Rupee Millionaires

by Frank Kusy

  ‘Do you know what you are, Mr Kusy?’ he asked, practically tittering with anticipation. ‘You are a crim-in-al!’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I have receipts for everything!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Missal indulgently. ‘Very low value receipts which cover only half the jewellery you bring in. Then there is matter of the Indian silver, the thirty kilos which you ask your wife to smuggle through. They have no receipts at all.’

  ‘I didn’t ask her to smuggle anything!’ I said hotly. ‘That stuff didn’t need receipts. I’d already paid duty on it before I exchanged it back in India!’

  ‘And you didn’t think to apply for a re-importation certificate? Your agent did not tell you this?’

  Well, no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t said anything, because I hadn’t thought to tell him what I was planning to do. It was, as they say, a fair cop. I had no option but to hold up my hands and let Mr Missal do his worst—which was very bad indeed. With a hungry grin he confiscated half my Thai silver, and all of Bobby’s silver, then fined me £2000 for importing counterfeit Nike and other brand name jewellery. To top it all off, he put a black mark on my name, so that whenever I flew in from Asia again, Mr Missal would be there in person to be my very own judge and jury. In the background, I heard Tony groan at the tough sentence.

  All this, however, was nothing compared to my reception back home. As soon as I turned the key to my front door, I was confronted by all seven furies rolled into one: an aggrieved, red-faced Madge in full Doberman attack mode. She proceeded to give me such a tongue-lashing I felt whipped raw. She had been grilled for two hours by Mr Missal, she had never been so humiliated in her life, she had almost lost her job and gone to jail, and it was all my fault!

  I waited, stunned, until she finally ran out steam. Then I watched her stomp up the stairs, gathering up two mildly protesting cats as she went, and barricade herself in the master bedroom. At the bottom of the stairs was a note. Its message was short and sweet. ‘Thank you for nearly destroying my life,’ it read. ‘Don’t involve me with your stupid business ever again. Go away and stay away. Furiously, Madge.’

  That didn’t leave much room for negotiation, but I had to try anyway. I attempted to explain myself through the locked door, but that didn’t work. Then I slipped a piece of chicken roll under the door, hoping to provoke a fight between the cats, but that didn’t work either. All that achieved was two airborne pussies chucked in my face and the door slammed back shut again. The only thing that did work, after hours of persuasion, was the promise of a five star holiday to the destination of her choice. Even then, it took weeks to calm her down properly and for me to ‘learn my lesson’.

  In the meantime, I was facing total ruin. With three-quarters of my silver confiscated and my credit card spent to the max, I was seriously considering bankruptcy. I phoned American George for advice and was told, ‘You’ve got some stuff left, haven’t you? Just triple your prices, man! That’s what I would do!’ But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t punish my customers for what was, after all, my own stupid mistake. So I did the only other thing left to me. I sold all that I had in quick order, and bet everything on one final roll of the dice: one last trip to Asia. This time, I promised myself, I would be a good boy and play by the rules. If I fell into the hands of Mr Missal again, I would give him no reason, not even the tiniest missing receipt, to punish me.

  But fate is a fickle thing. As it turned out, I gave Mr Missal so much ammunition, he could have had me locked up for years.

  Chapter 32

  A Very Bad Year

  There comes a point in every wholesaler’s life when he feels like throwing in the towel, when he thinks to himself: ‘It’s been a good game, I’ve had a fun run, but now it’s time to check out.’

  2001 was a bad year for me. A very bad year. Just as I was licking my wounds from Mr Missal, just as I was getting ready to travel again and recoup my losses, I received a letter from the Inland Revenue. It contained a bill for £40,000. The bill belonged to Spud, who had somehow managed to transfer his own business failure to my account. As a final act of retribution for me ‘deserting’ him three years before, he had managed to convince the IRS that I was still his partner when he went bankrupt, and I was therefore liable for all his debts. This worked—despite the fact that we had never had a written partnership agreement, and I had set up my own company months before Spud went down the drain.

  I was fed up with paying Spud’s bills. I had already paid off his staff, most of his suppliers in India, even his solicitor and his accountant. I was blowed if I was going to pay Spud’s whopping tax bill as well. But what else could I do? Spud had cleverly sealed my fate (back in ’98) by tricking me into paying the first six instalments of his bill, then paying nothing himself. The whole bill automatically became mine, and I had a feeling the reek of this particular stink bomb would not go away for many, many years.

  *

  Then, tipped off by Spud, the Inland Revenue slapped a court order on my house in a final attempt to reclaim their forty grand, and threatened to repossess it if I didn’t pay up.

  I made a desperate call to Stavros. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know you’re my accountant, not my solicitor, but what would you do to get out of this mess? I’m about to end up on the street!’

  There was a long pause at the other end of the phone—so long that I thought he had been cut off—then Stavros asked,

  ‘How is your health?’

  I blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, as far as I know, they can’t do you if you’re sick.’

  ‘How sick?’

  ‘Very sick.’

  I gave a pained smirk. I was very sick. I just hoped somebody would believe me.

  Four days later Stavros’s wife—who was a solicitor and who did believe me—rolled me into the main office of the Inland Revenue in a wheelchair. I hadn’t slept in three days and was a helpless, gurgling wreck.

  ‘How dare you threaten my client in this condition?’ she berated the tax officer, but he was unmoved. I had sixty days to pay up, he informed her, or the bailiffs would move in.

  Spud. Wherever I went, whatever I did, Spud was determined to destroy me. Trying to blow up my first house was one thing. Telling the taxman my new address so they could seize the second was quite another. What other schemes might this little maniac have in store?

  Thrashing about in my bed, driven half-crazy by growing paranoia, I began taking Valiums on a nightly basis.

  *

  Madge was not amused by this situation. Not amused at all.

  ‘You’ve got 60 days before we lose the house?’ she screeched hysterically. ‘Well, I’mnot paying that bill – it’s your mess!’

  ‘Not really,’ I countered. ‘I got tricked into it.’

  ‘I told you not to trust that bald little thug. Only an idiot would have believed him! Oh, and what happened to the self-professed cool dude I fell in love with? Drugged up to the eyeballs with sleeping tablets, you’re turning into a zombie!’

  Drastic measures were called for.

  I don’t know what came over me, I hated to think what would happen if Madge ever found out, but I rang up a psychiatrist, showed him my most recent hair transplant scar, and said, ‘I’m not safe on the streets. Look, I just picked a fight with the missus and she banged me round the back of the head with a bottle!’

  He got me admitted to hospital in a flash.

  *

  Let no-one tell you that a drug rehab unit is a picnic. It isn’t. The moment I got in, I thought ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ A dozen or so shadowy figures surveyed me suspiciously from the dark, dimly lit communal recreation area. All of them wearing dressing gowns, all of them smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Oi, mate!’ called out one of them. ‘What you in for?’

  ‘Sedatives,’ I replied, and they all laughed.

  That was when I realised I was in the wrong place. This wasn’t a nice, cosy holiday camp for Valium sufferers. It w
as in fact a hard-line smack ward, full of recovering heroin addicts. And the funny thing was, I knew half of them. They’d come from the methadone clinic down the bottom of my road, and I’d been giving them money for years.

  Nights were the worst. That’s when the communal dormitory turned into a living hell of snoring, hallucinating, screaming psychos. They’d been issued their daily ration of methadone earlier in the day, and it hadn’t been enough. I jammed my earplugs in, to drown out their nightmares, but I couldn’t sleep. My body, pumped up with enough sedatives each night to tranquillise a full-grown pony, was suddenly very much awake.

  I lay a prisoner in my bed for hours, and when I did finally drop off, I woke up to find a razor at my throat.

  ‘If you snore one more time,’ said a ghostly voice, ‘I’m going to slit your throat.’

  Well, that did it. I didn’t sleep at all after that.

  On the fifth night, I finally broke down. I’d held myself together up till then with constant chanting – hours of it, in the dining room, the shower, even the toilet. The staff got so pissed off with me – especially when some of the other inmates signed up and it became a general pray-in – that they ‘forgot’ to give me my medication. Result? I went into rapid cold turkey withdrawal and was found, that awful fifth night, a crying, hysterical wreck on the carpet.

  They quickly gave me something to calm me down, but the damage was done. I would never sleep well again.

  *

  Madge welcomed me home with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had been in that place just long enough (two weeks) to qualify as a bona fide recovering addict – the taxman tore up the court order and the bill bounced straight back to Spud. On the other, I had returned to her in a lot worse condition than I had gone in.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go back to work again?’ she said, concerned.

  ‘It’s not a matter of wanting to,’ I gurgled unhappily from my sick-bed. ‘It’s a matter of having to.’

  Chapter 33

  On being a Bad Buddhist

  It was a Friday night that I got nicked.

  My mobile rang, and it was Spud. ‘Check your glove compartment,’ he said mysteriously, then he was gone.

  I was in the van, driving home from Sidcup, and nearly lost the wheel.

  Reaching into the glove compartment, I discovered a pack of ecstasy pills and promptly did lose the wheel. I plunged off the pavement and into some old lady’s rose garden. To top it all off, a police squad car materialised out of nowhere and arrested me. ‘Driving in possession of Class A narcotics,’ they cautioned me as they wrestled the pills out of my sweaty fist. They left the van where it was, with the old lady still hopping around on her decimated roses, and drove me down to Bexleyheath police station.

  I was well acquainted with this police station. It was situated exactly where my old bedsit had been five years before, so it almost felt like coming home. I even suggested that I might have the cell where my old room had been, but that only earned me an ‘Are you taking the piss?’ and a thump across the shoulder.

  Spud had obviously set me up by ringing the police and leaving an anonymous tip. But I couldn’t prove it. They had me bang to rights, and I was looking at a nasty little jail sentence. Possibly even a nasty big jail sentence, since there were eleven pills in that packet. Anything over ten meant I was ‘dealing’ rather than casual using.

  What saved me was all the crap in my pockets: all the business cards, tat souvenirs, diesel receipts, fag butts, congealed sweets, and assorted loose change gathered down the course of the years.

  ‘How many pockets have you got?’ asked the policeman, itemizing all my loot. He was scowling, trying to detach a wad of dead gum from a faded holographic picture of Krishna.

  ‘Nineteen,’ I said brightly.

  He groaned and told me to go home.

  *

  I flew into Bangkok at the end of September 2001. My right buttock was paralysed from tromping through the mud at Glastonbury, followed by six weeks on the road selling in England and Wales. All that lifting and bending over the course of the past ten years was finally getting to me. I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, even whether I should be keeping it up. My whole back was a mass of accumulated scar tissue, and unless I learnt to slow down and look after myself, my days as a travelling salesman could soon be over.

  I limped off the plane looking like John Wayne, lurching forwards from my hips with my jaws tightly clenched. They had given me an orthopaedic chair on the plane to help me sleep, but this had provided only temporary relief. By the time I reached the Amari hotel in Sukhumvit, I was a cripple once more.

  Fortunately, funds being low, I was only in Thailand for three days. Even more fortunately, I found everything I needed in one shop, barely two hours after touchdown. The shop was located in the Narayana Phand complex, opposite the World Trade Centre, and it was owned by a fat, smiley lady named Anne. She had all the copy Nike, Adidas, and Playboy earrings which Mr Missal had earlier confiscated, together with matching rings, pendants, and bracelets. No, I wasn’t being stupid when I bought them again. I had a plan. The plan was to take all this counterfeit stuff to India and send it home from there, mixed in with Bobby’s jewellery.

  Good plan. Sort of.

  The only thing Anne did not have, and that went for all the Thai shops, was any good stones, either precious or semi-precious. I would have to go back to India for those. I knew by now that to get a good cross-section of jewellery, both plain silver and silver with stones, I would have to travel straight from Bangkok to Delhi.

  I returned to the Amari around noon, practically paralysed with pain. The final blow to my back had been brought on by a horrifically dangerous tuk-tuk ride. Tuk-tuks are the most common mode of transport in Bangkok. They are also the most hazardous. They resemble the auto-rickshaws of India, but have a lot more zip—and a lot less regard for the law. My driver, totally ignoring my howls of pain, sped me home via five hotel car parks, two shopping malls, and more private forecourts and backstreets than I thought possible. In Bangkok, I thought, one didn’t buy a ride. One bought a lottery ticket.

  With no other choice, I called the hotel doctor: a fat, confident individual named Dr Ratt, who promptly came upstairs and gave me a shot in the bum. Minutes later my central nervous system shut down, and I couldn’t move off the bed. Then, for some reason I will never understand, Dr Ratt began stuffing me full of bananas. A large plate of bananas sat in my room, and the doctor made me eat every one of them.

  Just before Dr Ratt left, a bellboy appeared with a fresh bowl of fruit. This was quickly shoved down my throat as well. I felt like a malnourished monkey being force-fed an orchard. The bowl contained a lot of one particular fruit I had never seen before, and when I asked what it was I was told, ‘These are sort of cantaloupes. Very good for you!’ Moments before falling asleep, I spotted a large cockroach perched on the single remaining cantaloupe. It was welcome to it.

  The following morning, to my great relief, the pain was almost gone. The good doctor’s injection seemed to have worked. I abandoned all thoughts of going home in a wheelchair and headed out shopping again.

  September appeared to be a good time to visit Thailand. The shops were full of new stock, since there were a lot of other wholesalers around, and though it was supposed to be the end of the rainy season the weather was surprisingly dry and cool. By contrast, I couldn’t help thinking, it hadn’t stopped raining in England since early May.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I thought, smiling to myself. ‘Maybe we’ve borrowed their monsoon!’

  I stopped smiling when I returned to my hotel. A fresh bowl of fruit sat in my room, and it was swarming with cockroaches. One of the creatures even peered inquisitively at me when I was on the toilet. I rang for help, but the maid who answered my distress call did not understand my predicament. I had to get down on all fours and wave my fingers around my head like antennae before she finally saw the light.

  ‘Ah, cock-loach kill!’ she annou
nced triumphantly and whipped the offending fruit bowl away into a waiting trolley. Now I knew why Dr Ratt had been so keen that I eat all those bananas.

  Two days later, with all my Thai shopping done, I packed my bags and prepared for the second leg of my journey: India.

  I flew into Delhi at 2am, to find it unexpectedly wet and overcast. My mood matched the weather, owing to severe jet-lag, no sleep in twenty hours, and a long wait in the immigration hall before I got my first fag of the day.

  India was like a mirror, I decided. Through all the years I had arrived upbeat and well-rested, it had reflected back only good stuff: the humour and kindness of the people, the fascinating street-life, and the vivid, romantic scenery. Now that I was down, I was shown its sordid underbelly. So it was, as I drove into the city, that I was struck by the sheer squalor of the place. The sidewalks were a post-apocalyptic bombsite of open sewer holes, ugly mounds of earth, crumbling temples, and a few struggling shrubs bearing the logo ‘Protect our Trees.’

  ‘What a shit-hole!’ I thought to myself. ‘How can people live like this?’

  But live like this they did, for in between all the rubble I could see dark, shadowy figures sleeping on the pavements – beggars, slum dwellers, rickshaw wallahs – as well as all manner of recumbent livestock, from dogs and cows to ponies and pigs. No cats though. They probably had too much sense to walk the streets.

  Even as I checked into the Oberoi, even as Anil shook my hand in welcome, I could not shake a gathering sense of gloom. I remembered, for some strange reason, a letter sent me years back from an old friend named Peter, who had castigated me for my lack of pity for India. ‘Have you no sense of compassion or outrage at the unimaginable suffering most folk out there have to endure?’ he had written. ‘When I first returned, I could not eat a meal for weeks without feeling guilty that we should have so much and they so little!’