Disembarking tourists, brought ashore in launches from the ships moored out in the roadstead, were immediately surrounded by Arab and Indian salesmen and touts, desperately 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 visitors 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. But for the young Gujaratis hired by Besse & Co., Aden was a kind of paradise, and most recalled 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. ‘It was tax free virtually, and we never saw an electricity bill or rent bill until we left. For fourteen 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 twenty-one months straight work in Aden or at one of the Besse outposts around the Red Sea.
While most of the British residents lived on the slopes above Steamer Point, the 15 000 Indians clustered in a few streets of the Crater district. The Besse & Co. bachelors 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 British Governor Charles Johnston: ‘Indian merchant families, the women in saris, the men in their white jodhpur-ish 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, coffeemakers, carpet merchants, all the usual figures of the Oriental bazaar – and pervading the whole thing a strong hot smell of spice.’4
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 Ramnikbhai worked in Besse’s automotive division, Dhirubhai was assigned to the Shell products division. 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, remembered 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 described it as bichu chordiya or ‘letting loose a scorpion’. Despite his affability, some of his old colleagues described 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 Reliance. ‘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.
In March 1954, at the age of 22, Dhirubhai married, in a match arranged by his mother (his father had died in 195l) but which Dhirubhai himself had supervised. His wife was Kokila (meaning cuckoo), daughter of Ratilal Jasraj Patel, the postmaster in Jamnagar, the port on the western side of Kathiawar. She had grown up in a modest small-town environment, in a row of houses sharing the same long verandah, but had received a sound schooling to high-school level. Her family was not particularly wealthy so it was not a financially advantageous match for Dhirubhai. But ‘Kokilaben’ (the suffix is an endearment, meaning ‘sister’) was also a Modh Bania, as the strict caste endogamy of the time demanded, and her character complemented that of Dhirubhai. She was a solid home anchor very much grounded in traditional values and religious piety.
Although he was doing well, Dhirubhai was far from happy with his position as an employee. M.N. Sangvi, who worked alongside Dhirubhai in the Shell division and later went to work for him in India, recalled him as “different” from his workmates: ‘I could see he wanted to make something of himself.’ His room-mate Susheel Kothari also remembers the ambition. ‘Right from the beginning he was determined to do something big,’ he said. ‘He was never comfortable in service. He was a born businessman.’
After office hours, which finished at 4.30 in the afternoon, Dhirubhai would invariably head for the Aden souk. Initially he just watched the Arab, Indian and Jewish traders in action. Later he began taking positions in all kinds of commodities, particularly rice and sugar, in gambles against rises and falls in prices at time of delivery. Doing business on one’s own account was strictly forbidden to Besse employees by the terms of their contract and his older brother Ramnikbhai disapproved, so Dhirubhai would simply say he was ‘studying the market’.
Dhirubhai made some profits and learned the fundamentals of business and money. But he also made some near-disastrous mistakes that almost wiped out his capital. On one occasion he suffered a tight financial squeeze when an incoming cargo of sugar was damaged by seawater and his customer refused to accept delivery. Pending settlement of his insurance claim, Dhirubhai had to pass the hat among Besse colleagues for loans to bail himself out.
One particular ally was a Besse employee named Jamnadas Sakerchand Depala, a relative by marriage, who lent Dhirubhai 5000 shillings on this occasion. Depala was close to Dhirubhai and the two usually had lunch together, even after Dhirubhai had married. It was an odd relationship, another attraction of opposites. Depala was not a worldly man and lent money again to Dhirubhai for his ‘market studies’, but had a strong influence nonetheless. ‘Jamnadas was morally in control of Dhirubhai,’ said Susheel Kothari, who had been in the same bachelors mess with Dhirubhai. ‘If Dhirubhai was drinking too much, no one else could stop him. He’d just swear at them. Kokilaben used to call Jamnadas and Dhirubhai would listen to him.’ Jamnadas is said to have made considerable sacrifices for Dhirubhai. On one occasion, Jamnadas and Dhirubhai were reported to Besse management for their private deals and were suspended from service. Jamnadas took responsibility and resigned, allowing Dhirubhai to complete the seven years’ servi
ce that earned him the right of residence in Aden.
Another story told by ex-Besse staff is that, after leaving the company, Jamnadas continued to invest in rice and sugar deals masterminded by Dhirubhai and lost heavily, to the point of losing most of his capital. Jagani remembers Jamnadas being ‘very depressed’ around 1961. Whatever the truth of this, Dhirubhai continued to act as though he was in debt to Jamnadas. Some years later, Janmadas returned to India and was given a shop selling textiles for Dhirubhai. After a while Jamnadas stopped coming to work, but Dhirubhai saw that his salary was paid until his death in 1987.
Dhirubhai left Aden in 1958, with his seven years’ service and right of residency as a fallback, to try his hand in business back in India. The house of Besse lasted only another nine years, as long as British rule in Aden, which was being eroded by the sandblast of pan-Arabic nationalism. Some of the transistor radios sold at Steamer Point found their way to the villagers of Yemen, who listened to President Abdul Gamal Nasser’s message of Arab nationalism on Radio Cairo. Hit-and-run attacks by rival liberation fronts made Aden unsafe for foreigners. In the second half of 1967, British forces retreated to an ever-tightening perimeter until the rearguard was evacuated by helicopter to naval ships offshore on 29 November 1967.5 The territory fell unconditionally to the National Liberation Front. It applied its harsh version of Marxism–Leninism, abolishing private property and nationalising most foreign companies. By then the closure of the Suez Canal in the 1967 Arab/Israel war had cut Aden’s bunkering business. Racked by periodic coup attempts and wars with northern Yemen, the new state of South Yemen became an economic backwater and haven for international terrorists – a modern version of the pirates’ lair the British first subdued.
Besse & Co. was among the companies appropriated by the new regime. From retirement in France, former director Peter Besse wrote in 1996 that the ‘vast trading empire … of my father collapsed on the arrival of various “People’s Democratic Republic” governments. Today nothing is left.’6
4
Catching live serpents
At the end of 1958 Dhirubhai returned to India with his wife Kokilaben and first child, a son named Mukesh, born in April 1957. They were expecting their second child (another son, Anil, born in June 1959, to be followed by daughters Dipti, born in January 1961 and Nina, born in July 1962). From all his years with Besse & Co. and all his evenings ‘studying the market’ he had accumulated savings of just 29 000 East African shillings – then worth about $3000 – which, as his Besse colleague Susheel Kothari had reminded him, would be just ‘chutney’ back in his homeland.
Dhirubhai was determined to go into business on his own account. At first he looked at Rajkot, the port city of his native Saurashtra facing the Rann of Kutch. Krishnakant Vakharia, by then practising law in Rajkot, remembered that Dhirubhai came to visit. ‘He was toying with the idea of a dealership in automobile spare parts there,’ Vakharia said. ‘I had a friend who was doing just that and who was not doing very well. So I advised Dhirubhai that he should not go into this business and instead of Rajkot he should go to Bombay.’
At Dhirubhai’s request, Krishnakant Vakharia, by then practising law in Rajkot, accompanied him down to Chorwad and stayed there a few days while Dhirubhai sounded out friends and acquaintances about ideas and help. He found support in the family of Chambaklal Damani, a second cousin who had been working in Aden for family companies at about the same time that Dhirubhai was there. One business, Madhavas Manikchand, had imported textiles and yarns from India, ran a transit business into Ethiopia and held the agency for Bridgestone Tyres. The other, Anderjee Manekchand & Co., had imported textiles from India and Japan. When necessary Dhirubhai had used the names of these firms during his own after-hours trading.
Damani’s father, Madhavlal Manikchand, had closed his businesses in Aden and Ethiopia on retiring in 1957 and decided to put Rupees (Rs) 100 000 into a trading business for his son and Dhirubhai in Bombay. Vakharia saw the agreement concluded in his presence and returned to Rajkot. Dhirubhai and Chambaklal called their new business Reliance Commercial Corporation. The first office was a room of about 350 square feet in Narsinathan Street, in the crowded Masjid Bandar district of Bombay. It had a telephone, one table and three chairs. If the two partners and their initial two employees were all present, someone had to stand.
At first, the business traded spices back to the partners’ contacts in the souk of Aden – betel nut and curry ingredients – and shipped some cotton, nylon and viscose textiles to Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. But local contacts led them quickly into the frenetic and potentially profitable business of trading synthetic yarns – one of more than sixty commodity markets serving all of India that were located in Bombay, nearly all of them run by Gujaratis. Vakharia had introduced Dhirubhai to a fellow activist in the Socialist Party, a successful yarn trader called Mathura Das Mehta. And Dhirubhai’s talented nephew Rasikbhai Meswani (the son of Dhirubhai’s older sister) had begun trading in yarns a couple of years earlier.
At the tiny Masjid Bandar office, Dhirubhai began to assemble a team that stayed with him for decades as Reliance grew. It included Meswani, his older brother Ramnikbhai, who had also returned from Aden, his younger brother Nathwarlal (Nathubhai) on completing his education and two former schoolmates from Junagadh named Rathibhai Muchhala and Narottambhai Doshi. Dhirubhai also enlisted the services of old acquaintances from Aden, including Liladhar Golkaldas Sheth, who had been a dealer in textiles, coffee and foreign exchange in Yemen, Burma and Aden (suffering several bankruptcies along the way) before settling back as a foreign exchange dealer in Bombay in the 1950s.
Dhirubhai quickly became a familiar figure around the streets of Pydhonie, the synthetic yarn trading district of Bombay where Gujarati merchants then did their business, sitting on spotless gaddi (white canvas fIoor-covers), entering trades in compendious ledgers and consuming endless cups of tea thick with sugar, spices and hot milk. From late morning until about 4pm, Pydhonie was busy with trading, as dealers made forward trades, trying to guess the future price of yarn of this or that micron size.
If cotton and silk had been the materials of India’s textile industry right from the old handloom days to the industrial looms of the early twentieth century, by the 1950s the industry and its consumers were hungry for the artificial threads created by modern chemical science. Nylon, viscose and polyester were cheap, hardwearing, quick-drying and crease-proof and could imitate the textures of both cotton and silk.
The problem for yarn dealers at Pydhonie was not usually to find buyers but to secure supplies. The tightening of industrial controls and import quotas since Independence had choked supply of these ‘luxuries’ as the economic Brahmins of New Delhi channelled national resources towards new complexes making capital goods such as electrical turbines and steel mills – what Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called the ‘temples of modern industry’.
India had one viscose factory, owned by the Birlas, and one government-owned nylon plant. The first polyester fibre plant did not open until the 1970s. These domestic factories supplied only a small fraction of local demand from textile weavers. Smugglers supplied some of this demand, bringing in yarn either by misdeclaring cargoes at regular ports or by simply running small ships to the numerous creeks and beaches of India’s west coast. Made-up textiles were also smuggled, via Dubai or Singapore. Indian visitors to Japan’s artificial textile industries, then in their great postwar expansion phase, recall seeing vast production of sari-length material, for which there was no legal market in the subcontinent at all.
The other source came from the strictly controlled import licences given to registered exporters of textiles, allowing import of raw materials worth a certain percentage of their export earnings. Like many others, Dhirubhai realised that these import or ‘Replenishment’ licences (known as REPs) were as good as money, even though some of them were officially not transferrable and imports had to be made by the ‘actual user’ of the materials. By payi
ng higher margins than any other trader, Dhirubhai soon became the main player in the market for REP licences. The margins were tiny in the trade itself – but his dominance also put him in the position of being able to turn on and off much of the supply of yarn into the Indian market.
Suresh Kothary, whose family business was the importing agency for Du Pont products including textile fibres, chemicals and dyes from 1958 to 1993, and was also active in yarn trading, remembers first meeting Dhirubhai in 1964 at the Masjid Bandar office. Dhirubhai would often drop by at Kothary’s shopfront at Pydhonie thereafter, lounging on the white cotton mattress and drinking tea or coffee. They were in effect rivals, as Dhirubhai mostly imported his yarns from Asahi Chemicals in Japan or Ital Viscosa via a long-resident Italian businessman in Bombay, a Dr Rossi, while Kothary handled only the Du Pont product from the United States and elsewhere. But Dhirubhai was a sporting rival, Kothary said: ‘He would always say, “This is what I’m going to do, boy!” Whenever he fights an enemy he goes in the open.’ Not everyone in the Bombay textile trade would have agreed.
Kothary and many others in the Pydhonie market remember Dhirubhai’s intervention in a market crisis in the mid-1960s when spiralling textile prices led government authorities to crack down on ‘speculation’ in the yarn market by banning forward trading and then arresting traders found to be continuing the practice. ‘Consumers must have complained to the government about fluctuations in prices – some people, about a dozen, were arrested in the market,’ Kothary said.
The trading community was despondent as their colleagues languished all day in the cells of Picket Road Police Station. Approaches to officials by the Bombay Yarn Markets and Exchange Association got nowhere. Then, late in the evening, Dhirubhai arrived like a storm at the police station, shouting greetings to senior officers and handing out snacks to everyone. Within an hour the arrested traders had been released and complaints against them shelved. Kothary can only guess at the substance of Dhirubhai’s intervention. ‘The usual – India!’ he said.
Mahabharata in Polyester Page 4
