The Polyester Prince (5 page)

The answer lies probably in the deep poverty that his family endured as the cost of his father’s devotion to a teaching career. While he also learned that life is a web of relationships and obligations, Dhirubhai was fired with an ambition never to become dependent on anyone or to stay long in somebody else’s service.

Early in the 1950s, officials in the treasury of the Arabian Ekingdom of Yemen noticed something funny happening to their country’s currency. The main unit of money, a solid silver coin called the Rial, was disappearing from circulation. They traced the disappearing coins south to the trading port of Aden, then a British colony and military bastion commanding the entrance to the Red Sea and southern approaches to the Suez Canal.

Inquiries found that an Indian clerk named Dhirubhai Ambani, then barely into his twenties, had an open order out in the souk (marketplace) of Aden for as many Rials as were available. Ambani had noted that the value of the Rial’s silver content was higher than its exchange value against the British pound and other foreign currencies. So he began buying Rials, melting them down, and selling the silver ingots to bullion dealers in London. ‘The margins were small, but it was money for jam,’ Dhirubhai later reminisced.

After three months it was stopped, but I made a few lakhs [one lakh = 100000 rupees] of rupees. I don’t believe in not taking opportunities.”

Dhirubhai had gone to Aden soon after finishing his studies in Junagadh at the age of 16, following the long tradition of boys from Bania families in Kathiawar heading for the Arabian trading ports or the market towns of East Africa to gain commercial experience and accumulate capital.

A network of personal contacts kept jobs within the same community. Dhirubhai’s elder brother Ramniklal, known as is Ramnikbhai, had gone to Aden two years before, and was working in the car sales division of A. Besse & Co. Founded by a Frenchman named Antonin Besse, the company had developed from trading in animal hides and incense between the world wars into the biggest commercial house in the Red Sea area, selling cars, cameras, electrical goods, pharmaceuticals, oil products and food commodities to both British and French territories in the Arab world and the Horn of Africa, as well as to Ethiopia.

Another Gujarati, Maganbhai Patel, from the Porda district, joined Besse as a junior accountant at the age of 18 in 1931 and was made a director in 1948. He estimates the company controlled about 80 per cent of the region’s commerce soon after the Second World War. It had 30 branches, and six to eight ships of its own in the subsidiary Halal Shipping. It was indeed successful: shortly before his death at the age of 72 in 1948, Antonin Besse made a donation of one million pounds to endow St Anthony’s College in Oxford.

Thereafter, the company was run by two of his sons, Tony and Peter. It employed over 10 000 people, of whom about 3000 were Gujaratis hired as clerks, salesmen and middle management. Susheel Kothari went to work for Besse in 1952 from Wallibhipur in Saurashtra, in a group of 14 recruits hired after interviews in Rajkot. Besse trusted Indians as honest and loyal, he recalled. While not paid nearly as much as European expatriates, they enjoyed a standard of living that periodically drew complaints from the British colonial administration for forcing up wages generally On one occasion, Tony Besse had told the governor to his face that it was ‘None of your business what I pay’.

When Dhirubhai left school, his brother Ramnikbhal put in a word for him with Maganbhai Patel. On his next leave back in Porda, Patel invited Dhirubhai to come over for an interview. ‘My first impression was his way of walking,’ recalled Patel, imitating a heavy, decisive footstep. ‘It was as if time was short and he had to get ahead, to reach a goal.’ Patel asked him to read from The Times of India and then write a summary in English, a test Dhirubhai passed satisfactorily.

He was hired, and soon after arrived by steamer in Aden. As Susheel Kothari notes: ‘The first sight of Aden is always a shock.’ The oil-filmed blue waters of the port are backed by steep crags of dark-brown rock, remnants of an old volcano, with no sign of vegetation.

Aden had flourished in Roman times as a way station on trading routes between Egypt and India. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 revived its importance, and it became a major coaling port for European shipping to Asia and Australasia. From its occupation by a detachment of Indian sepoys sent by the East India Company in 1839, Aden had been an important link in the ties of Britain to the Indian Raj. Until 1937, when it was put under the Colonial Office in London, the territory was administered from India. The Indian rupee circulated as its currency until it was replaced by the East African shilling in 1951.

The outpost had been a punishment station for British regiments deemed to have shown cowardice or other offences against discipline while in India. As one of its last governors, Charles Johnston, noted in a memoir, it had been ‘the dumping ground, even as late as between the wars, to which regiments sent officers who had got themselves into matrimonial difficulties’.

The colony also became the entrepot for the Red Sea and Horn of Africa, where deepwater ports were few. Cargoes of cattle hides, coffee, aromatic gums and pearl shell were brought to Aden by wooden sailing dhows, and bought by trading firms like Besse, Cowasji Dinshaw, Luke Thomas and Cory’s. In return, basic commodities such as sugar, rice and textiles were shipped back.

Between the world wars, the biplanes of the Royal Air Force kept the hinterland quiet by machine-gunning the villages of any unruly Yemeni tribesmen. Behind this shield of bullets, the middleman trade flourished. The definitive historian of British rule in Aden, R. J. Gavin, noted:

Aden indeed consisted of a hierarchy of brokers from the heads of foreign firms to the lowest workman or child who offered his labour or hawked in the street. Speculators, hoarders and price rings frequently sent commodity and foodstuff prices rocketing up and down, while moneylenders and dealers darnpened the effect of this for the rest of the population at a price which included a claim to social leadership. Acquisitive individualism was mitigated only by ethnic and other local solidarities formed outside rather than within the town.

Aden’s economy developed rapidly after the Second World War, but its business milieu still had some of this character when Dhirubhai learnt his basic techniques in the 1950s.

The spur to Aden’s growth was the decision of British Petroleum to build a new oil refinery in Little Aden, another crater jutting into the sea across the bay from the main town. BP’s existing refinery in the Gulf port of Abadan had been nationalised by a new Iranian government. The refinery employed up to 11000 workers at any one time during its construction over 1952-54, and then had a permanent staff of 2500 housed in a comfortable village. This sparked off a construction boom which saw Aden extend beyond the wastes and saltpans of the causeway which had been kept clear for defensive reasons in earlier times.

Later in the 1950s, the British began concentrating strategic reserve forces in Aden from other bases in the Gulf and East Africa. By 1964, Aden had some 8000 British military personnel plus dependents-and their demand for housing kept the construction activity going. Aden’s population grew from 80000 in 1946 to 138000 in 1955.

==It became a more modern economy, and airconditioning ameliorated the hot humid weather in the midsummer months. But it retained many exotic features, including the daily inward flight by Aden Airways of the mild narcotic called qat. From a hedge – like bush in the mountains of Ethiopia, the qat leaves had to be consumed fresh and were delivered to consumers in Aden within a few hours of plucking at dawn. ‘It is not medically harmful, so far as can be ascertained,’ noted Johnson, the former governor, 1although if taken in excess it lowers the appetite and produces a characteristic green-faced, cadaverous appearances. Just before mass air travel arrived with the first passenger jets, Aden overtook New York in 1958 to become the biggest ship – bunkering port in the world. As well as for cargo shipping and tankers, it was a refuelling stop for elegant liners of the P & O and Orient Lines as well as crowded migrant ships taking Italians and Greeks out to Australia.

Disembarking tourists, brought ashore in launches from the ships moored out in the roadstead, were immediately surrounded by desperate Arab and Indian salesmen and touts, offering cheap cameras, fountain pens, transistor radios and tooled-leather items.

After making their purchases and taking a quick taxi tour around the arid town, most were glad to get back to their P & O comfort and security. Aden had an air of menace, of repressed resentment at its naked display of foreign military and commercial self-interest. As Gavin observed: ‘For a thousand years or more Aden had essentially belonged to the merchants of the world, be they South Yemeni or foreign, while the people of its hinterland watched with jealousy and poverty-stricken eyes from beyond its gates. But for the young Gujaratis hired by Besse & Co, Aden was a kind of paradise and most recall their days there with great affection and nostalgia. ‘We felt it was heaven,’ said Himatbhai Jagani, a former Besse employee who had been born in Aden, the fifth generation of his family to live there since their original migration from Gujarat early in the 19th century ‘It was tax free virtually, and we never saw an electricity bill or rent bill till we left. For 14 of us in our mess we paid only 400 shillings a month for food. We could save about half our salary It was very comfortable-we all missed that life.’

Home leave of three months came after 21 months straight work in Aden or at one of the Besse outposts around the Red Sea. The Besse employees went home with their savings to spend by P & O liners like the Chusan or Caledonian, sometimes by Flotte Lauro of Italy, and if nothing else, India’s Moghul Lines.

While most of the British residents lived on the slopes above Steamer Point, socialising at the Gold Mohar beach club nearby, the 15000 Indians clustered in a few streets of the Crater district-Sabeel Street named after a refuge for stray and injured animals set up by rains and Hindus, Danaraja Street, and Bencem Street, named for the prosperous Jewish trading community that once thrived in Aden and Yemen. The Besse & Co bachelor’s mess occupied four or five buildings nearby in Aidroos Valley.

The Crater had all the features of the Orientalist watercolours that adorned European drawing rooms at the turn of the century, as described by Governor Johnston: Indian merchant families, the women in saris, the men in their white jodhpurish get-up, are taking the air, immaculate after the siesta. We drive around a market square with fruit glowing on the stalls, and enter a narrow street fairly buzzing with exotic life-pastrycooks, water-sellers, coffeernakers, carpet merchants, all the usual figures of the Oriental bazaar-and pervading the whole thing a strong hot smell Of Spice.

The various expatriate communities lived in their own social circles, where, in the way of

‘hardship posts’, attachments were strong and recalled with nostalgia in later life. The Hindus from India were probably liked the least by the local Arabs-to whom Muslims from India and Pakistan complained about India’s incorporation of Kashmir and Hyderabad, but filled a need for white-collar staff that Aden’s schools could not meet, and had their own social circle too.

While his brother Ramnikbhal worked in the automotive division, Dhirubhai was assigned to the Shell products division of Besse. As a newly arrived youngster he created an early splash, literally, by taking a bet while out helping bunker a ship in the harbour that he could not dive off and swim to shore. The prize was an ‘ice-cream party’-which he won, by swimming through waters that had seen occasional shark attacks on swimmers outside the nets of its beaches.

As he developed more familiarity with the trade, Dhirubhai was sent to market Shell and Burmah lubricants around the Besse network, visiting traders in French Somaliland, Berbera, Hargeysa, Assem, Asmara (Eritrea), Mogadishu (Italian Somaliland), and Ethiopia. Some places were not accessible to steamers, so the Besse salesmen would travel by dhow, the traditional wooden sailing vessels of Arabian waters. Lodgings would be extremely rough, and the food difficult for the vegetarian Gujaratis.

Dhirubhai was outgoing, robust, and helpful to newcomers. He was physically strong and proud of his physique. The other young men tended to be bashful about nakedness in their shared bathrooms, and a common prank was to whip away the towels they wrapped around their waists while crossing the living space in the mess. Dhirubhai would walk around without hiding behind towels. His solid footsteps could be heard from a distance, and his colleagues soon started calling him ‘Gama’ after a famous Indian pehelwan (wrestling champion) of the time. Navin Thakkar, a former colleague at Besse, remembers that Dhirubhai taught him to swim by simply throwing him into the sea, at the swimming place down near the Aden dockyard where they used to go on Saturdays and Sundays.

Dhirubhai delighted in stirring up pandemonium. Old colleagues describe it as bichu chordoa or ‘letting loose a scorpion’.

Despite his affability, some of his old colleagues describe Dhirubhai as a ‘dark character’-

not just because of the darkish skin he inherited from his father-but for the ambition and risk-taking he hardly concealed. ‘Ramnik was more or less a saintly man,’ said one ex-Besse colleague who later went to work for Dhirubhai. ‘Dhirubhai was a daring one. He was already advising me to go for business and not to remain in service.’

Dhirubhai’s career with Besse was progressing steadily, and the Shell Division was one of the most rapidly expanding areas of company business. By 1956, when the Suez War broke out after Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Dhirubhai was managing the Shell refuelling operation at the Aden military base. He was also able to observe construction of the BP oil refinery in Aden, gaining an early insight into the production linkages of the petroleum industry.