by Frank Kusy
But the nightmare was not yet over. As I flicked through the last of Spud’s orders, I was horrified to spot the name of Isaak Mohammed. For some indefinable reason, Spud had resumed negotiations with the worst tailor in town. He had also given him an order for five hundred tie-and-dye smocks.
I charged down to Isaak’s shop to see how this particular order was progressing. Turns out it wasn’t progressing at all, because Isaak wasn’t there.
‘He’s in hiding,’ Susie called down.
I was surprised to hear her voice. Evidently she had claimed the rooftop hovel over Isaak’s quarters and had made it her new home. I climbed the stairs to see her.
‘In hiding from what?’ I asked.
‘From you. He heard you were coming into town, and he shut his shop.’
I slumped. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, you haven’t heard. Well, you’d better sit down.’ Susie balanced baby Om Prakash with one arm and handed me a cup of cardamom tea with the other.
‘It’s Spud, isn’t it?’
She grinned. ‘How did you guess?’
I sighed, resigned. How could I not?
‘You remember how cross he was last trip, when Isaak didn’t make your goods on time?’ she asked.
Yes, I certainly did remember that. We had got so fed up with waiting for Isaak that we had given him a new name: Mister Shanti, or Mister Ultra-Slow. He had been so wazzed out on bhang lassis it had taken him three days to cut one piece of material in half.
‘Well, Spud wanted someone to make him five hundred chiffon smocks, and nobody but Isaak would do it. They were … ahem … so transparent that even I wouldn’t try one on. And you know I’m open to pretty much anything.’
‘So?’
‘So he asked Isaak to make a sample, and Isaak forgot to make it. Spud found him downstairs, tranced out on another bhang lassi. This time Spud grabbed hold of Isaak, marched him out to the desert, and began force feeding him mutton curry.’
I stared, and she nodded. ‘Everyone in town is talking about it.’
It took a moment before I could find words. ‘He did what?’
‘It gets worse. This happened during the holy feast of Ramadan, when Isaak was supposed to be fasting. I don’t know what’s happened to Spud, Frank. Someone said he’s on drugs. Whatever it was, he was well on his way to inviting an international fatwa!’
Susie went off to welcome Raju back from work, leaving me to sit back and think. For some reason I recognised this little scenario of Spud’s … now where was it? It wasn’t Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, though I could well imagine Spud dancing around the annoyingly sleepy little Muslim with a lit match and a can of petrol. And no, it wasn’t any number of hostage movies Spud and I had watched together on Indian video buses.
At last, light dawned. It had in fact been a conversation with Girish on our last trip in Jaipur, to which both of us had been privy. In that conversation we learnt that nobody stole from the Jaipur Agarwals and got away with it. Earlier that day a cleaner had stolen £1000 from Gordhan’s house, along with a solid gold necklace. A few hours later, Girish caught him, but he didn’t take him to the police station. Oh no. Instead, he drove him to an empty building and stripped the man naked. He stood on the wretch’s feet with hobnail boots, warmed up a pair of sugar tongs to white heat, then branded him about the body until he returned the loot. Then—and this could only happen in India—he gave the thief five hundred rupees to go away and never come back.
‘Did Spud offer Isaak money, by any chance?’ I asked on Susie’s return.
‘How did you know?’ she said, surprised. ‘Yes, he waited until Isaak’s master tailor miraculously came up with a sample. It only took him twenty minutes! Then he gave Isaak five hundred rupees to go away and never talk to him again.’
‘But that doesn’t apply to me. Why is Isaak hiding from me?’
‘Everyone’s hiding from you! Haven’t you noticed? They all think Spud is crazy, and if they get stuff wrong, you’re going to tell him and he’s going to come back and torture them!’
That explained a lot. Cancelling Spud’s orders had been easy. Placing new ones was proving to be impossible. The favourite excuse I’d been getting was that it was the marriage season, and all the tailors were on holiday. The best excuse by far came from Mendu who, when I asked him to make five hundred block-print shirts, said, ‘So sorry. Tailor is dead.’
When I asked where his other six tailors were, and why they were not working, he replied, ‘Oh, they go to funeral.’
Inevitably, the only person I could find to work for me was Satish Agarwal. I found the man squashed deep inside his hole-in-the-wall grotto like a fat spider awaiting his prey. I tried to lure him out, but he wasn’t having it. He was hiding, very sensibly, from the intense heat.
‘Come inside,’ he crooned. ‘Enjoy ice cold mango Frooti drink!’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but please, no business. First we talk friendship.’
‘Friendship is good,’ muttered Satish. ‘We can talk money after. Why not?’
Satish, I knew already, was an Agarwal, just like Gordhan in Jaipur. It was his self-proclaimed ‘duty’ to make money. What I did not know, and what served to explain Satish’s apparent greed, was that the Agarwals were a business caste. The more money he made, the more people looked up to them. I couldn’t understand this at all. In my country, I told Satish, flaunting one’s wealth was regarded as bad taste. Only people like Spud actually enjoyed flaunting it—carrying a grand around in his pockets, for example, just for show. But Satish wasn’t showy. As the eldest brother of three, he explained, he had a large extended family to support. He didn’t make money for its own sake. He made it for all of them.
Satish must have been a striking man in his youth, I thought. Even now, aged thirty-six, he looked exactly like Omar Sharif. He had the same moist-brown eyes, the same aquiline nose, the same seductive smile. Even the same moustache and dimpled chin. The only thing that wasn’t the same was the three stones of excess weight he carried. He’d lost it once and tourists started asking for his autograph.
Everyone has their Achilles heel, however. In Satish’s case it was his lazy left eye. The right one gleamed with warm sincerity and bonhomie. It said, ‘I am your friend and servant. You can trust me with your life.’ The left one, by contrast, was a narrow slit with a restless ball which wandered to and fro instead of looking straight ahead. It said, ‘I am a devious bastard who is about to cheat you. I hope you don’t notice.’ Satish’s left eye was unfortunate, because it put off every other wholesaler from dealing with him. Nick found him ‘creepy’ and George, who had a thing about evil eyes anyway, wrote him off as an ‘asswipe.’
Once you got past the eye, however, Satish was about the friendliest person imaginable. He was so friendly that he actually scared people away. I had to sit him down one day and encourage him to relax.
‘You have too much mental tension,’ I told him. ‘Let customer come to you, not you to them!’
Satish took my advice to heart, and not long after, he became the teacher and I his willing disciple. He stood in the entrance of his shop in the Pushkar market, arms akimbo, and flashed his teeth at passing lady tourists. If any of them came close enough, he gave them a present. A shawl, perhaps, or a scarf. Satish had learned since he was old enough to rub two rupees together that his profit rose in direct proportion to the number of presents he gave his customers. And his psychology, which I quickly adopted, was spot-on. Once he had hooked them with a present, they felt duty-bound to buy something from him. First they bought something cheap, just to return the favour. Then, when he gave them another present, they bought something more expensive. And so it continued until they had one armful of presents which had cost them nothing, and another armful of purchases which had probably cost them double what they would’ve paid anywhere else. So Satish ended up with lots of profit, they held lots of presents, and everybody was happy.
Over one more frozen
Frooti, I asked Satish how he had first come to Pushkar.
‘That is a long story, Frankie!’ he said, chucking a friendly arm around me. ‘How much time you have?’
I indicated the empty street. All the shops were closed for siesta. ‘A lot.’
So he settled in to tell his tale. I learnt that one winter, when Satish was ten, his father had travelled to Pushkar for the Camel Fair. Once there, he’d decided to open a blanket shop. Hordes of pilgrims had flooded in for the fair, all of them wanting something on which to sit during the day, and something to wrap around themselves when the desert grew cold at night. Woollen blankets were very much in demand. His family already had a successful jewellery business to the north, in Mathura, but Satish’s dad had been having problems with his partner and wanted to try something new. So he uprooted the whole family and brought them 360 kilometres west to Pushkar. It was a shrewd move, but not without complications. The main complication was that they were not welcome. The young Satish liked Pushkar, but the Pushkar people didn’t like him. He was an outsider, a migrant pariah who was certain to take food out of their mouths by setting up a competing business. They wouldn’t even walk in his shadow.
‘I don’t like the local people situation,’ confided Satish. ‘Too much blub-blub-blub, and no friendship-making. I like business for customer relation, not for money only!’
Satish left school at age fourteen to help his father with the cloth business. But two years later his father died, leaving Satish in charge of the whole family. He had two younger brothers, Sanjay and Dinesh, but they had been too young to work. It had been up to him to keep things going.
‘Now my name in Pushkar is very popular,’ said Satish. ‘But first five years is hard. I work alone and nobody want to be my friend.’
Satish then told me of his two brothers, who were also Agarwal. They weren’t as fat as he was, he joked, because they worked more and had less money. In fact, because they were younger and had fewer responsibilities, the Agarwal rules meant they couldn’t actually make money for themselves at all. They could only help him make money, and this they were pleased to do. The reason they were so happy to serve him was because Satish would soon choose their wives, and the richer they helped Satish become, the more well-born and attractive these wives would be. In the meantime, all the money they made for Satish went into the family pot and secured all their futures.
The youngest brother, Sanjay, grinned a lot. He was the most handsome of the three, and he knew it. He had the dark swarthy features of a Rajput chieftain, and the slim, dangerous grace of a panther on the prowl. Western ladies swooned over him, and he usually courted two or three at the same time. They loved his shock of shiny black hair and his doe-like eyes. They particularly liked his roguish grin, which, if he could have bottled it, would have made him a fortune. Satish encouraged Sanjay’s grin because it sold a whole lot of clothing and made him a fortune. Unknown to Sanjay—and here I was sworn to strict secrecy—Satish had no intention of marrying him off for a long time. It wouldn’t be good for business.
Dinesh, the middle brother, was the holy one, since he was a bit simple, and therefore close to God. Dinesh spent half his day doing puja (prayers) for the family and the other half working out. Just as Satish collected money and Sanjay foreign girlfriends, Dinesh collected muscles – and, of course, good karma for the Agarwals.
Dinesh made me nervous. Dinesh made everyone nervous. Not just because he was a large, frisky puppy-dog, but because he was dangerously affectionate. The first time I met Dinesh I had been in the shop, checking jackets. Dinesh had sprung up out of nowhere to pump my hand and comment on my progress.
‘I know your mind!’ he exclaimed, beaming happily. ‘I know what you are thinking!’
But he had caught me on a bad day, and I snapped back, ‘Okay, if you know my mind so well, I’ll go home and you can check these jackets!’
Dinesh paused a moment, trying to decide if I were serious or not. Then he leapt over to give me such a crushing bear hug my lungs nearly imploded. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he boomed. ‘You are good joking man. That is good!’
Chapter 20
Full Moon Camel Trek
I left Satish with an order for four hundred wool jackets then walked back up the market. Up a little way, George was taking part in a heated debate with Mendu about the price of cotton dresses. As the volume of their shouting grew, Mendu’s face twisted into a grotesque leer, and he played his ace card.
‘Where is my watch?’ he screamed.
George, who had quite forgot he’d promised Mendu a watch from Pittsburgh, was forced to back down and accept the hiked prices.
‘Man,’ George said to me afterwards, ‘that dude plays hardball!’
‘Well, what do you expect?’ I asked, laughing. ‘You taught him the game!’
George smiled grimly, then handed me a fax he had received from Mendu in America.
Being well and in healthy possessions, I wish to the god for your sounding position. Very earlier, I have sent your material what you ordered. But why have you not cleared that material? If you have any problem, please inform me because the goods are in airline and have to be damaging. I await your untimely information.
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked, looking entirely bewildered. ‘I showed it to Mendu, who wrote it, and he didn’t understand it either!’
Distracted by a passing beggar child, George then delved into his pockets and came up with what he termed ‘a mysterious potpourri of international currency.’ When he opened his hand I saw nickels, roubles, dimes, dinars, shekels, pence, and pfennigs, all collected down umpteen years of travel. He gave the child a choice.
‘You can have all this change,’ he told her, ‘or a pack of chewing gum.’
The kid took the gum.
‘That made her day,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well,’ sniffed George. ‘You can be poor in India and still be happy, you know. Even on a stick of gum. You gotta think about that.’
Later on, we found ourselves sitting among a Druidic circle of new age travellers at the Sunset Cafe, listening to some long-haired dude sing forty-two verses of 'American Pie.’ He was really getting into it, almost sobbing with emotion. The only thing which averted his total collapse into hysteria was the moment when George grabbed his ukulele and launched into his favourite song: ‘All I want is one more fuck!’ The magic circle instantly disintegrated.
‘Well, that went well,’ I commented. ‘Who were those guys, anyway?’
‘Freaks, man,’ George said with a shrug. ‘Pushkar’s full of kids who missed the ’60s and want to go back there. They smoke dope, they wear tie-dye, and they wobble their heads to eastern mantras or to Bob Marley. They’re kinda sad, you know?’
‘No, I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I would’ve loved to have been a hippy in India twenty years ago, hanging out on beaches in Goa, drifting north to Manali in the hot months, then hanging out again in Pushkar in the spring and living on bananas and brown rice.’
‘You, as a hippy?’ snorted George. ‘I don’t think so, man!’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, you like eggs and chips and fried breakfasts. No brown rice for you! For another, you don’t look the part. You’re a geek, Frank.’
‘A geek?’
‘Yeah, an endearing, absent-minded college kind of a dude. Be grateful. A geek’s better than an asshole and a whole lot better than an asswipe!’
I hesitated, then nodded vaguely. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think.’
A few days later, Tim, my young UK helper, turned up in Pushkar. His eyed me cautiously. ‘Be gentle with me,’ he pleaded. ‘I’ve just spent two weeks with Spud, putting on another show. I’m shot to pieces.’
Tim was a tall, lanky redhead with a ponytail and a wide, freckly smile. Of all the staff Spud had hired down the years, he was the only one who had any knowledge of India. That was why he was here to help me out. He was also the only one I trusted, and who shared my unea
se over Spud’s deteriorating state of mind. But when I cautiously asked how things were going back home, all Tim said was, ‘You don’t want to know.’
That told me two things. First off, things weren’t going well. Secondly, Tim was afraid of losing his job by saying why.
With the Full Moon approaching, everyone—Ram and Eri, Susie and Raju, George, Tim, and I—congregated for the annual camel trek. Even Nick and Anna were present, having just dashed up from Madras on a night train. The trek was insane: ten people dancing around a bonfire in the middle of the desert, singing Rajasthani folk songs for which they never quite learnt the words. The only people not dancing were Guy and Trudi, a Belgian couple who had no sense of humour at all. The dancing continued around the bathing ghats overlooking Pushkar lake, with everyone wearing pointy hats and trying to scare each other with their respective shadows. After three or four bhang lassis apiece, that wasn’t difficult.
*
On the way home, Susie taught me the Hindi word for duck. ‘It’s butak,’ she said, grinning. ‘And I only know because Raju ran up to me in the street today, shouting, “Jyoti! Come quick! There are forty buttocks in the lake!’
But Susie was a little preoccupied with an important issue. For a while now, she and Raju had wanted to ensure they could legally get Raju and the children into England. They had got ‘married’ five times in the hopes that one of the various Hindi ceremonies they used might be considered "legal" enough to satisfy the British Immigration Service. But she still had not obtained a UK work visa for Raju, and their ‘marriage’ still wasn’t recognised in England. She was at her wits’ end.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she confided to me, ‘but there’s another baby on the way.’
Back in the market the next day, I tried to collect Spud’s tie-and-dye smocks from Isaak. Unfortunately, he hadn’t even started them.