by Karan Bajaj
Murali and Manu paid no such obeisance to the global officers, instead lambasting the unsuspecting foreign directors for corporate malpractices and racism. ‘Jigar, I can’t understand why Shivam Chemicals pay so much lip service to respecting diversity and being a true multinational. We don’t even have an Indian running the Indian operations of the company, leave alone an Indian in a high position at the company’s global headquarters,’ Murali said.
I squirmed, wishing he would shut up. But Manu picked up. ‘I agree. It’s going to take another fifty years for Westerners to realize that Indians are not just call-centre operators who help fix toilets and ovens, but can actually manage companies pretty well.’
‘Harvard and Wharton are crap,’ said Murali irrelevantly. ‘Do you know statistically it’s about a hundred times more difficult to get into the IIM?’ He thumped his chest, literally and figuratively. ‘Jigar. We have suffered.’
Indeed, I thought, his suffering was as apparent as the blue colour of the Cosmopolitan in his hand. I sank further in my seat. I knew they were talking nonsense and just trying to be provocative. But the crew of foreigners listened with rapt attention. More drunkenness and random cries of ‘Desi rocks!’
Anne, director of the company’s huge soap business in France, finally asked, ‘What is “desi ”? I keep hearing that word from you guys.’
Murali elected to reply. ‘Jigar. It’s a term Indians used to describe themselves, sometimes affectionately, but mostly derogatively. You know why we use it derogatively?’ He was itching to answer yet another unasked question. ‘It is because Indians are the biggest racists. We hate each other—north Indians hate south Indians, Bengalis hate Punjabis, resident Indians hate non-resident Indians, upper castes hate lower castes, Marwaris hate Parsis, Hindus hate Muslims, everyone hates everyone, but we all cohabit and together blame the West for racism.’ That made no sense at all since he had just blamed the global officers for being white supremacists and discriminating against Indians.
The conversation then drifted to poverty, illiteracy, imperialist exploitation and the conspiracy against India, with Murali and Manu alternately blaming Britain and the US, and suddenly Pakistan, for all the country’s troubles. To their credit, the directors took no offence at all. The party finally disbanded in the wee hours of the morning and we made our way to our rooms in the elegant hotel where the company had graciously put us up.
Murali, totally hammered by now, hugged me before stumbling to his room. ‘You are the best man. Jigar. You are game for everything, always.’ It reminded me of something Sarkar had once said, and I knew there was a principle here somewhere, but by then I was too smashed to figure it out.
I glanced in the giant mirror in my room and noticed my bloodshot eyes. I abstractly wondered whether I was developing a drinking problem. I decided to reflect on it over a beer from the mini-bar. It was pretty weak, so I decided to have two. I really didn’t have a problem yet, I eventually decided over a shot of the delicious Jamaican rum they had stocked up in the refrigerator. True alcoholics probably never mixed their drinks. If they were addicts, they would probably like to get high on the same stuff every time, wouldn’t they? I felt relieved and poured some Scotch in my glass in celebration, and didn’t realize when I finally passed out on the sofa.
The rest of the week passed without incident—tepid orientation lectures, drunken evenings, hung-over mornings, apologetic phone calls to Vinod and Sarkar, broken promises to myself to be less self-centred and judgemental. Soon, I would be heading to Benares for the internship, to run the Shivam Chemicals sales team for the region. I had tried to find out more about what ‘running’ a sales team in India meant, chiefly what I was supposed to do there, but nobody could give me any clear answers. I realized this wasn’t going to be anything like the structured investment banking internships I was used to. There would be no action plans, projects or deliverables—it was the Wild, Wild West out there. The only certainty was that there was a sales number to hit every month for Shivam’s entire product line-up—soaps, detergents, shampoos, toilet goods, perfumes, deodorants, sanitary napkins—and it was left to you to achieve that. You could watch porn all day in the company’s guest house or you could be out in the mean streets peddling your goods from morning to night. No one would know or care as long as you hit your month-end sales target.
Hoping I would have some company in Benares, I had asked Murali where he would be based. ‘Hey man, I got lucky. I’m being sent to Bangalore to handle the company’s foray into iced tea. Jigar. Couldn’t have asked for anything better. You must tell me about all your local hangouts in Bangalore. What about you, what did you get? Delhi?’
When I told him where I was headed, Murali went ballistic. ‘Benares! Ha ha! You’ll be so fucked, man, just wait and see. It’s the world’s dirtiest, most miserably crowded city. Hey, Manu, he is going to Benares, yaar. How like these idiots to send the only foreigner in the batch to Benares while the rest of us go to big cities. Jigar!’
I called up Mom and Dad.
‘Beta, when will this foolishness end?’ Dad said. ‘We didn’t raise you to spend your life lying on the ghats of Benares. Soon all the privileges you take for granted will go away, you know. Goldman Sachs won’t want you back, and you know how Wall Street is—once Goldman drops you, no one will want you. Stop chasing your ghosts all over India. You can still come back now if you want.’
I called up Sarkar and Vinod. Sarkar said it would be lawless and violent. ‘Be careful there. Those bastards, they can steal your dick and you won’t even realize it is missing.’ He didn’t care to explain who ‘those bastards’ were. Armed with these optimistic, encouraging words of wisdom I made my way to Benares with half a mind to buy a one-way ticket to Manhattan instead.
*
I needn’t have worried. Despite being crowded and anarchic, or perhaps because of it, Benares turned out to be the quintessential Indian experience, full of contradictions that I had in mind when I left the safe environs of Manhattan. I lived alone in a bedroom at the nondescript company guest house, but found solace in the teeming crowds of pigs and pedestrians that abounded in the busy street outside. I vowed to read ancient Hindu philosophical and mythological texts, but defaulted to reading Letters from the Penthouse when the Upanishads became too much to crack. I enjoyed the absolute, perfect isolation of living in a city where I knew no one and no one knew me, but sought refuge in writing long, elaborate letters to Mom and Dad, Vinod, Sarkar and Peter. I jogged odd times in the day and night, sometimes to avoid the crowds, and sometimes to catch them at their most crowded.
I spent many evenings watching the daily aarti on the banks, mesmerized by the lights cast by the thousands of lamps on the water and the sound of devotional songs sung by impassioned devotees. They have so little, I thought every time I heard them, yet they have so much to thank God about. And here I am, a rich, fat, selfish bastard who has everything but can’t stop complaining. Everything but happiness, I would remind myself. But what is happiness, and why does it continue to mock me? I have never been a religious person but the mystical aartis did rouse something in me, and I desperately wanted to believe in the existence of a higher truth than the one I knew.
The banks of the Ganga provided their fair share of bizarre experiences as well. One night as I sat staring transfixed at a funeral pyre long after the crowds had dispersed for the night, I heard a sudden movement from the pyre. Benares has a reputation for being a dangerous city at night, and Vinod had forewarned me that taking midnight strolls on the ghats was begging for trouble. But I’d smoked some strong stuff and was acutely lethargic. The abrupt movement which had attracted my attention seemed to be caused by a thin, white ghost emerging from somewhere around the pyre. His tall, angular body was covered with ash, and he seemed to be gliding towards me. I wondered briefly whether I was hallucinating because of the marijuana, but quickly dismissed the possibility—I had smoked way more before.
He stood beside me now. ‘Do yo
u have a cigarette?’ he asked in perfect English, with a trace of an American accent. Clearly, he sounded more like a man than a ghost. But then, how does one know how ghosts sound, I thought? My heartbeat returned to normal, though, as I looked closely. It was a breed I recognized well—an American pothead hoping unsuccessfully to discover missing pieces of his soul in India. I saw one in the mirror every day, after all. I offered him my new favourite cigarette brand, India Kings.
‘Ah, I like it,’ he said after taking a small puff. We kept silent for a while—what small talk do you make with an ash-smeared white American yogi who just appeared out of a funeral pyre? ‘Where are you from?’ he said finally. Uh-huh. For me this wasn’t the easiest conversation starter. I decided to stick to Manhattan for this conversation.
‘Well, then we are from the same country,’ he said. ‘I was born in Texas, and even worked as an investment banker in Manhattan for a while. Great city. I tried to have a bite off the Big Apple, but I guess I couldn’t digest it.’ I looked to see if he was pulling my leg but he seemed serious. I wondered if I would become like him one day—streaked with ash, meeting fellow confused souls on the ghats and telling them about my banking days. That would be a sad end to my odyssey, I thought. But then, maybe not. This dude’s eyes shone with obvious pleasure and contentment. He looked… he looked almost happy, although it could well have been the ethereal lights from the remaining diyas.
Still, I was intrigued. He obviously knew something I didn’t know. I racked my brains wondering how to sustain the conversation. He appeared completely comfortable and calm in the silence.
Finally, for fear of losing him, I asked, ‘Pardon me for asking but I thought I saw you come out from behind the funeral pyre. Was I mistaken or were you praying there or something?’
‘Or something,’ he replied vaguely. I looked at him puzzled. I wasn’t expecting him to be evasive. What could you possibly be hiding when you are buck-naked and smeared with ash? ‘What were you doing there if I may ask?’ I pressed, expecting to hear about some complicated Indian prayer that helps achieve salvation.
He replied nonchalantly, ‘I was hunting for flesh. Fingers, to be specific. Those are my weakness, very delicious. I finally found some that were not charred by the fire, and am carrying them with me now. Do you want to see one?’ I was stunned, convinced he was either a psychopath or a lunatic or both. I was planning my escape now. He must have sensed my panic because he continued calmly, ‘Look, I don’t expect you to understand—your sphere of comprehension is very different. I’m a part of the Aghoree sect, which you probably haven’t heard of. Don’t worry, we are not going to sacrifice you or kill you or something.’
I was hardly reassured. ‘What is the Aghoree sect?’ I asked, curious despite myself.
He replied, ‘Aghorees wander from place to place looking for human remains because that is all we eat. We believe that everything that comes from God is an expression of his love and beauty. By feasting on the darkest, most repulsive of His creations, charred human remains, we show our devotion to all creation.’
By now, I was shivering with fear, and my terror grew when I saw one more Aghoree baba, his body smeared with ash as well, walking towards us. Maybe he had a toe fetish or a tongue fetish. I didn’t care to find out. ‘Jai Shambu Baba. I must take your leave now. It is late—you can keep the rest of the cigarettes,’ I said. The white baba smiled an eerie smile as I almost ran from there, convinced that I had encountered a crazed cult of lunatics. Serves me right for wandering around stoned so late in the night, I thought to myself as I rode through the empty streets, trying hard to stay calm and not fall off my bike.
Back at home, I shakily downed several pegs of Scotch to calm my nerves. Soon, curiosity got the better of me and I went on the internet, connecting via the excruciatingly slow dial-up that I had installed in the room. I searched with various combinations of Aghoree and found that the sect was concentrated around Benares because of the easy availability of human remains there. In fact, the white Aghoree baba I had just met had a couple of websites dedicated to him. He was a minor celebrity whose life had been the subject of a grotesquely titled documentary called An American Cannibal in Benares. I would have made a particularly good dinner, I thought, since I had become really fat on rich Indian food in the last year. For all my confusions, ending as a value meal (zero procurement cost) for a bunch of ash-smeared yogis was hardly the solution I was seeking. My nocturnal wanderings did slow down significantly after the incident, although it didn’t make me stop getting stoned at the ghats. Only now, I did so in broad daylight and full public view, the fear of flesh-eating babas far outweighing that of being sodomized in a prison cell.
Apart from such sudden, freak encounters though, my days were happy for the most part. To my surprise, even my work delighted me. Until then, I had rarely thought of work as an enterprise anyone could be truly passionate about, but somehow I fell in love with the mad, bad world of retail in India.
At first, my team of hardened salesmen was openly sceptical about my presence and had mockingly nicknamed me ‘management’ (another one to add to my Indian collection—‘firangi’, ‘toilet paper’ and the worst of the lot, ‘Dallas’, from the 1978 porn movie Debbie Does Dallas). I was young, with no sales experience at all, and spoke with a funny accent that they had heard only in the porn movies they saw regularly in a ramshackle movie hall that specialized in screening, illegally of course, the latest hard porn from the US. In a fit of sexual frustration, I saw a movie there once with my sales team. It was disguised as a religious film and devotional songs played in the background as they showed a multiracial orgy involving black, white, Hispanic and Asian actors in hapless, frenzied copulation. My fascinated team assailed me with the usual reactions: ‘Sir, you from America, you must have done this all. You live really good life’, ‘Sir, what is the maximum number you have done in one time?’
New management trainees came from the IIM all the time. They organized team meetings, practised the latest jargon on the increasingly cynical team—‘have a big vision’, ‘deconstruct the problem’, ‘broaden your perspective’—came up with new, impractical motivational methods like team anthems every morning, and mostly busied themselves e-mailing pictures to the company’s headquarters taking all the credit for their team’s fledgling successes. They sincerely applied all the fluff they learnt at business school, but rarely hit the dirt and grime of the market, almost never accompanying the sales guys on their daily calls to the retailers. After all, they had gone to India’s top B-school to live the high life. Wasn’t it enough of a sacrifice already to be in the dilapidated two-room sales office on a street where you invariably ended up stepping on piles of dog, pig and cow shit, which immediately took the shine away from your newly acquired Gucci shoes (and from life overall, if you came to think of it)?
My team’s experiences with B-school trainees made me a persona non grata from the moment I arrived. I overheard many snide comments about myself, comments I was meant to overhear, such as, ‘Looks like they have run out of Indians to send. Let’s see how quickly we break this bastard.’
Uncharacteristically, this rejection didn’t faze me. I knew I would be different from my predecessors, not because of any great desire to excel, but because perversely, the dirt and the grime of the market was what attracted me the most.
Soon, I would go on to enjoy the trip of riding my bike stoned in the crowded lanes, spending hours meeting wholesalers and retailers and diligently observing the well-oiled, complex machinery of retail in India. I would watch fascinated as my sales team negotiated with retailers trying desperately to meet their month-end targets. ‘Seth, I’m finding it difficult to meet this month’s number. Can you take an extra case of Kalyan Sanitary Napkins please?’ Wholesaler replies: ‘Motherfucker, last time’s extra cases are still around. You had given the same spiel then. First get those out.’ Salesman: ‘Just take some extra for this month please. I will give you extra cash the moment I get next m
onth’s display budget. You can send Bittoo to Thailand.’
Hmm… so this is where the company’s carefully allocated money for ‘in-store displays’ went—funding a Benares wholesaler’s delinquent son’s sexual romp in Bangkok. I felt sorry for the suits, who spent hours agonizing and intellectualizing and creating presentations over display-budget allocations in the corporate headquarters. I would see small-town retailers queue up to buy our stuff from the wholesalers, negotiating for every paisa in the vilest language possible: ‘Sir, isn’t there any scheme or discount for us? I buy so much from you, and you never give me anything special.’ Wholesaler turns his back and shows his ass. ‘Why don’t you take my ass? That will be the only special thing which can satisfy you now. I have gone bankrupt giving you schemes, and yet you keep asking me every time for more and more offers. I can’t give a paisa more. I have squeezed everything I can from my own margin.’
Small retailer knows how to play this big game. He says quietly, ‘Sahib, Taureef wholesaler is giving a new 12+1 scheme (one pack free with 12 packs). I might have to go there now.’ Wholesaler: ‘Abey, that Taureef is a behenchod. How many years have you been doing business with me? He is an upstart who won’t be around tomorrow. What will you do then? I will fuck you then, and won’t even let you buy from me, leave alone give you a scheme.’
The bargaining would go on through the day, each and every rupee being bitterly fought for. Observing these negotiations, one would have thought that a typical wholesaler in India is a cash-strapped destitute. In reality though, being a big wholesaler is an extremely lucrative proposition, and many of the wholesalers I dealt with in Benares were actually closet millionaires. Driving a hard bargain and saving every cent they could was in their blood. Not unlike the investment bankers I worked with on Wall Street, money was the wholesaler’s life and getting a good deal their only real dharma.