Corporate Carnival (13 page)

I wished Nqobile goodnight and we trooped past our host, who was sleeping peacefully on the left breast of his friend. She winked at me and blew me a kiss. Pedro stirred and came to life.

‘Leaving, Jai?’ he asked. ‘
Et tu Brute
?’ He looked around at the almost empty room and shook his head in a resigned way. ‘No friends, no Romans, no countrymen.’ Then, quickly shrugging it off, he resumed his nibbling, this time on another part of the young lady’s anatomy.

12

’Coz Love Has No Season, No Reason

J
uly 2010 was South Africa’s time in the sun. To a man, the country cheered like they had never cheered before. First for Bafana Bafana. Then for Ghana, the sole African nation remaining in the World Cup. Then for Soccer City, and finally for themselves, the super successful host country. But now the party was over. And it was time to move on.

Our new regional CEO was a chap called Peter van Hart, a Dutchman. The new compliance man was Jan Kahn. Nathan had so far managed to cling on, though there were rumours that he was on his way out. The top guys in corporate bank and treasury were also preparing to leave. As if the existing confusion in structure was not enough, the CEO had set up an NRP team akin to the NRI team to cater to off-shore businesses from resident and non-resident Pakistanis. To run that team, we had yet another head, a former colleague of mine, Ahmed, whom I had not particularly liked when I first knew him. It wasn’t just he I objected to, but the fact that in addition to premier banking, investment services, NRI team and private banking, we now had one more dimension to add to the whole ‘wealth management’ scenario. It was apparently Jan, in his capacity as the new CEO’s close buddy and trusted advisor, who had been instrumental in getting Ahmed in and wrangling a good position for him.

‘Ahmed’s not a bad sort, Jai,’ Kitch told me. ‘Once you get to know him, he’s pretty decent.’

‘The creep sent me an invite on Facebook yesterday,’ I told him. ‘You should see his Facebook page! Ahmed talks quite well, but he writes a lot of rubbish. He’s always been like that. I have kept a couple of his emails from Myers at home in my “funny file”. On Facebook, he’s put up a picture of himself wearing just a pair of unbuttoned denim shorts, bare torso and all. He seems to think he’s some kind of love god. He’s thirty-five and has three kids, but on his info page he has the gall to say he’s interested in women and is looking for dating and relationships. He’s put in a little bio… here, let me show you.’

I logged in and went to Ahmed’s profile. Under ‘About Me’ he had written: ‘I’m smooth. I’m sexy. I value my skills. I respect my intelligence. I act on my feelings and think for my beliefs. Believing is doing. I love what I am. Life is nasha. Live with junoon. DIL DIL PAKISTAN!’

‘Can you believe it? Such nonsense!’

Kitch stifled a laugh. ‘I know, Jai! But that’s just the way he is. A lot of bluster and bravado, a bit immature perhaps, but he’s all right. Do you know I took him to see a Tamil movie once, while we were at Myers.’

‘What!’

‘Yeah, we happened to bump into each other in Deira one evening. He was at a loose end and decided to join me at Galleria. He enjoyed the film, actually, and kept repeating some of the punch lines later. He’s okay, Jai. Don’t worry. You’re getting too tensed about these small things. Take a chill pill.’

But I did worry because over the next few weeks, it became obvious to us with sickening clarity that we were no more the bank’s blue-eyed boys. We probably never were, but it had been nice knowing that the chairman and regional CEO thought highly of us. Now the chairman had been reduced to a puppet and Fergs had left. The new guys didn’t know us and didn’t seem to care.

Ahmed’s position of strength even before opening his first account was obvious because he had been given a car parking slot, something that Kitch and I still didn’t have. The bank was in a very busy location on Khalid Ibn Al Waleed Road and space was at a premium. A parking slot was the ultimate test of power at AbAd – or AdAb, as it was now called. (Apparently, the Dutch management felt that since they were the stronger faction now, the name Adriaan should appear before Abbott. Hence, AdAb). Our team had three slots which we shared. Peggy could have kept one for herself, but she was gracious enough to allow all seven of us to share the three. It helped if some of us were travelling, but there were times when all of us were in Dubai and on those days parking was a nightmare. Traditionally, the regional CEO had always had two parking slots to himself and it was a matter of pride for Fergs – and now Peter – that he could park in comfort across two slots.

At Myers, your pay packet determined your standing. Here, the remuneration was quite hush-hush. Nobody knew anything for sure, although everyone kept talking about it all the time; about how much money Alpha made or how Beta was done in by a scheming management coterie which was rumoured to have kept a substantial part of the bonus pool for itself. So, for all practical purposes, parking slots determined the hierarchy for the grapevine. In keeping with this, therefore, Ahmed had already edged past us. It was not an easy thing to digest. Still, there was little I could do about it, frustrating as it was.

To get over all this, Kitch and I tried to pack in as many things as we could outside of work. We checked out the view from near the top of the Burj Khalifa, we tried parasailing and we camped out in the desert a couple of times.

We also met at each other’s houses from time to time. That week, we, along with some other friends, had planned to get together at Galiya’s and Kitch’s for dinner and Galiya had asked Mina and me to stop on the way to pick up some freshly made kuboos, which are like large, thick chapattis, very popular in these parts.

‘Let me get a parking ticket,’ I said as we got out of the car.

‘Oh, you don’t have to. It’ll just take five or ten minutes,’ Mina replied.

‘That means nothing. I can see that khaki-clad guy hovering around, waiting to pounce on someone and sock him for a fee. That’s jolly well not going to be me, after what happened this morning.’

What had happened that morning was this: Mina and I had, for a change, decided to have a buffet breakfast at a hotel in town. I had wolfed down sausages, toast, omelettes and muffins neatly washed down by some coffee, while Mina had tucked into fruit, hash browns and pancakes. I had bought a one-hour ticket and placed it under my windshield. Just as we were stepping out of the hotel, Ahmed appeared from nowhere and rushed up to us in a bit of a panic, wanting to know if I had three thousand dirhams in cash.

‘I don’t think so,’ I told him. ‘Can’t you use your credit card?’

‘No, no,’ he said emphatically, looking behind him a little nervously. ‘Cash! I need cash. Can you check please? Quickly! There’s no ATM nearby and I just realized I have no cash on me. I need three thousand.’ I had less than a thousand, but luckily for him Mina had enough. Between the two of us, we gave him the money. He grabbed it, mumbled a quick thank you and rushed off.

As a result of this little encounter, we reached our car ten minutes late, just in time to find an employee of the Road Transport Authority punch my car number into the little machine he carried. No amount of persuasion could make him change his mind. It turned out to be a rather expensive breakfast.

Luckily, our evening stop was more smooth. We picked up the kuboos from the little shop in Bur Dubai that Galiya had insisted on. Mina kept looking the other way deliberately, so she didn’t have to see the man use his sweaty hands while making the stuff. After that we were on our way to Kitch’s house.

For dinner, Galiya had to cater to all kinds of tastes. Four of us – Mina, Kitch, his cousin Ravi and Gavas – were what would technically be described as lacto-vegetarians. Then there was Andy who was a lacto-ovo-vegetarian. Harry ate only fish and chicken. The rest of us – Rachel, Peggy, Galiya and myself – pretty much ate everything.

Galiya had made several gallons of the VK stuff, some of it with manathankali and the rest of it with lamb. Then there was fish fillet, grilled paneer
,
cauliflower and lots of beer. Andy had brought along what he called ‘Bengali Biryani’, a rice dish with baby potatoes and whole eggs dipped in some tasty vegetarian masala gravy.

‘I have tried to cater to everyone’s taste,’ Galiya announced. ‘There’s more in the kitchen, so please help yourselves… Andy, I’m gonna kill you! You’ve outshone me completely! Your biryani is the best part of the meal.’

‘Non-vegetarians are always at an advantage,’ Kitch grumbled. ‘They eat up the non-veg stuff and also dig into the vegetarian food. So we get only a small portion of what was meant for us!’

‘Kitch! You are not being a very good host today!’ Peggy remarked.

‘No, no! I didn’t mean it that way. But it’s true, we vegetarians always get a raw deal wherever we go.’

‘And not just literally,’ I added.

‘Yesterday,’ Kitch continued, ignoring me, ‘we were at a buffet where there were four non-veg dishes and only one vegetable dish. Even that was a dry one, so what do we eat the rice with? The problem is that chefs are non-vegetarian. They can’t think from a vegetarian’s point of view. Look at airlines! Most airlines seem to believe that vegetarian food consists exclusively of salad, zucchini, brinjal and mushroom.’ He had hit upon his pet peeve. He kept going on along these lines for quite a while, while the rest of us kept eating.

In the middle of all this, I got a call from Lalwani. ‘Jai! This damn thing, this zuvulala,’ he began, striking a complaining note straightaway. ‘It’s not working! Useless, kaput!’ he said. ‘I’m blowing, blowing, blowing, but no sound is coming!’

‘You are not supposed to blow like in a pipe,’ I told him. My brain had been much enriched in the last few days. I had learnt about a variety of things from dung beetles to football, from click consonants to the right way to play the vuvuzela. ‘You have to keep your lips pressed together and then blow like you are spitting.’

With the entry of the Lalwani motif, the topic gradually veered to the office. ‘You’d have thought,’ said Peggy wryly, ‘considering the profound impact the World Cup had on those London meetings, that Netherlands’ loss in the final would have shaken them up a bit. But no, they are far from being chastened. It’s like, as far as they are concerned, the World Cup was played only between England and Netherlands.’

‘I think one reason why we are finding things a bit difficult to cope with is because this place is so big and unwieldy,’ Harry chipped in. ‘So many employees, so many grades and so many positions.’

‘And such a complicated structure,’ said Kitch. ‘I believe that Peter chap was just an HR guy in Rotterdam with no business experience. Derek from treasury says he is long on theory and short on everything else. And a fellow like that gets two parking slots!’

‘As they say in Hindi,
time time ki baat hai
,’ Gavas added.

Rachel raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘What was that again?’ she asked.

‘It means,’ Kitch replied, ‘that it’s all about being in the right place at the right time.’

Rachel nodded in agreement. ‘Oh, it is. It always is, isn’t it, dear?’ she said, leaning to her left. The next moment – I’d been tilting my chair backwards and sipping my beer – I toppled over and dropped the bottle. At the same time, Kitch uttered a hoarse cry and his jaw dropped. And for good reason.

Rachel had just planted a kiss on top of Andy’s head and was folding him in a long, slow embrace. The object of her affection responded with a wide smile, the lovelight shining in his eyes and on his face, the unmistakably intoxicated look of a young man deeply in love.

We had this practice at office of meeting every Monday at noon to discuss what we had done the previous week and how best we could coordinate our efforts in the week to come. Sometimes we decided to pair up to accomplish select goals, if we felt that would make quicker progress. In this we were unique within the organization, because in most other teams in the bank, there was a lot of infighting and ego tussle. But our faith in Peggy and her sense of fairness helped immensely in keeping our team working in unison.

Omar and Harry had opened one account each that week. Omar’s client was an Iranian who owned a chain of craft and curio stores. Harry’s client, he told us, was an Indian businessman who sold Arab men’s underwear. This statement was greeted with a long pause. Some of us looked at each other and the others looked at him.

‘What do you mean, Arab men’s underwear?’ Rachel asked. ‘Don’t Arabs wear the same underwear we do?’

Harry stared at her incredulously. ‘You don’t expect them to wear what
you
wear?’

‘Well, okay, I mean, like…
you
.’

‘What will you pay me for this information?’ Harry asked, tongue firmly in cheek.

Rachel pretended to throw something at him.

‘Well, they probably do wear what I wear…’ Harry continued. ‘Frankly, I’m not sure, but what I’m referring to is this thin white cloth that they wear under their robe. That’s what this guy sells. He imports it from a town called Tirupur in south India.’

‘Guys, if I might digress for a moment from this theme that seems to be holding you all spellbound,’ Peggy interrupted, ‘we desperately need an Arab private banker in the team. I have spoken with Aliya, our former colleague, but she is getting married soon and is not too sure how things are going to shape up. Let me know, please, if you think of anyone. Someone with experience preferably, because they need to be prepared for the sales part of the job. I met two or three very good Arab nationals in the last month, but they want only a managerial job. So keep your ears open.’

I then told the group about Pedro’s account. The money had come in the previous Thursday. I had called Pedro that morning to tell him that everything was fine. ‘It may be fine with you, young man,’ he had told me, ‘but not with us. The World Cup is over, and now we don’t know what to do. It seems like suddenly there’s no energy, no purpose. It is very important for a country to have a common short-term objective, something everybody is passionate about, that will unite everyone. Not something vague like GDP growth, but a clear ambition that they can attain quickly. Like the game of football itself. There is one clear purpose. To shoot the ball into the opponent’s net as many times as possible in ninety minutes. Our goal was FIFA 2010. That goal has disappeared for us, Jai. Now it is like living in a vacuum. Life has lost its meaning.’

‘Jack is lucky,’ Gavas said after I had told them about the account. ‘He meets the most incredible people. The rest of us have just been meeting textile merchants, jewellery shop owners and underwear importers.’