Corporate Carnival (7 page)

8

The Haunted Hotel

M
y client Lalwani had decided that he wanted to start trading currencies. He had also decided that he was pretty good at timing and with his choice of currencies and didn’t want to rely on anyone’s advice. He wanted to buy British pounds. ‘But I don’t want to buy at over 1.50,’ he told me. ‘Two days ago, it was about 1.49. If it goes back to those levels, I will pick up sterling for a million dollars.’

‘It’s very volatile,’ I warned him. ‘Would you like to leave a limit order at say 1.4950?’

‘No, I don’t like limit orders,’ he said. ‘Let us wait and watch.’

It was nearing dinner time and I was at the hotel. Mina had gone home to spend some time with her family and I had decided to relax at the hotel and take a reflexology treatment at the hotel’s spa – something that had strongly been recommended by Kitch. Kitch, who two years ago was hesitant to so much as inhale the euphoric and sedative vapours that surround a spa, was now a much sought-after client at spas worldwide. He rarely saw a spa nowadays without getting his muscles kneaded, his head oiled and hammered, his body poked and prodded and having mineral rocks placed on his back.

While Kitch moved from one extreme to another, my own approach to spas had always been one of cautious curiosity. But I submitted myself to the reflexology treatment at the hotel spa. As I lay on my back in a sufficiently darkened room, a lady in uniform informed me that she would work on the soles of my feet. Nerves from all over the body ended there, she said, and manipulating them would cause positive ripple effects all over. At least that is what I understood from her rather jumbled explanation, in which tenses collided liberally and Swahili words mixed freely with English ones. Then she asked me which my right leg was.

‘Why?’ I asked, not unreasonably. It is not every day that adults ask you such a question.

‘Because, for this treatment, I have to start with your right leg,’ she said chirpily. ‘So which one is it?’

I pointed, but my confidence in this lady had plummeted several notches. If she didn’t know left from right, how would she know which nerve to manipulate? What if those ripple effects were negative instead of positive?

As it turned out, I need not have feared. She may not have known her right from her left but she knew her nerves. After a few minutes of doing something that felt remarkably like my dog nibbling at my toes, she did a series of moves from toe to heel that left me feeling happy and lazy.

I was lying in my room in much the same pleasant stupor, waiting for Mina to return, when the phone rang and Galiya’s anxious voice sounded through the wire. ‘Jai! Can you come to our room quick?
Now!
’

Still in my boxers and tee, I turned into a man of action. Damsels in distress never had to wait for long when Jai Patel was around. Galiya had sounded quite frightened, as if she had seen a ghost. I smiled to myself. Girls will be girls. It was probably some inconsequential thing. I hoped it wasn’t a lizard, though. I had barely knocked once when the door opened and Galiya stood there. The entire room seemed bathed in some kind of eerie, mystical haze. Her face was white.

My heart turned cold. She pointed at the bathroom door to her right and turned to me. Even as she opened her mouth, the door creaked open and a large, shapeless white figure emerged from the bathroom and stood threateningly behind Galiya.

A shiver of fright went through my spine. ‘G-gug-gug-goat!’ I stammered. ‘Run, G-ghastliya! G-gug-ghostliya! I mean, r-run!
Run!
’ I screamed. Grabbing her by her wrist, I dragged Galiya halfway down the corridor before I realized that the reluctant girl was not cooperating to the extent a chivalrous knight might expect from a distressed damsel.

‘Run!’ I shouted again, unable to think of any word beyond that. As far as I was concerned, the first step to dealing with the current crisis was to put as much distance as possible between us and the ghost. Then we could chew over the problem at leisure. There were a zillion things we could do. Check out of the hotel, stay at Mina’s parents’ house for the night, go to the airport, whatever. But all that would come later. At a time when I needed discipline and complete obedience, this imbecile girl was tugging at me and whining.

Then I realized what had happened. Numbed by the sudden appearance of a ghost in the bathroom, she was not quite herself. What she wanted was a bucket of cold water poured over her head. Pending that, I chose the next best option. It’s how strong men save drowning novices; when the novice panics, flails her arms and starts screaming, the recommended remedy is to deliver a stinging slap to bring her to her senses before hauling her out of the water.

I swung my hand backward. Bringing it down on her bare shoulder, I dealt her a resounding blow. You cannot win a war without spilling blood. Ask Winston Churchill or anyone. ‘Run!’ I hollered in my most commanding masculine voice.

She burst into tears. ‘G-go back there,’ she sobbed. ‘That’s K-k-kish.’

‘What?’

‘Kitch.’

‘Which?’

‘That!’

‘Where is Kitch? Is he still in the room? Is he hiding?’

‘K-k-kitch in there.’

‘I know that. But there was a thing behind you.’

‘W-which?’

‘It’s not a witch, dumbo! Witches fly on brooms! It was a
ghost
. Didn’t they teach you anything in Kazakhstan? That’s a ghost!’

We were back outside their room now, Galiya pulling at my reluctant arm. The door was slightly ajar. The bathroom door was shut but the apparition was standing near the bed and had buried its head into a pillow. I watched, transfixed, standing gallantly in front of Galiya, holding her hand tightly. Somehow, we needed to find Kitch and get him out of the room.

The ghost raised its head from the pillow. Portions of a human face emerged from behind the white form. It was the face of my good friend Kitch.

‘Kitch!’ I yelled. ‘What on earth are you up to?’

Kitch opened his mouth and made a frothy sound. A bubble formed around his lips and then burst.

‘Jack b-beat me!’ Galiya sobbed.

A cautious but closer look at Kitch revealed that the man – for reasons best known to him – had covered himself from head to toe with a mass of bubbly lather.

‘Why don’t you use a towel, you ass?’ I said.

More frothy sounds came from his direction, accompanied by frenzied hand movements. Broadly, I understood that, for some reason, he couldn’t go into the bathroom.

I decided to inspect things firsthand. I put my hand on the bathroom handle.

‘Don’t open it!’ Galiya shouted. But I had already turned the handle.

If Kitch was a ghost, the bathroom was the mother of all ghosts; a mass of super-hot, volatile, silvery cloud, like some deadly volcanic lava. It was filled with steam and soap from top to bottom. A wave of heat slammed into me and water gushed towards me, threatening to scald my feet. I hastily shut the door and stared at the two of them. They looked back at me sullenly.

A thought struck me. ‘I know what happened!’ I exclaimed. ‘You two have been making out in the bathroom!’

‘Don’t be an idiot, Jack,’ said Galiya crossly. ‘We were just watching TV!’

I looked at her incredulously. ‘And that has wreaked such ruin? Such utter and complete devastation?’

‘Kitch wanted to have a bubble bath.’

‘I did not (pop) want a bubble (pop) bath!’ Kitch protested. He was talking a little better now. Small bubbles still poured out from his mouth when he opened it and burst one after another, but his speech was clearer.

‘Then what did you want?’ Galiya asked him sharply. ‘Niagara Falls?’ Caustic, but I could understand her plight. Close to midnight after a long day, first her husband almost turns into a ghost and then, when the rescue team arrives, she gets slapped and shouted at.

‘It wasn’t
entirely
my fault,’ said Kitch a little angrily, giving her what can best be described as a knowing look. He turned to me. ‘I just wanted a regular bath,’ Kitch said in an injured tone. ‘There was a bottle which said “bath essence” so I poured it in. I thought it would give a nice scent, like in a spa.’

Bubbles fizzed and popped randomly at regular intervals all around him, revealing more and more of him like a slow, aquatic, foamy striptease. With every mini explosion, he looked more human and less like a giant, white, spitting, crackling amoeba.

‘All of it?’ I gasped. ‘You are supposed to use a drop or two.’

‘Well, how was I to know? I poured it in, turned on the tap and shut the door, meaning to get back after a few minutes. But there was something interesting on the pay channel and I forgot all about it.’

‘Hah!’ I said triumphantly. ‘I knew this had something to do with sex!’

‘We were watching
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,
’ Galiya informed me coldly.

‘In that case,’ I retorted cleverly, suddenly turning into a deadly combination of Sherlock Holmes and George Barnard Shaw and mixing deduction with sarcasm, ‘perhaps that condom decided to take a little walk along the carpet by itself.’ I pointed at the spot.

The couple looked at each other, aghast.

‘Don’t know how that landed up there,’ Kitch mumbled. ‘Anyway, when I remembered after about half an hour, I went to the bathroom to turn off the tap, but by then the whole place was filled with this… this stuff and I got completely covered with it. That’s when you came in.’

‘And got scared to bits,’ Galiya added, not to be outdone in the sarcasm department. ‘But please tell me, Mr Patel, do you propose to be of any help at all, or will you just stand there making wisecracks?’

‘Watch me,’ I said.

I went into the corridor and summoned a housekeeper. She entered the room and pushed open the bathroom door. ‘Oh, no!’ she exclaimed and pulled it shut. Eyes wide open, she looked at me and said, ‘This has to be dealt with at a much higher level.’

‘God?’ I whispered in awe.

‘My supervisor,’ she replied and came back in five minutes with a small, wizened gentleman, veteran of many a watery faux-pas, no doubt. He suggested we leave the room – which we were happy to – and told us he would fix it in half an hour. Taking a change of clothes for Kitch, who now looked almost human, we trickled off to my room, even as Lalwani called again.

‘Jai, what is pound at now? Quick, quick, quick!’

‘1.4860,’ I informed him after checking. ‘It’s below the level you were looking at. Shall I buy for you?’

‘See, it is a very good thing that we did not leave a limit order. If we had, it would have been done at higher rate. Now we can buy it at lower.’

‘So shall I place the order?’

‘No no no!’ he said firmly. ‘I think it will go to 1.48. Let us try to buy at 1.48.’

Mina returned just after midnight.

‘Jack saw a ghost!’ Galiya giggled before Mina had even sat down.

Mina raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s a new one,’ she said. ‘So, what is the colour of an African ghost? Black or white?’

We took turns at telling her the story, three different versions of it. Each of us downplayed his or her role in the story while exaggerating the actions of the others.

Once Mina gets tickled by something (and it doesn’t even have to be extraordinarily funny, it just has to appeal to her mood of the moment) she tends to laugh like she is having a fit and finds it impossible to stop. This was one of those occasions. She laughed till she spilled buckets of tears and it ended with her getting a stomach cramp.

Kitty called minutes later, filling me in on all their activities. The FIFA World Cup was in full swing and they had seen three matches already. They had booked some tickets earlier and our uncle Kaushik had arranged a few more. ‘Jai, why don’t you come along as well?’ my uncle asked me, taking the phone from Kitty. ‘There’s a really festive atmosphere here this month.’

‘I don’t want to take a vacation just now, uncle,’ I told him. ‘If I had some prospects to meet, I could swing a business trip, but not otherwise. I did get a referral from a chap called Prospero Pindoria to his brother, but going by what happened with Prospero, I have no hope on that one.’

‘Would his brother be Pedro Pindoria, by any chance?’

‘Yes! Do you know him?’

‘Then you simply must come, Jai. Pedro is a multimillionaire. I know him personally. He is crazy about just two things: women and football. Come over, Jai. We’ll try to do something.’

‘But big chief, I am not a woman and I know nothing about football.’

‘Jai, just come! I’ll help. These kids are having a great time. It will be wonderful if you join them. I will send you an invitation. I don’t think it will take more than a day or two to get visas for both of you.’

Just before I went to bed, Lalwani called again. ‘The pound has shot up to 1.51,’ he said, fuming. ‘They are just manipulating the price, all these hedge fund operators and speculators! Scoundrels! Criminals! But let us keep watch. If it touches 1.50 again, I want to buy quickly.’

‘Should I leave a limit order at 1.50?’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t believe in limit orders.’

Back in Dubai, there was football fever in the office. There was a lot of group betting going on with everyone pooling in. I called Kitty’s husband, Shree. ‘Hey, Shree, I need to place a bet on one of the FIFA teams, who should I put my money on?’

‘Well, Spain was my favourite,’ he said, ‘but they are struggling. I think Brazil will pick up steam.’ So I scribbled ‘Brazil’ against my name on the betting sheet and, as history would show, bid permanent goodbye to a hundred dollars.

Compliance and finance approved my South Africa trip within a day of my submitting it. Clearly, we were still the golden boys.

Meanwhile, Peggy had been called to London to attend a global meet. Select members of the bank’s managing committees worldwide had been invited for a top-level powwow. When I spoke to Peggy on the phone, she sounded rather low.

‘It’s all about football out here,’ she said. ‘I wish I knew more about the damn sport.’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ I told her. ‘I am leaving for South Africa in two days to meet a multimillionaire who is a football fan. My uncle tells me I will have him eating out of my hand if I talk football to him. Or if I turn myself into a pretty lady. Women and football are the two great loves of his life.’