pamplona is the one place I would not give up for all the wealth in the world.’

It is easy to make lofty statements, I thought cynically, when you have 60 million dollars stashed away. The topic changed to Prospero’s issues with his prostate. He went into its details and I went into my shell. There was no way I could crack this prospect. That, combined with my inability – under the circumstances – to make meaningful conversation, was enough to make me feel very despondent indeed. I picked up a toothpick and made a hole in a sachet of sugar. Then I made holes in all the sachets. I pushed the toothpick through the sachets one by one and then rotated the toothpick to see if I could get all the sachets to swing around it. I ate the cookie that came with the coffee. I took the toothpick and stirred the remaining froth at the bottom of my coffee cup, waiting for the meeting to end. Moodily, I ate another cookie. Prospero was still talking loudly in the background but I had lost all interest in him. This was obviously going to be a wasted trip.

Prospero stood up abruptly.

His face wore a pained expression and he was staring at the table like a soul in torment. He seemed to be wrestling with something; an inner turmoil, some deep emotional turbulence. He fixed his eye firmly on me, gimlet like, and bore into me. Then, pointing at me accusingly, he screamed, ‘
You!
You took my cookie!’

I stared at him, dumbstruck.

‘I had saved my favourite carrot coconut cookie for the end and you took it, young man.
You ate it!
’

I stood up and looked at him in shock. I had frozen completely. The city of Kampala rubbed its hands in glee. I opened my mouth to protest but no sound came out. The only sound I heard was the scraping of chairs against the wooden floor as some of the other guests shifted their chairs to get a better view of the proceedings. I closed my mouth. Something had obviously happened to my larynx or vocal chords or whatever it is that enables one to talk.

‘You
stole
it!’

I shook my head and wrung my hands helplessly.

‘Gone! All gone! And under my very nose!’

‘I say, no! I mean, really! I… I didn’t…’

‘Don’t lie to me, young man! It was here. On my plate. You stole it!’

‘I didn’t know, I… I must have taken it without thinking. Sorry!’

‘I always save that cookie for the end. And you… you…!’ He spluttered and ended up choking.

Kapoor, who seemed to have congealed somewhere in the background – like the policeman in old Hindi films while the hero is fighting the villain – suddenly came to life and simultaneously to my rescue. In increasing decibel levels, he shouted, ‘We will get another one, Prospero. We will get another one.
Another
one!’ A frenzy of activity suddenly produced two waiters with three carrot coconut cookies between them.

By now the seated crowd had been joined by some standees. They heaved a collective sigh of regret. Obviously they had been hoping for nothing short of a police complaint followed by a formal arrest.

Prospero sat down and gobbled down two of the cookies. The third he wrapped in a tissue and put it in his jacket pocket. ‘I am taking one home,’ he told the city at large. ‘I cannot eat too many because my stomach is a little weak.’

Two hours later, Kapoor came to my room. He was apologetic. ‘Jai, I am sorry about this. I haven’t met Prospero for quite some time and he really seems to have aged in the last three or four years. His mind is not what it used to be. But I have some good news. He tells me he has a younger brother in South Africa, called Pedro Pindoria. The two of them are heirs to the family fortune. Why don’t you meet him? He is worth as much as Prospero.’

‘I wouldn’t meet him if he was the last client on earth,’ I replied. I was in a nasty mood. I was upset with Kapoor for lugging me all the way to Uganda to meet this rich, fuddy-duddy nutcase and I meant to show it.

‘Jai bhai, this business is all about long-term relationships. You must have some more patience.’

‘I cannot have more patience,’ I replied coldly. ‘My patience is a little weak.’