If God Was A Banker (28 page)

He had just revisited the story of his life.

He was about to set out on the long walk to Tedd Bridge's room, when the phone in his room rang. Louisa was not around, and so he picked up the call himself.

'NYB. Good evening. Sundeep here, how may I help you?'

'Hello.'

'Natasha, where are you?'

'Sundeep, when are you planning to leave? We are in the neighbourhood. Two blocks away. If you are planning to leave soon, we will come over to your office.'

'Natasha, I will be delayed. I am just stepping into a meeting with Tedd Bridge.'

'Okay. We will find our way back. Call me if you will have some dinner at home. I will make something,' said Natasha and hung up.

Sundeep dragged himself out of his room and walked towards Tedd's.

'Go on in. They are waiting for you,' said Tedd's secretary, as soon as she saw Sundeep.

Sundeep knocked on the door and entered the room. There were four people in the room. Tedd Bridge, Chetan Bindra, Michelle, and, in the corner sat Aditya Rao. Sundeep was quite stunned to see Aditya. What was he doing there?

All of them were seated in the lounge sofa that was on the right side of Tedd's room. Sundeep had harnessed a dream of one day occupying this corner office. He was wondering what would happen to it now. But Aditya's presence was adding to the suspense. Why was he here?

'Hi Sundeep.' Michelle was the first one to speak. 'Please make yourself comfortable.'

'Thank you.' Sundeep sat down on a single sofa on the left to everyone else.

'Coffee?' It was Michelle again. Tedd hadn't spoken yet.

'No thanks. I am fine,' said Sundeep, a meek copy of his usually arrogant self.

'Sundeep, you might be wondering why Aditya is here?' Tedd spoke for the first time.

'He is the one who hired you in the bank and he is the one who knows you and your family better than anyone of us. That's why I requested him to join us today,' Chetan Bindra clarified.

'Hi Aditya. Good to see you after a long time.' Sundeep was being polite. Aditya nodded.

'Shall we start?' said Michelle seeing that the pleasantries were over. Tedd nodded. He was quite cold towards Sundeep today. Normally he was a very friendly sort of person. But today was different for everyone.

'Sundeep,' began Chetan, 'today is the culmination of a process that began over six months ago. After you moved into New York, one day there was a phone call which came into the Global Compliance Hotline. We had received many similar calls on the compliance hotline against you, but we had, after initial investigations, ignored them. We couldn't establish the validity of what was being said in those calls. We thought some professional rivalry was instigating these calls. Complaining on the compliance hotline against successful individuals is a very common occurrence these days. Hence, while we act instantaneously on the calls on the hotline, we also discount them if they are found to be false.

'In all we have received eighteen complaints on the hotline, all levelling various charges against you. The one which came in six months back on the eighteenth of June was one that was very unclear, and so we decided to ignore it. We thought that it was a disgruntled employee speaking and we couldn't do anything about it. Here is the transcript of the call.'

Sundeep extended his arm and received the copy of the transcript:

I am calling from India. My life has been screwed by the irrational and rash behaviour of a senior member of NYB in India. When this person was in India, he pressurised me into having a relationship with him. Now because of him, my marriage is on the rocks and I am close to a divorce. He has screwed many lives in India. He is corrupt to the core. I have heard that he is hand-in-glove with some vendors and has made millions in the bargain. Such people are not worthy of holding high offices in the group. They have messed up lives and they will mess up the bank.

Sundeep read through the entire transcript with a blank face. He didn't know who the person was and why it was being shown to him.

'The same person called back on twelfth of July and left another complaint in an extremely agitated tone. We suspected it was the same person and confirmed it by running a voice analyser test on the two messages. They were indeed from the same person. Here's that transcript.' Chetan handed over the second page to him.

I had called earlier as well. My life is ruined thanks to this gentleman who works in New York. He is a maniac. Has no respect for women. He has screwed my life. My husband today has filed for divorce, because he got to know of my relationship with him. This person threatened to ruin my career if I didn't oblige. He forced me to sleep with him. He chased me even when I told him that I was not interested and now I have nowhere to go. If you do not take any action against Sundeep, I will be forced to take it up with the legal authorities in India. It is not fair that I get screwed and he has all the fan in life. The organisation owes it not only to me but to other women in the organisation as well.

'Chetan, Tedd, Michelle, Aditya! Is this the basis for all the conversations that we are having today. Pardon me for saying this, but here is a girl who is not happy with her family life and has convinced herself that I am responsible for her screwed up life, and all of you happily believe her.' Sundeep said in a tone stinking of ridicule, and looked straight out of the window.

Tedd was a bit peeved at this attitude. 'Sundeep, I do not particularly appreciate your attitude. Respect the collective intelligence of four people in this room. This is not it. There's more to it. Do you want to take it one at a time, or do you want to see it all at once. The choice is yours.'

Sundeep realised that Tedd was not impressed by his belligerence and decided to apologise and keep quiet.

Aditya was silently watching all this from his sofa by the window.

'Can we proceed?' Chetan looked at Sundeep and then at Tedd. Both nodded.

The door opened and Tedd's secretary walked in. 'Mona Albance is here.'

'Send her in,' said Tedd.

'I am terribly sorry. I was stuck in a traffic jam two blocks from here. Have I held all of you up?'

'No Mona. Join us.' Tedd moved and made some space for Mona to sit down.

Chetan introduced her. 'Sundeep, meet Mona Albance, our Manager, Diversity Initiatives. She works with Michelle.' She was the key player in the drama that was unfolding.

'Go on.' Tedd was getting impatient.

'Mona Albance was in Mumbai for a week. She met a lot of people there and investigated this whole issue threadbare. We will be showing you the findings shortly.' Chetan wanted to make it known that it was only after lots of deliberations that they had come up with the findings.

'Sundeep, what do you know about Priya Mehra?'

'Priya Mehra...' Sundeep pretended to be thinking. 'I can't seem to remember,' he finally said.

'Priya was a Manager in BOCA, the BPO that was bought in India when you were working there.'

'Oh yes. Now I remember. Didn't her husband also work in the bank?' asked Sundeep.

'Of course, he did, Sundeep. You gave him a job. When he was out of a job and looking for one. And you extracted your pound of flesh from Priya, didn't you?' Mona Albance started off. She was too emotional about the entire sequence of events.

'No. That's rubbish.'

'Are you sure, Sundeep?' Mona taunted him.

'Yes.'

'Well, then what is this?' She handed him a few sheets of paper.

It was the extract of Sundeep's mobile bills when he was in Mumbai. Sundeep couldn't believe his eyes when he saw it. Along with the bills was a separate summary sheet, which had been made in-house. It had a table:

'Between November 2003 and March 2004 you have sent Priya over 2300 SMSs. If you call that normal, then my name is Mother Teresa. That's not normal. If I look at the calls you have made to her, the picture looks quite similar. You haven't got back so much of a response from her. She hasn't sent messages to you, hasn't called you so often. I have seen those messages, Mr Srivastava, and they are extremely vulgar. You have solicited her umpteen number of times. The messages were so explicit that I am a bit ashamed reproducing the same here. You not only hired Mehra but also hired him at a level he didn't deserve, all because you had your eyes on Priya. Do you want to know who gave me copies of these bills? Priya's husband. When he found out about you, he wanted an end to their relationship. You killed their family, Sundeep.'

Sundeep didn't answer. He was staring blankly at the ceiling.

'Do you need any more evidence, Mr Srivastava?'

No answer. 'Bitch,' thought Sundeep.

'Sundeep.' Tedd stepped in. Sundeep didn't answer.

'Let's go on.' This time it was Chetan.

'Sundeep, what's your relationship with Ram Naresh?' Mona asked him.

'He is a vendor of the bank, who was introduced to me by Suneel Dutt.'

'Is that all?'

'Yes. Along the way he became a personal friend, but that never interfered with our professional relationship.'

'Is it true that you paid him more than normal for buying out his call centre at a time when you need not have paid that? You paid him six million dollars at a time when his infrastructure was not worth more than two million dollars.'

'That's not true. The entire deal was evaluated and the laid out process was followed when we bought the call centre.'

'Maybe you would remember something more when you see this document.'

It was a print out of Naresh's bank account. Two entries were highlighted in the bank statement. One was the credit of six million dollars into Naresh's account and the other was a debit of two million dollars. The day Naresh was paid six million dollars to buy out his call centre, an amount of two million dollars was transferred to the credit of an account in the name of S Srivastava in New Jersey.

'I do not know. That's not me,' said Srivastava. No one believed him.

'Maybe you would like to let the group know why Ram Naresh was paid over three times the amount you would pay any other sales agent? This is obvious from the bills that Mr Naresh has raised on NYB while you were in office. The Group Audit which is currently on in India has validated this.'

For a similar volume of personal loans originated by Naresh's unit and other DSAs, Naresh has been paid five percent as professional fees, whereas the others have been paid less than two percent. This disparity had been raised many times by the internal audit team in their reports to you, but you chose to ignore the same.'

'The payout requests are normally put up by the respective sales managers to the Business Heads, who review it and recommend it to me. I often go by their recommendations.'

'No Sundeep, I have a copy of this mail from Vivek Jalan to you, in which he has asked you not to pay him so much money, and you have asked him to mind his own business, stating that you are routing some other payments through Mr Naresh.'

'I do not remember,' said Sundeep.

Mona promptly produced a copy of the e-mail. She had laid her hands on it when she was in India.

'Is it not true that Reena, your secretary, quit because she felt that you were making her raise bills and do things that contradicted her own sense of ethics? That's not it, she was also fed up with your making suggestive passes at her. Your financial impropriety and personal advances made her quit.'

'That's conjecture. She quit because of personal reasons,' said Sundeep.

'I have a statement from her. She quit without a job in hand, and that too at a time when she was going through personal stress in her family life. She desperately needed the job, but, despite that, she quit.'

She gave him a copy of his secretary's resignation letter. It had Sundeep's signature on it. 'Received Sd. Sundeep Srivastava.'

In that letter she had categorically stated the reason for her quitting to be a dangerous conflict with her ethics and values. She had clearly said in that letter that she was quitting because of Sundeep.

Mona's hand went into the folder. She rummaged through the pile of papers that she had and came up with another document. 'Now read this.'

Sundeep took the piece of paper from Mona. This was the resignation letter of Reena which was pulled out from HR records. Sundeep could make that out because it had HR notings on it. According to this letter, Reena was quitting due to personal reasons.

'The second one is the letter that HR gave me when I asked for it and the first was the one Reena gave me, when I met her. That was her copy of your acknowledgement. And Sundeep, the two letters are different. You switched the two letters, got Anindyo Roy to document her exit interview, without even doing one, and relieved her in a single day because she had pointed a finger at you. She knew something that could have landed either you or Ram Naresh in trouble.'

'Is this still conjecture, Sundeep?' asked Chetan.

Sundeep didn't respond.

'We haven't spoken to Mr Naresh because he was partnering you in your misdeeds.' Mona was in no mood to relent.