Rupee Millionaires

by Frank Kusy

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, her eyes somewhat glazed over. ‘They’re greeting you like some visiting Viceroy and me as your queen! You’re strolling ahead as though nothing is happening, and I’m trailing behind like a Muslim wife!’

  I laughed. ‘Are you really complaining? You’ve got more stuff in your arms than I have in my warehouse!’

  In the centre of the market, just as we were unloading Madge’s loot onto a roadside trolley, we were accosted by Mister Bullshit.

  ‘Thank you very much, sir!’ crooned Lalit Jain, vigorously shaking my hand. ‘You are very kind, sir! I have got only one heart, but if I had two hearts I would thank you even more—double, double!’

  Lalit was now the top moneychanger in town. He was eager for me to see his new shop sign, which read: ‘Easy Cash – By Authority of Government.’

  ‘It’s about time you got authorised,’ I teased. ‘You’ve been unauthorised for ten years!’

  ‘India is great, man!’ said Lalit, nodding sagely. ‘Better than anything! Now I give official Encashment Certificate, so more customer, more business!’

  We were rescued by Satish, who gave Madge a beautiful Kashmiri shawl and brought her home to meet his family. The house was a simple affair, rather ramshackle, with gay garlanded shrines to various gods parked in every corner. Inside, Sanjay’s wife (yes, he had finally been allowed to marry) prepared us a pure vegetarian meal. Satish’s two young sons took an instant shine to Madge and kept her occupied by asking excited questions.

  ‘It was nice,’ she commented later, ‘to get away from all the western tourists and sample a piece of real Indian life!’

  The one disappointment of the day was Ram. I had been looking forward to introducing him to Madge and to treating her to one of his famous camel treks. But he was nowhere to be found. According to Himmat, the manager of the Venus, Ram had returned from England ‘a little crazy.’ Spud had apparently laid a lot of drugs on him and filled his head with delusions of grandeur. Thus it was that Ram had been jailed recently for scamming $10,000 off Eri, his loyal Japanese girlfriend, after promising to marry her. When he married a local Indian girl instead and the liaison with Eri had broken down, he refused to give her money back, and the whole of Pushkar had rejoiced in the scandal.

  ‘Hello, Mister Japanese!’ they’d shouted at him for weeks afterwards, and though he’d quickly bribed his way out of jail, he had been forced to leave town until all the gossip died down.

  He was back in town now, but all attempts to set up a rendezvous—with his younger brother R.J. acting as go-between—met with failure. Ram stood us up twice that evening, leaving me both confused and angry. I could only presume that he had been too ashamed to face me, or that Spud had screwed up his mind so much that he had forgot his loyalties. Whatever it was, I had to apologise to Madge, saying that my ‘best friend in Pushkar’ was now a thief and a coward.

  Chapter 25

  Mister Magic Trouser Man

  The next day Nick and Anna blew into town, and the four of us went on a camel trek into the desert. In the absence of Ram, his brother R.J. did the honours.

  ‘Today is special day!’ R.J. declared with a twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘How’s that, then?’I asked.

  ‘Today is 26th January. Day of our Independence!’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘It is better than good! It is fantastic! No bloody British for fifty years!’

  ‘But I’m British!’

  ‘No matter,’ R.J. added conspiratorially. ‘You are always welcome to come back. Especially to my silver shop!’

  Madge liked Nick, saying, ‘Under that quiet exterior, there’s a wicked sense of humour,’ but at first she wasn’t sure what to make of Anna.

  ‘She’s the bright bubbly one,’ she concluded at last. ‘She tried to take me under her wing, but had no idea of how to talk to Europeans. As soon as she learnt I was Dutch, and thus foreign, she started speaking to me in the same pigeon-English she reserves for Indians, saying stuff like ‘Where you coming from? Oh, much much far!’ She obviously thinks ‘foreign’ equals Indian!’

  The camel safari was a great success. Madge didn’t know how to get onto a camel, so she stood awhile, stroking it cautiously. Nick strode over and took the reins in one hand.

  ‘You can’t move a camel by being nice to it,’ he told her. ‘You have to do like the Indians do, and bark “Jttt! Jttt!” at it with attitude!’

  This was Madge’s first time on a camel, and she had a wonderful time. She particularly enjoyed the peacefulness of the desert, a stark contrast to the hullabaloo of the market town. While Nick galloped on ahead, doing his Lawrence of Arabia bit, a small child held the lead of Madge’s camel and guided it slowly forward until she fell into a peaceful, quite uncharacteristic, trance. Then came a sudden thunderstorm, a stunning firework show of flashing lightning and dark rumbling clouds. We holed up in a low concrete shelter in the middle of the desert to watch the display. Nick wanted to play charades, but since Madge didn’t know what charades was, we entertained her with stories of Pushkar people instead.

  ‘Have you met Mister Magic Trouser Man yet?’ asked Nick. ‘His real name’s Pawan, and he has this little clothing shop close to the Brahma temple. I bought some trousers off him one day but had to go back because they were too long. “No problem,” he said, and whipped out a pair of scissors. He sheared about six inches off the bottom and handed them back to me, saying, “Look, magic!”

  ‘Did they fit?’ Madge asked, laughing.

  ‘Oh yes, he’d magicked them perfectly. But the very next day when I went back, he had no trousers at all. He wasn’t even wearing any. Instead, anticipating my needs, he wore only a long woollen jacket over bare legs. He had his scissors ready handy, ready to ‘magic’ the jacket, but his wife dragged him off the street for public indecency.’

  ‘Pushkar is full of strange stuff,’ agreed Anna with a giggle. ‘We were woken up this morning by a loud banging outside our room. Nick thought it was another beggar asking for money, so he flung open the door and laid into this guy, shouting, “We’ve had enough of you people hassling us for rupees! Why don’t you beg somewhere else?” Imagine his embarrassment when he recognised our landlord, who had only called to collect the rent!’

  ‘Then there’s our old pal, Mendu,’ continued Nick. ‘I saw George in the market earlier, and he was hassling Mendu over his escalating silk prices. This went on for quite some time before Mendu completely lost it. He jumped up, waved a silk dress in George’s face, and said in that high, whiny voice of his: “Nick pay … Spud pay … now you pay!”’

  ‘My personal favourite,’ I added, ‘is Sunny, Mr Bullshit’s brother, who’s gone into the cloth business. Not altogether a wise decision this, since he’s colour blind. One of the main reasons Spud went bust apparently was that he sent two hippy chicks to buy tie-dye clothing for him, and the two of them sent Sunny off to Delhi to buy a load of blue and purple fabric for it. But Sunny returned with a truck full of brilliant pinks, oranges and yellows instead. When Spud rang from the UK to berate him for his stupidity, he said simply, “I am black and white only, like TV!”’

  A day or so later, I took Madge to the top of the high Savitri temple then down again by way of the famous Brahma temple.

  ‘It’s not much to look at,’ I apologised. ‘But it is the only one in India!’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ she argued. ‘What about the one in Mahabilapuram? The hotel manager told us about it while we were on honeymoon, but you were so depressed we walked straight past it!’

  That stopped me. ‘Really? How embarrassing! All these years I’ve been telling people that Brahma has only one home in India, and now he has two? What on earth was he doing down in Mahabilapuram?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Madge said with a shrug. ‘Sunbathing?’

  If Madge was unimpressed by the Brahma temple, she was more than impressed by the Pushkar Posse. In one short year, since my last visit, it had expanded exponentially. So
many buyers were now in town, as well as friends of buyers, that the Venus restaurant simply couldn’t keep up with all of them. Himmat, the new manager, dashed back and forth, trying to seat them all, and eventually came up with a massive fold-out table usually reserved for marriage parties.

  ‘Wow!’ declared Madge. ‘Twenty-seven hippies sitting at a round table. It’s like a scene out of Camelot!”

  'Wow!' echoed the Venus’s crazy new waiter. ‘Too many people! Wow!’

  ‘Have you met Mister Wow?’ Nick asked. ‘His real name is Vinod, but he starts or ends every sentence with the word “Wow”!’

  'Wow! Coffee?’ asked Vinod. ‘Full wow coffee! Take no milk and wow is free!’

  Nick gave him his order, but Wow didn’t go away. He just stood at the vast table, staring transfixed at the pips rising and falling in my lemon soda.

  ‘Wow!’ he declared reverentially. ‘Many times up down! Inside magic! Double wow lemon drink!’

  ‘What did you do, Frank?’ called over Nick. ‘Put too much sugar in again?’

  ‘Yeah man, it nearly—wow—exploded!’

  On the way home, Madge gave me a big hug.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I said.

  ‘That’s for making the effort. This honeymoon has been a lot more fun than the first one. When are we coming back?’

  On our last day in Pushkar we bade our farewells. Nick and Anna said they would visit in London, and Susie turned up to apologise for her earlier absence. She had been busy with baby number three, she said, but would give us a proper welcome whenever we returned. That was, she added, unless Raju’s UK visa finally came through and she made it back to Dagenham.

  George we found in a sorry state, though still performing. He was recovering from a severe bout of dysentery, brought on by eating food from dishes washed in polluted lake water. We left him strumming on his ukelele and crooning ‘My Sweet Lord’ with two freaks in the Sunset Cafe. Apart from the tightly-crossed legs, we wouldn’t have guessed he was sick at all.

  Our final call was Satish, who was in his shop with his new line of blankets which he called ‘Lover Mattresses’. He was selling them hand-over-fist to young Indian honeymooners. Satish was sad to see Madge go. When asked why, he replied that since she had spent three years in India as a child, she had a ‘calm and serene mind.’

  Little did he know.

  Chapter 26

  Madge’s 64-Million-Dollar Question

  Back home again, I was forced to take stock. Not just of my business, but of life in general.

  I had been so busy to-ing and fro-ing between India and England that I had somehow lost sight of my goals.

  ‘What are your goals?’ Madge now asked me. ‘You say you’re a Buddhist, but you can’t sleep, you can’t relax, and when you’re not busy working you’re on the phone to India ordering more stuff to make you even more busy. What’s it all for?’

  It was a good question, and one for which I had no answer. I suspected it might have had something to do with death, for there had been so many losses in my life lately: first my mother, then my stepfather, finally my Buddhist mentor, Dick Causton. In reaction, I had thrown myself into work and was now killing myself simply for work’s sake.

  Ironically, I hadn’t had this problem when I’d been with Spud. Spud had enough vision, enough goals, for the both of us. He had also had a way of putting things that switched on a five-letter word in my head, one that totally fitted in with Thatcher’s New Britain – Greed. If big bankers were paying themselves huge bonuses every year, Spud had lectured me, what was wrong with greed? Evidently, greed was good. After all, the whole country was succumbing to it. As revenues from newly found North Sea oil rolled in, as the huge war debt owed to America was finally paid off, England was back in the black. The buzzword was spend, spend, spend, and the age of the credit card was born. Ushered in on this new wave of consumerist optimism was a new wave of shops offering unlimited credit, and Spud had been right there waiting for them.

  ‘It’s like a giant playground full of cash!’ Spud had pronounced. ‘All we have to do is reach down and pick it up!’

  But then Spud had made his million rupees, and several more million rupees on top of those, and only one thing had made him happy: dropping a wad of cash on the floor of pubs, then—just as someone was about to pick it up—snatching it back again on the end of a piece of string. He had only ever permitted himself one luxury: a brand new Mercedes Benz which was purposefully scratched—the day after he bought it—by some hoodie he had upset at a gas station.

  Never once had Spud considered Madge’s 64-million dollar question: What was it all for?

  In the Buddhist scheme of things, I decided, nothing was worth doing unless one enjoyed it and created value from it. If there was a profit to be made, well, that was a bonus.

  I returned to my wholesale business with a new determination: I would stop treating customers as customers; I would create value by making friends with them.

  When I’d been with Spud, I had worked with over a hundred customers, from the grungy, tattooed owner of a shady head shop, to the pristine, perm-haired manageress of a high-street boutique. Befriending them had been more difficult than I had expected. For one thing, despite my best efforts, they kept on calling me a ‘rep.’

  ‘I can’t deal with these people,’ I had complained to Spud. ‘I walk in the door and they say, “Oh, another rep.” Who am I representing? Myself? I’m not a lowly fifteen per cent agent. I’m a director of my own company!’

  Spud sneered. ‘Oh, get over it! They’re wankers. Just follow the money!’

  That had been easy for Spud. No shopkeeper had ever called him a ‘rep.’ They were just grateful when he left.

  My solution had been more subtle. If anyone called me a rep or ignored me, I went out into the street, hung cheap clothing on the side of my van, and started selling it in full view of the enraged shopkeeper. This tactic didn’t make me any friends, but it weeded out a lot of people who didn’t want my friendship.

  I started weeding out customers as soon as I’d got shot of Spud. The first to go were the cheats and non-payers, starting with the girl from Durham who never paid for the box of clothing I’d sent her the day before my wedding, and the couple from King’s Lynn who took advantage of my good nature and ripped me off for five grand worth of jewellery.

  Next to go were the time wasters. These consisted of anyone who forgot I was coming, phoned to cancel me at the last minute, or spent hours choosing a single dress or pair of earrings. A typical such time waster was Sarah from Twickenham, who kept me hanging for a year to prevent me from selling to anyone else in her area, then bought off someone else who was more expensive.

  ‘You’ve got too much stock,’ had been her lame excuse. ‘I haven’t got time to look through it all anymore.’

  Finally, there were the rude bastards. Not just ‘rep’ callers, but people who enjoyed insulting me and watching me suffer. People like Doug in Cheltenham, who ‘helped’ me reverse my van into a brand new Jag, then jumped up and down in the back of the van until the Jag’s front bumper fell off.

  ‘You really shouldn’t have done that!’ Doug cried gleefully as police and traffic wardens swarmed around me.

  That left about 40 customers with whom I could deal with and keep my self-respect. I gave respect to all my suppliers in India, no matter how often they let me down. So why shouldn’t I insist on it for myself?

  The shopkeeper who gave me the most respect, and who I had the most respect for, was Martin in Norwich. Martin had so many things on the go at once – running the oldest head shop in the country (founded 1971), refurbishing the oldest house in Norwich (built on the castle ruins), conducting the oldest choir in the oldest church in the city, and being himself the oldest hippy going – that I was impressed. I had been impressed ever since our very first meeting, when Martin had dragged me up to the roof of his shop and shown me all his weed plants.

  A little old lady on the opposite roo
f had shouted over, ‘Hey Martin! Have you got any more of that wacky backy?’

  Martin had ruffled his mad shock of bushy hair and admitted to me that he supplied all the little old ladies round there. He then emptied my van into the street, stuffed half the contents into a mass of bin liners, gave me a wad of neatly-folded cash, and insisted I smoke some of his special ‘home grown’ grass. After that, he had taken me down into an ancient crypt in the cellar of his shop, given me a lit candle, and told me to meditate on the silence of the place. Unfortunately, I was so wasted by then I couldn’t even hold the candle, let alone ‘feel the silence.’ But that hadn’t mattered. Nor had it mattered when Martin insisted that I make friends with his hyperactive poodle, Muffin. All I had seen was Martin’s generous spirit, his spontaneous desire to share all that he had with a virtual stranger.

  Muffin wasn’t really Martin’s poodle; it belonged to his live-in girlfriend, Nikki, but the animal never left Martin’s side. And every time I visited, I had to play handball with the highly-strung pooch just to stop it from jumping up and down all over my stock. The only time Muffin actually behaved was when Madge visited with me, and the dog ran off with some of her post-hysterectomy Prozac. Nikki had been furious, but Martin was secretly delighted.

  ‘Have you got any more of those pills?’ he whispered. ‘I haven’t slept so well in years!’

  Up until now I had tailored my prices according to how much I liked my customers. It was something I had picked up in India, where the motto was: ‘Nice customer, good price. Less nice customer, less good price.’

  Martin, who couldn’t be nicer, got the best prices of all. But at the end of ’98 I stopped giving good prices to anyone. This had nothing to do with the recession, which was nearly over, and everything to do with Sharon, the brassy owner of a shop in Poole. She it was who asked me a question I had never been asked before.