The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  There were carefully produced graphics on these websites, with towers thrusting out from the flat map of India, their different heights announcing the amount and concentration of personal wealth in the country. Bombay, now known as Mumbai, had the tallest tower, which made sense. There, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani (who, in a piece of news concocted by the Indian media, had become the world’s richest man in October 2007, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) planned to build a skyscraper in the most expensive area of the city. Sixty storeys high, it would have just twenty-seven floors because of its vertiginously high ceilings. And the only residents in the building apart from the Ambani family would be their retinue of 600 servants.

  A little over forty years ago, the New Yorker writer Ved Mehta visited the country of his birth and wrote a piece called ‘The Richest Man in India’. This august personage, according to Mehta, was not an industrialist or a politician. He was the Nizam of Hyderabad, a southern ruler who had been stripped of his monarchy and much of his wealth by the Indian state in the years following independence in 1947. Although the Nizam was a political nonentity by the time Mehta wrote about him, he was still reputed to be the richest man in India and one of the richest in the world. Leafing through the pages of an official biography, Mehta found the Nizam described as ‘a national asset of incalculable value’, especially in a modernizing India whose ‘most crying need is liquid investable capital’.

  The passage of four decades has seen to it that India is awash in liquid investable capital, if only in select areas, and the Nizam appears even more of an oddity now than he did to Mehta at the time. A five-foot-three, ninety-pound waif who took his meals on a tin plate while squatting on a mat, the Nizam’s relation to his personal wealth was royally idiosyncratic, supremely indifferent to portfolio diversification or conspicuous consumption.

  Every age gets the rich people it deserves. In contemporary India, the new rich are the anti-Nizams. They are people in a hurry, expressing fevered modes of consumption, flaunting gargantuan appetites meant to astonish and dazzle the rest of us. They acquire things that are better, bigger and more exclusive, and while coolly expecting public admiration, they also attempt to carve out their own affluent nations, towers from the tops of which float prayers in a strange language, expressing desires that most of us can’t comprehend. This is because there is a paradox at the heart of such affluence, where each rich individual, while being celebrated for his or her wealth, also expects to be something other than his or her wealth. People are the amount of money they make, but even in the world of the Indian rich, that is no longer enough.

  This paradox of wealth became evident to me one evening at the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a formerly colonial establishment sited next to the prime minister’s residence. I had been taken there by friends amused by my interest in India’s new money. After we parked the car and walked past empty rooms with high ceilings, and long corridors featuring sepia tints of colonial clubgoers, we entered a crowded and noisy bar. From our corner table, chosen for its sweeping view, I watched the generously proportioned Delhi residents – business-people, civil servants and politicians – consume subsidized food and liquor, ringing little bells to call waiters to their overflowing tables. It was Thursday, a dance night at the club, and as the evening progressed, a sizeable contingent of the city’s youth appeared on the scene, sending the middle-aged men in the crowd into a frenzied search for prospective partners among the young women in tight jeans.

  The man who approached our table soon after the dancing began possessed a shock of white hair, a bushy moustache and two gold chains under his green polo shirt. My friends introduced us, but it was hard for me to make out what he did above the rendition of ‘Hava Nagila’ from the club band.

  ‘I work for the world,’ he said.

  It seemed an especially unlikely claim in that setting, and I felt compelled to ask, ‘Yes, but what exactly do you do for the world?’

  ‘Ambassador,’ he said. ‘I am an ambassador for the world.’

  He looked at my friends, looked at me and smiled at his private joke. Then he passed me his business card, which read:

  THE WORLD

  Abhai Varma

  Ambassador

  www.aboardtheworld.com

  The World was a cruise ship sailing across the globe, registered in the Bahamas and managed by a Miami-based company. Varma wanted to impress upon me just how exclusive this cruise ship was. People bought an apartment on the ship – apartment was the word he emphasized with some violence, just as he had emphasized world and ambassador before – for half a million dollars, at the very least. The money covered all expenses incurred on board, and the amount of money paid determined the number of votes residents had, who then, through the democratic exercise of their voting powers, determined the itinerary of the ship. When people went ashore, they partied, paying out of their own pockets for the pleasures of terra firma, but they tended to live more quietly on the ship, dabbling in refined pleasures like haute cuisine and art. Americans formed a large part of the contingent, but there were many Indians as well, and Varma’s role was to match the right people from the Indian subcontinent to this floating signifier of his. The World was a cruise ship, its ambassador a salesman.

  As for the clients, those who bought a piece of the world, Varma was both guarded about them and insistent about their exclusivity. He wouldn’t give me the names of his clients, usually picked out from marketing lists compiled by companies like American Express, but he said that he had to see that people wouldn’t board The World and start talking about the amount of money they had made.

  I understood why Varma was concerned that people might talk about money on board the ship. India was full of people talking about money. Just half an hour earlier, in the men’s room, I had passed a drunken group listening to a man who was saying, ‘All the people I went to school with, they became doctors, engineers. I’m the one who became an ordinary garment exporter.’ He waited a beat before delivering his punchline. ‘I earn a hundred times more than them,’ he said, producing a burst of appreciative, alcohol-fuelled laughter from his listeners.

  To avoid such situations, Varma encouraged each prospective client to make a short trip on The World at a cost of $1,500 a day. ‘That’s the stage,’ he said, ‘when having dinner with other apartment owners, he’ll learn not to flash his wealth. Everyone around him will be super rich, and they’ll consider him crude if he talks about money. Either he’ll learn to shut up, or he’ll get off at the next port and not come back.’

  Manish was used to rich people who talked about money. He was a pleasant young man, handsome in a generic way and with a veneer of softness that made him good at his business as a cigar dealer. He was one of India’s two cigar importers, insinuating his products into hotels, bars and clubs, serving not only affluent metropolises like Delhi but also the second-tier cities that were full of people he described as ‘aspirational’. Manish started laughing when he talked about these aspirational people, but he was accommodating in every way possible to the whims of his customers. For those in Delhi, he held monthly gatherings, usually sponsored by liquor companies, where men sat around on stuffed leather couches, learning the fine art of cigar smoking in relative privacy and connecting with each other through a dense haze of smoke. But Manish also delivered cigars to the homes of his clients, to business celebrations and wedding parties, ready with suggestions if people were uncertain about which cigars might make the greatest impression on their guests.

  I had gone to see Manish in his shop, a glass-fronted store called ‘Kastro’s Cigars’. From the store, one looked out on to the winding walkways and upscale boutiques of the Santushti Shopping Complex, all of it built to a scale so small as to look like a shopping mall from Legoland. It could have been one of the more expensive retail complexes in America were it not for the fact that the land was owned by the Indian Air Force, and the cigars and designer handbags were being sold only a short walk from an airbase guarded b
y dour soldiers with thick moustaches and big rifles. The rents were subsidized, and the shops were offered only to senior defence personnel and their relatives, or to those with political contacts.

  On the afternoon I visited Manish’s store, we sat by ourselves in the front section. He had one employee, a Mizo woman from the north-eastern part of India dressed smartly in a Western suit. She brought us cappuccinos from a nearby Parsi restaurant and receded into the background, while we lounged on the armchairs, looking out at the shoppers trickling through the boutiques, at heavily jewelled women holding the hands of thickset men, and an ayah with a pushchair following a mother and her friend. Behind us, separated by a picture window and a door, was the temperature-controlled part of the shop where the cigars were kept on partitioned shelves running along one wall. On one side of the shelves were copies of Cigar Aficionado, while on the other end were lockers where customers kept their stock, each locker the distillation of a life.

  Manish’s best customer, the one whose locker held the most expensive cigars – Cohibas, a box of twenty-five selling in Manish’s shop for 27,000 rupees – was someone who never smoked them. They were gifts for bureaucrats and politicians, people who were useful to his business. I could build a personality from that detail, and it was tempting to do so. I thought of the wheeling and dealing the nameless man was involved in: was it my imagination that Manish seemed slightly nervous, a little wary, when we talked about the owner of this particular locker? I thought of the self-control and possibly orthodox social and religious views that kept the man from smoking the cigars, as well as his ruthless ability to direct the gratifications of people useful to him. What vices would such a man have?

  Manish couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me about the vices of this customer, but he had much to say about his other clients. His job, in many ways, was to assuage the insecurities of his rich customers, and he described them to me with anthropological pleasure. There were tycoons who would bargain furiously with him, asking for a 10 per cent discount; there were others who had temporary cash-flow problems and required credit; there were Sikhs who needed their cigars to be smuggled to them so that they would not be seen to be breaking a religious taboo; there were people who asked after their friends, also clients of Manish’s, and then dismissed them as charlatans, dissemblers and criminals; there were men who talked about their marital and sexual problems; and there were those who wanted the handsome young Manish’s approval of the hot mistress or prostitute they had acquired. Like a therapist at a private session, Manish listened to them all, taking care never to smoke cigars in public places so that his clients wouldn’t feel he was competing with them.

  ‘They’re loud and brash because they don’t know how much money they’ve made,’ he said. ‘They don’t know who they are.’ These were men whose self-control was a thin veneer, Manish said. ‘You see such a man walk in aggressively and loudly, look flustered when he realizes that he has to go through a second door to reach the temperature-controlled section, and who closes the second door much too loudly when he finally goes in.’

  A man in his late twenties came into the store, dressed American-style in wrap-around sunglasses, shorts and big white sneakers. Manish immediately became polite and deferential.

  ‘I’ll come back later,’ the customer said, ‘but can I take one of these matchboxes?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Manish said. ‘Take a few,’ he said, scooping them out of the tray and pressing them into the customer’s hand.

  ‘What’s his background?’ I asked after the customer had left.

  ‘Family money,’ Manish said with a touch of derision.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Look at the clothes he was wearing. Too old to be in college but not smart enough to be in university. Doesn’t need to go to work, so he can wander around in shorts on a weekday afternoon.’

  Underneath Manish’s smooth, solicitous manner, there was a resentment about the men he dealt with. He himself had struggled to get to where he was now, but he still had far less money than his clients. We stepped out of the shop and began walking through the complex as Manish told me the story of how he had entered the cigar business. He had wanted to be a pilot, and in order to pursue this objective he had enrolled in a flying school in Kansas. Like many Indians of his class and background, he had noticed almost nothing about America except its business opportunities and what had seemed to him to be an orderly and regulated public life. He had held numerous odd jobs, including at a nightclub, where he observed, with some perplexity, the popularity of cigars. When he came back to India with his pilot’s licence, he apparently couldn’t find a job. Manish’s mother had a shop – this very one – selling imported artificial flowers, and Manish took it over. By his own account, he was drifting and unhappy. He was very close to his mother, with whom he still lived, but estranged from his father, who had been in the air force. Manish began thinking of selling cigars, and so he approached the man who was the only cigar importer in India. This man was much older than Manish and the cigars were simply a sideshow for him. His main business since the sixties had been as an arms dealer.

  Manish entered into an uneasy partnership with the arms dealer, who agreed to supply him with cigars for a very high share of the profits. In 2000, Manish opened what he described as ‘the first cigar lounge in India’. It was at the Park Royal in Nehru Place, the hotel that Arindam used for his company’s events and to which I would return in a few days to attend a leadership session conducted by Arindam. But as Manish started doing well in the cigar business, his partner began demanding an even bigger share of the profits. When Manish tried to talk to him about this, he threatened to cut off the supply.

  The problem with cigars, Manish said, was that they were a controlled luxury commodity. The arms dealer had moved into importing cigars because he was already importing weapons. ‘There is a strong relation between the two,’ Manish said, and in fact, when I met Manish again a couple of years later, he himself had expanded into the ‘security’ business. The fact that rich Indians could afford to smoke Cuban cigars, Manish said, depended on the political situation in Cuba. ‘One hundred and sixty million cigars a year, that’s it, that’s all they produce,’ he said. ‘But there’s been an El Tardes office in Florida for ten years, ready to swing into action when Castro dies.’ When that happened, he said, Americans would move into the Cuban cigar market and that would be the end of smoking Cohibas for many people elsewhere in the world.

  When Manish’s relationship with the arms dealer broke down, he became desperate. He no longer had access to cigars and began calling exporters all over the world to arrange for a fresh source of supply. All the men he contacted refused to do business with him. They were already represented by the arms dealer in India and had no reason to enter into new arrangements with an unknown young man. Manish had very little money and just a couple more numbers to call, one of them belonging to a sheikh in Bahrain. He decided to meet directly with the man. He bought a ticket with the last of his money, flew to Bahrain and met with the sheikh. When the sheikh heard Manish’s story, he was so amused that he agreed to supply him with cigars, even giving him credit at the beginning.

  It was the kind of striving that Manish couldn’t find among his customers. I got the sense that in his mind they were like the arms dealer, coasting along, building on a success that had been present in their lives from the very beginning. They were brash and vulgar on the surface, and cheap and insecure underneath.

  ‘There is a certain kind of man who will walk in and say, “Show me the most expensive cigar you have,” ’ Manish said when we returned to his store. ‘And what I will do right away is relieve the pressure that such a man obviously feels. I’ll say, “Don’t even go for this one.” As soon as I say that and make it seem that the best cigar is not necessarily the most expensive one, he feels released from the need to spend as much money as possible in order to assert himself. I listen to this man and talk to him for a while and then
he’ll tell me what he really wants. “Forget it, yaar,” he’ll say. “I’m going to a party and I just want a long cigar that I can show everyone.” ’

  ‘So what do you do when he says this?’ I asked Manish.

  ‘I tell him that he can buy a seven-inch cigar for fourteen hundred rupees, but he can also buy another seven-inch cigar for four hundred rupees. He’ll happily take the cheaper one. Size is all that matters.’

  5

  One evening in September, I went back to the Royal Ballroom auditorium of the Park Royal Hotel to hear Arindam speak. I had heard him address a crowd before, but that had been a familiar audience, made up of graduating students herded into a hotel auditorium near the Satbari campus. The students had seemed awestruck but were also restless, their attention wandering whenever the talk veered away from the question of their future to trickle-down theory, no doubt because they were more concerned with trickle-up. Arindam hectored them a little, and he had been worried enough about this to send me a text message a few hours later, asking me to ‘discount some of the harsh words i said to students’.

  The event at the Royal Ballroom was different. It was the final performance in a day-long ‘leadership’ seminar for which people had paid 4,000 rupees each, the previous speakers having included Arindam’s wife, A. Sandip and other IIPM professors and Planman employees. Over a hundred people, quite a few women among them, sat under the chandeliers as a laptop was set up on the stage. They looked aspirational rather than polished corporate types, the men with red sacred threads around their wrists, the women in saris and salwar kameezes, a gathering of middle-class, middle-rung, white-collar individuals whose interest in leadership skills had a rather dutiful air to it. After a number of children – it was unclear to whom they belonged – had clustered around Arindam to get copies of the all-time best-seller Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch signed, Arindam went up on to the stage. He was wearing a shiny black corduroy suit, the jacket displaying embroidery on the shoulders, and loafers that seemed to be made of snakeskin.