Rupee Millionaires

by Frank Kusy

  ‘She is honoured guest!’ protested Gordhan as we made to leave. ‘Your family is my family, and family guest not leave! She stay my house! Son Girish move downstairs!’

  Once again, I had to remind my mother not to be too friendly with the locals. They would only keep wanting to adopt her.

  Our arrival in Pushkar the next day was the big event of the year. Everyone knew we were coming, and no sooner had my mother got out of the taxi than Jagat Singh, the most influential man in town, appeared and festooned her head with sweet-smelling garlands of jasmine and frangipani. He welcomed her into his ‘humble’ 4-star hotel and introduced her, in turn, to every member of the local royal family. He then ushered her, through a swaying crowd, into the glitzily decorated restaurant and plied her with a huge banquet of local delicacies. He had heard, through me, that my mother knew her way around a kitchen – that she had once cooked for the likes of Churchill and Mountbatten – and he was desperate to impress her. During a brief interlude, Manish, the kitchen manager, sang her a plaintive tune of his own composition – very sweet – while Norath, the reception guy, danced up and down in the foreground, clapping his hands together in glee. Everyone but everyone wanted to have their photograph taken with her, and it was only when my old friend Ram, the designated master of ceremonies, appeared with a camel that she was finally whisked away into the desert for a bit of peace and quiet.

  Nick and Anna joined us on the trek, and it was a good thing too. My poor mum had been so overwhelmed by her reception that she was crying uncontrollably and needed calming down. Gently swaying on top of a camel helped steady her nerves, but it was Nick who put things into perspective for her. ‘Indians have a thing about mothers anyway,’ he quietly informed her, ‘but your son has been writing about Pushkar and doing business here for ten years, so of course the whole town wants to see you. You’re an extra special mother!’

  To drive the point home, Ram then kicked off about me buying him three camels, and giving half the town’s tailors work and money, so that ‘the name of Kusy will never be forgotten in this world.’

  I’m not good at this kind of thing. In fact, I found the whole business just plain embarrassing. I tried to hide, but my mother followed me onto one of the dunes, where I was doing my evening prayers. She sat beside me, waited for me to finish, then—for the first time in my life—said she was proud of me. Somehow, after decades of disapproval, I had finally won her respect.

  We held hands a while, and then, in the silence that followed the sun slowly disappearing over the horizon, she said, ‘I’m going to miss you.’ I held her tight and whispered, ‘I’m going to miss you too.’ Then we cried for a bit, and it was as if a large load had been lifted from our hearts. We had spoken the unspoken and had come to terms with it. All that was important now, we both agreed, was that we treasure the time still left to us and simply enjoy the present.

  I can’t remember much of what came after. I knew that my mother was mobbed in Pushkar – treated like a visiting queen – and that she spent most of her time there either laughing with joy or weeping with emotion. But apart from a few seconds of video from Nick, when she first mounted her camel, and one faded photograph of her on an elephant, ascending the high Amber Fort in Jaipur, I had no memories at all. Maybe they were too painful, maybe I just blocked them out, but my mind was a complete blank.

  The one thing I do clearly recall is that when she died, a few short months later, she was still clutching the album of photographs we’d made together in India. I don’t know what happened to that album – maybe she took it to the grave with her – but she never let it out of her sight. It had been the twilight highlight of her life, this last holiday together, and it had given her the peace to let go.

  Chapter 23

  Margreet

  Margreet came into my life just as my mother was about to leave it. Tall, blonde and beautiful, she actually reminded me a lot of my mother. She had the same perfect teeth, the same vivacity and humour, even the same chattiness and love of travel. She was also a Continental, having been born and brought up in Holland. My mum couldn’t believe her luck when Margreet came round to the family house. ‘What have we got here?’ I could hear her thinking. ‘Not just smart and good-looking, but so well-presented and a university lecturer to boot! Thank you, Jesus!’

  When we told my mum, a short month later, that we were getting married, she fell quiet for only the second time in her life – the first having been the taxi incident at Dudu. Then she dipped into her handbag, took out a hankie, and wept into it from sheer happiness. Madge and I had sped up the wedding plans, to make sure that she would be able to attend, and she was, for that day at least, all smiles and anticipation.

  But then the cancer had returned, and this time it had attacked her spine. She wasn’t sure she was going to make the wedding, she said, and she certainly didn’t want to be photographed in a wheelchair. Instead, whether by accident or design, she slipped away in her sleep, just nine hours before the nuptials. Did she take too many pills that night? Did she think her work done and her son safely off to the registry office? I would never know.

  It was the 31st August 1997 – the day I lost the most important person in my life and gained the next. The only Indian I informed of the event, Gordhan, thought it a highly inauspicious sign and advised that I cancel the wedding forthwith. But it was too late for that. Over a hundred guests were already on their way and the honeymoon – in India, of course – was only two days off.

  My mother had timed things to perfection. She knew exactly how long to boil an egg, and she knew exactly when to leave this world – so that I would have to get married and be forever looked after by someone else.

  Suddenly, with my mum’s death, I had no family home and no family. While I was away, my step-brother John had sold up and moved his dad to Enfield. All I had left were Anita’s cats and a house in Peckham that was in peril. It was in peril because Spud had just discovered that his precious shipment, the one he had ordered from Gordhan, had been sold to me instead.

  ‘You bastard!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘You said you weren’t going back into business. I needed that stuff for a big London show!’

  ‘Well, you should have paid for it then!’ I shouted back. ‘And I only said I wasn’t going back into business with you!’

  ‘Nobody fucks with me and gets away with it!’ repeated Spud. ‘You’ve just moved up to number one on my death list!’ I recalled a similar warning, issued to the head buyer at Liberty’s a few years before, and promptly moved house. Which was just as well, since a week later the new tenant found Spud tinkering with the gas mains, intent on blowing the place up.

  Now this was serious, and I rang up two of my oldest Buddhist friends – Anna and Brenda – to ask their advice. They both told me the same thing. If I was so worried about Spud, they said, I should chant for Spud’s happiness.

  ‘Chant for Spud’s happiness?’ I scoffed. ‘I don’t think so. Spud’s only going to be happy when I’m dead!’

  Then I thought better of it and took their advice on board. I chanted long and hard for Spud’s happiness and came up with the perfect solution. If I couldn’t make Spud happy by being dead, I would make Spud happy by being as good as dead. I left no trace of my new whereabouts. I changed my bank, my van, my mobile phone, even my appearance.

  ‘If Spud wants to be Mister Incognito,’ I decided, ‘I can go one better. I can be Mister Invisible!’

  With my new contact lenses, my perky Castro hat, and my clean-shaven face, not even my new best friend Justin recognised me.

  ‘Before,’ marvelled Justin, ‘you looked like a head posing as a journalist. Now, you look like a journalist posing as a head!’

  ‘I can’t walk down the road with you anymore!’ complained Margreet. ‘You look about twelve years old with no beard. I feel like a paedophile!’

  Margreet – or Madge, as I came to call her – had a habit of not mincing her words. She also had a fiery temper, like Anita,
and a mind of her own. Fortunately, unlike Anita, she was very level-headed, so I felt safe in moving in with her on the other side of London. This temporarily took me off Spud’s radar. It also marked a whole new phase in my life. I set up a new company and began taking entire days off. As these days off became entire weekends off, my life slowly fell into a more even rhythm. I was coming to embrace the Buddhist principle of the Middle Way, and with only sixty solid customers to deal with, instead of the numerous time-wasters I’d had with Spud, I could finally strike a balance between work and play.

  Only one mystery remained. I needed to know how Spud had managed to run the old company, a huge wholesale empire with an annual turnover of two million pounds, into the ground in only eight short months.

  Through hearsay and gossip, I gleaned that my old partner had spent far more time partying than attending to business. He had even brought Ram over from India and introduced him to London’s burgeoning rave scene. Nothing apparently gave Spud more pleasure than walking into a strobe-lit nightclub accompanied by a turbaned Rajasthani on crutches. He had somehow persuaded Ram that I was a false friend, that I would abandon him in the same way I had ‘abandoned’ Spud. When Ram flipped out on some bad pills and got arrested, Spud had apparently taken the same pleasure in putting his disabled pet monkey on a plane back to India. Spud, it seemed, had no truck with losers.

  I also learnt that Spud had stopped going to India himself. Instead, he sent out pairs of grungy hippy chicks to check out his clothing. The idea was nothing short of a disaster, since the girls spent all their time getting stoned and doing no work at all. The stuff they did send back had been so rotten that anyone fool enough to buy it never dealt with Spud again.

  At last—this was the final irony—all of Spud’s staff deserted and came back to me, cap in hand, asking for work. On Madge’s advice, I turned them all away.

  Chapter 24

  Second Honeymoon

  The 24th of January 1998 found me at Delhi airport, anxiously waiting for Madge to fly in from England. We had had a horrid first honeymoon – all tears and misery following on from my mum’s death – and this time I was determined to get it right. To make sure, I had completed all my business before she turned up, making a frantic £6000 buy in two days so I could give her my full attention.

  After a short wait she turned up, flustered and excited, and introduced me to a couple of Belgians she had met on the plane. It was just like my mother again—but without the umbrella.

  ‘This is what I remember!’ exclaimed Madge as we screamed into Delhi in a convoy of buzzing auto-rickshaws. ‘It’s all coming back to me now!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I grew up in North India,’ she explained. ‘I was here in Delhi, then up in Kashmir as a child. I never thought I’d be coming back thirty years later to find it all so familiar!’

  The Oberoi Maidens, the hotel I’d chosen, blew Madge away. She had a thing about art-deco architecture, and she was transported with delight by this imposing, Raj-style structure, with its magnificent pre-war façade and eight acres of emerald green lawns.

  ‘Did you know,’ she read excitedly, running her finger down the hotel brochure, ‘that the Duke of Windsor stayed here in 1927? And that Edward Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, lived here while the new city was being built in the ’30s?’

  I didn’t know. I had never bothered to find out. What I did know was that this was the flagship of the Oberoi hotel chain, and that Mr Oberoi himself favoured it over all the others. I also knew that it was the quietest, most hospitable luxury hotel in India.

  ‘It’s the staff that does it,’ I told Madge. ‘They treat you just like family. They’re not stuffy or stuck-up at all.’

  Anil, my old friend at reception, had put us in the honeymoon suite. The room was so spot-on, so full of colonial charm and splendour, that Madge was in raptures.

  ‘Look at this!’ she exclaimed, awestruck. ‘Half this stuff belongs in a museum!’

  She was so enamoured of the high ballroom ceilings, the regal furnishings, and the luxurious marble bathroom that I hesitated to drag her away. But then I remembered that Satish Agarwal was coming soon to drive us to Pushkar. And I wanted to show Madge all the famous sights of Old Delhi: the majestic Red Fort of Shah Jahan, the teeming markets of Chandni Chowk, and the largest mosque in the country, the Jame Masjid. For just this day, we forgot we had seen it all before—in my case many times. We took each other’s hands, stepped into the crowded street and became normal tourists doing the standard whirlwind tour of the capital.

  *

  It was gone noon the next day when Satish arrived. He shifted from one foot to the other in the hallway outside our room, apologizing, saying he would have been earlier but he had had a slight ‘accident’ on the road and had just finished scraping a dead goat off his windshield. He was about to say something else when I opened the door and ushered him inside the vast suite. Eyes wide with wonder, Satish gave a long, low whistle.

  ‘All this for you?’ he asked reverentially. ‘Are you now UK ambassador?’

  I chuckled. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘This is special for honeymoon people!’

  ‘Congratulations!’ said Satish, seizing and pumping Madge’s hand. ‘I hope you have a very vigorous night!’

  Sanjay, Satish’s younger brother, was right behind him. He didn’t say a word but watched in silence as Satish sank contentedly into a plush leather sofa. Then—after a quick nod from me—he dived into the opulent bathroom for an hour long shower. After he was done, the brothers went off shopping like two excited schoolboys, then returned a while later carrying presents for their mother and wives. Delhi was like the Big Apple to them. They couldn’t get enough of it. By the time they had all clambered into the van and headed back to Pushkar, the brothers were in a transport of ecstasy. Sanjay was in the back, caressing his new electric mixer, while Satish sat up front, happily humming Hindi tunes and drumming his fingers on the dashboard. From time to time, barely able to contain his excitement, he turned around and beamed back at us with his fat Omar Sharif face.

  ‘HAPPY?’ he roared. ‘You HAPPY? NICE here! Yes, BEAUTIFUL. Oh YES! Good, GOOD!’

  I couldn’t help nodding. Satish’s enthusiasm was genuinely contagious. Five years before, however, it had been a very different story. Back then, I told Madge, Satish had been like a man possessed – so urgent, so driven, so desperate to get my business that I’d had to grab him by the shoulders to shut him up.

  ‘Look here, Satish,’ I’d told him, ‘how can you take orders when you don’t listen long enough to write them down?’

  Now, five years later, Satish whipped out a new ballpoint as if on cue, and started putting pen to paper.

  ‘Oh good!’ praised Madge. ‘Writing everything down now!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Satish, looking pleased. ‘Writing is better than thinking!’

  Satish was at a complete loss as to where to fit Madge into the Indian caste system – until, that is, he learnt that she was a teacher. Not just any teacher, mind you, but a university lecturer. After that, he treated her like a princess. This was because teachers (like priests) belonged to the top caste of Indian society, way above businessmen like Satish, and were accorded the highest respect.

  ‘In England is opposite!’ Madge shouted over the engine noise. ‘Teachers there are very low profession. Too much work, too little money, and thought to be teachers because they can do nothing else.’

  ‘Really?’ Satish was incredulous. ‘England sound crazy! I no go there!’

  After this last burst of conversation, he fell silent. I had given him a Hindi music tape to play on the van’s stereo, and all we could see from the back seat was his silhouette clapping in time to the music and wobbling his head. The only moments of quiet happened when he stopped the cassette, then rewound or forwarded it for no obvious reason. So we enjoyed three hours of disjointed, blaring music, with loud clacks in between which ensured we never dropped off.r />
  The driver, meanwhile, was so distracted by the whole experience he was in constant danger of hitting things. It was even worse when it got dark. He was so blinded by the headlights of oncoming trucks that he couldn’t see and began aiming the van at roadside trees. The final leg to Pushkar was a nightmare, with the driver hunched over his wheel, peering myopically down the highway, and Satish bobbing and weaving in the front seat, happily gurgling to Hindi tunes, completely oblivious to the danger.

  ‘This driver I have for eight years,’ he said at one point. ‘I like him because he is not dead.’

  *

  So at last I managed to get Madge to Pushkar – to where I should have taken her, if I’d had any sense, on our first honeymoon. Here I had friends, practically family, and she would have been guaranteed a good time.

  Madge loved Pushkar, and Pushkar loved Madge. From the moment she arrived, she was treated like royalty, just like my mother. Jagat Singh rolled out the red carpet again, and crowds of adoring locals crammed into the Palace Hotel to pelt her with flowers and greetings. Faced by such unexpected attention, it took her half an hour to reach our room.

  ‘What was that all about?’ she asked, mystified.

  ‘You’ll see,’ I said, grinning. ‘That was just the start!’

  And so it was, for as we proceeded into town all the traders sussed who Madge was and began giving her presents in the hope of getting my future business. Inside an hour she was so loaded down with scarves, shawls, blankets, and wooden puppets that she could barely see past her nose.