MONEY TREE (11 page)

Kolkata
’s heat and humidity grew too much. He left it behind for his cool hotel. Result, he found himself fighting a chill - but not the onset of malaria he initially imagined. He slept fitfully and woke at 3 and 5 and finally at 7 am.

The image of last night stayed with
Ted as he headed off into the frantic morning for his interview. He felt stupid at coming over maudlin and sentimental. Who was he to judge what was going on around here? Maybe this was what they chose? How they wanted to live? If he’d learned nothing in his twenty five years of reporting, he’d at least understood you couldn’t apply Western rules and standards to the outback.

But whatever the reason – needing a drink, jet lag or still smarting at hav
ing to make this trip at all - Ted was angry. It made him mad to think of some bastards cleaning up from high interest loans to these poor suckers. He’d seen it before in the burst housing bubble across America. Ghost towns created by banks foreclosing on homes they valued less than their mortgages. Millions of poor bastards suckered onto a housing ladder with low starter rates that flipped to high regular rates beyond their income levels. Now the same wolves were marketing the foreclosed houses – people’s homes – as great investments. Bankers always win and always find another variation on the sucker loan.

By the time he arrived at the head office of the Peoples’ Bank,
Ted Saddler was spoiling for a fight. The taxi shuddered to a stop and several pairs of hands dragged at his cab’s door handle. All these scruffy gents pretending to be doormen at the Waldorf. He eased out, and took his bearings. They were well off anything that could be called a main street. Yet the small brass plaque on the wall confirmed it was the People’s Bank head office. It said so, beneath a stylised engraving of a tree. The bank was housed in a block that would have been condemned and knocked down in Harlem in the ‘70s. Its façade was distressed concrete and smeared glass.

He forced his way past the human barrier and into an echoing hall of concrete sl
abs and doorways. It was about 20 degrees cooler – making 90 seem bracing – and a fan chugged round overhead, spilling the humid air at him. A young woman in a cream sari sat behind a counter at a window on the right. He went over to her.

‘I have an appointment with Mr
Ramesh Banerjee. The name’s Saddler.’

She consulted a
screen in front of her. It shouldn’t have taken long. No-one else was waiting.

‘We are all very pleased to welcome you, Mr
Saddler. May I offer you a nice cup of tea?’

While smiling at the quaint offer, he thought of the billion bugs he could get from the water, far less the milk, and politely declined. He took a seat on the other side of the small lobby from her window and went over his interview questions one last time. Then he got back up and began to pace up and down, relieved that despite his fears some of the old excitement was working its way through. The hunter’s instinct not yet dead.

All the time he paced he felt her proprietorial eye on him. She half-bowed at him every time he looked her way. He guessed he’d been prowling for five maybe ten minutes when a door opened in the centre of the lobby facing the exit. A little man came through. He looked like any one of the threadbare characters Ted had seen around the hotel and streets this morning. Maybe a porter or clerk or something. He came over. He was wearing glasses and looked maybe mid-forties. He was thin and short. His black hair smudged with grey around the ears. He smiled. Ted smiled back, wondering what he wanted.

‘Mr
Saddler?’

‘That’s  me.’ He stood, assuming the man had been sent to get him. The man reached out a hand and they shook. Then the face became familiar from the news clip.

‘My name is Ramesh Banerjee. Please call me Ramesh.’

T
ed Saddler had met many top men in his time. Ramesh Banerjee fitted none of the profiles. His unheralded and low-key arrival almost punctured Ted’s annoyance. But of course it was all for show, all planned. Ted easily regained his sense of anger and injustice on behalf of the poor people of India.

He followed
Ramesh through the swing doors and into a shabby corridor. They pushed through another set of doors into a large room. It was full of desks, computer screens, people and mounds of papers. They wove their way through the crowded units, with Ted trying desperately to avoid knocking down the paper towers with his bulk. The clerks smiled and wished the CEO and Ted a good morning as they passed.

They stopped in front of a desk no bigger than any others but considerably less cluttered. Behind it, on the wall, was a giant version of the bank’s logo. The bank’s title was in gold across the spreading branches. This time the tree was coloured green and the branches were studded with fruit. Its roots were as long and powerful as its surface limbs.

‘This is your office?’

‘I only need a desk and a phone you see. It helps to be with my colleagues. In the West you call it open plan.’

Ted thought that there was open plan and then there was ostentatious humility; something for visitors to see, especially reporters.

‘How do you motivate people if you can’t give them something to aim for?’

‘A big office is important in the West, not here. Every one of us – me included – will spend time working in the branches, setting up credit and collecting loans. Everyone is important. Everyone is equal.’

Ted
was hearing sanctimonious bullshit, but he smiled and said, ‘In that case, call me Ted.’

Ramesh
smiled back, then the civilities were over.

‘Why do you hate me,
Ted?’

He asked it like he was asking if
Ted took milk in his coffee. Ted blanked his face. He wasn’t the one who had to explain himself.

‘I don’t hate
you. I hate what you’re doing. Your bank has a clever marketing angle to make money out of the poor. Your own government, the World Bank - just about any bank of repute in the world - they all think you’re pulling the wool over the eyes of people that can’t fend for themselves. My job is to expose you.’

Ted
’s voice took on the ringing tones of the righteous, the temple clearer. At that moment, he believed it. Ramesh looked at Ted quietly for a minute or so, until the silence had dragged itself out too long.

‘Sometimes even the most honest
men reach views using incorrect information. That is why I am glad you have come. Unlike those who criticise from afar. My books are open to you. As am I,’ he added as an afterthought.

Ted
had the grace to look slightly abashed at the noble motivation credited to him. A rivulet of sweat ran down his spine reminding him of his plans to get back to civilisation as fast as a 747 could carry him.

‘
Good. Do you mind?’

Ted
brandished a small tape recorder at Ramesh. At his shake of the head, Ted set it between them and turned it on.

‘Mr Banerjee, why did you set up this bank?’

‘When I came back from the USA, I set up the investment bank operation for Kolkata Regional bank. We began to make good money from local businesses and from Western businesses coming into the city.’

Ted
wondered why he omitted his stellar background; a first degree at Kolkata, then a post graduate course at Cambridge, England and an MBA at Harvard. Four years in New York with JP Morgan Chase. Why would anyone would want to come back to some crummy bank job in India at a twentieth of the salary?

‘But every day, when I came to work and when I went home in
the evening, I saw what you saw, Ted, unless you were asleep in your taxi. I kept telling myself that I was helping to cure this, but that it took time. If I helped top businesses make money it would trickle down to the poor. Eventually. The Western model worked and it would work here.’

He took off his glasses and
Ted could see the tiredness under his eyes. He could also see the intensity.

‘For five years I fooled myself. I made a great deal of money for the bank. But out there – on the streets and in the villages - nothing changed.’

‘Are you saying capitalism doesn’t work here?’

‘That is a very
interesting question. Capitalism requires all the ingredients to be in place before everyone begins to benefit, and not just the top layer. Here in India there is a big missing piece. It is mass ownership.

‘That sounds pretty Marxist.’
Or Erin Wishart, he thought.

‘Is that what you will write about me now?’
He smiled.

‘Well, are you?’

Ramesh sighed. ‘There are many truths in Das Kapital, but I am not an advocate for communism, just for working capitalism. Capitalism is about trade. Trading your right to work for a wage, trading your future earnings for a house, your crops for money, your credit-worthiness for a loan. If you have nothing, if you own nothing – no land, no money, no roof over your head – if you don’t even own the right to work - then you cannot trade, and you cannot trade up. More than half my people don’t own a thing, and work exists only in the form of slave labour. So they cannot participate in the merry-go-round of capitalism.’

‘And the answer is. . .
?’

‘
Banking services to the poorest people. It buys them a ticket on the merry-go-round.’

‘Why
set up a new bank? Why not within your Kolkata Regional Bank?’

He nodded. ‘I took my ideas to the board. But they could not comprehend my proposal. They
were not bad people. They honestly believed in the theory of trickle down of wealth. They saw the millions I was earning for them from investment banking and wanted me to stick to that, not go into some poor people’s retail banking that would lose money. And certainly not loans to women or Untouchables. It was unthinkable. It would upset the whole caste system that is no longer supposed to matter here. I could not convince them. So I left and set up the People’s Bank.’

‘Just like that?’

Ramesh smiled at some memory. ‘No. By no means. I had to beg for funding from one or two philanthropic foundations. I had to bring in people to help me without any salary at first. I sold or mortgaged everything I owned.’

He looked down. ‘And my wife left me. I don’t blame her. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she married a successful investment banker. The first three years were touch and go. But I was right
. And now, thanks to the internet, we are building a global service.’

‘So
now you’re a
global
money lender.’

‘
It’s not just loans. We insist on saving.’

‘
But your savers earn a pittance; half a per cent? While interest on loans hits 35% and above, for god’s sake. We call that sharking.’

‘
We are like the old mutual societies in England. Presently we only lend what we can afford from the deposits and the loan repayments. Which is why we were unaffected by the madness of sub-prime lending, Collaterised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and all the rest of the gimmicks that brought down the mighty Western banks. We lend tiny sums to very many people. The cost of setting up and administering these loans is very high. But each year we improve our systems, and we are bringing these rates down.’

‘So
, you admit it.’

‘O
ur loans are very short term, usually to a small group of people – women mainly – and over 98% repay their loans on time. We lend to tiny businesses, not to people who want to buy flat screen TVs. That is key. The interest payments are affordable.’

Ramesh
turned and pointed behind him at the stylised tree with its deep and spreading roots, and its flowering and seeding branches.

‘This is our logo. The neem tree. It is a remarkable tree, indigenous to India but now growing in many parts of the world in some of the poorest and hottest conditions imaginable. It stays green throughout the year on very tiny amounts of water. Its roots go deep
, you see. Its seeds and leaves and bark have a multitude of uses. We have cultivated this tree for thousands of years – it is known in Sanskrit medical literature. It is called the village pharmacy. Interestingly, one of your western drugs companies has managed to take out patents on some of the tree’s properties. A fine example of western capitalism, don’t you agree?’

Ted
was thinking that this guy was just too good to be true. He couldn’t see his angle yet, but there had to be one. Maybe it was a power thing? Some people just got carried away with an idea and needed to prove it. Ted stayed on the offensive.

‘So how is it that a bank with such scruples and int
egrity ends up in a court case accused of corruption and profiteering?  Smoke without fire?’

Behind his glasses
Ramesh blinked. ‘Shall we have some tea? This is thirsty work, Ted. Let me show you our canteen.’

Ted
picked up his recorder and set off after him. He wondered how fast those little bugs in the tea would take effect and whether this was how Banerjee got rid of unwanted guests.