‘You make your living from it,’ I said, curious to know how he would respond.
‘So?’
‘So, how do you feel about it?’
‘I don’t feel anything about it, one way or the other. Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That’s just the way the world is.’
‘But surely some money has more suffering attached to it,’ I persisted, ‘and some money has less.’
‘Money only comes in two kinds, Lin—yours, and mine.’
‘Or, in this case, Khader’s money.’
Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.
‘We make money for Abdel Khader, true, but a part of everything we make is ours. And it’s the little part of everything that belongs to us that keeps us in the game, na? Okay, let’s get started. Why do black markets for money exist?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I’ll ask it in a different way’ Khaled smiled. The thick scar that started at his throat, below the left ear, and cut a groove in his face all the way to the corner of his mouth, gave the smile a lopsided and unsettling twist. The scarred half of his face didn’t smile at all, which meant that the other half seemed menacing, or pained, when he was trying hardest to be kind. ‘How is it that we can buy one American dollar from a tourist for, say, eighteen rupees, when the banks are only offering fifteen or sixteen?’
‘Because we can sell them for more than eighteen?’ I offered.
‘Good. Good. Now, how can we do that?’
‘Because … someone wants to buy them at that price, I guess.’
‘Exactly. But who are we selling them to?’
‘Look, the most I ever did was put tourists together with black-market guys, and take my cut. I don’t really know what happens to the dollars after that. I never went that far into it.’
‘Black markets for things exist,’ he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, ‘because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they’re too strict. It’s all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won’t give you a black market. Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let’s say, pastries, but if there isn’t strict control on the baking of pastries, there won’t be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won’t be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market.’
‘You’ve put a lot of thought into this,’ I commented, laughing, but impressed and genuinely glad that he wanted to give me the ontology of currency crime, and not just the ways I could go about committing it.
‘Not really’ he answered self-deprecatingly.
‘No, I’m serious. When Khaderbhai sent me here, I thought you were going to give me a few tables of figures—you know, today’s currency exchange rates and all that—and then send me on my way.’
‘Oh, we’ll get to the rates and stuff soon enough,’ he smiled again, sounding very American in the light-hearted aside. I knew he’d studied in New York when he was much younger. Khaderbhai had told me that he’d been happy there, for a time. A little of that happiness seemed to have survived in the long, rounded vowels and other Americanisms of his speech. ‘But first you need the theory, before you can make a profit from the practice.’
The Indian rupee, Khaled explained, was a restricted currency. It couldn’t be taken out of India, and it couldn’t legally be changed for dollars anywhere in the world but in India. With its vast population, India sent many thousands of businessmen, businesswomen, and travellers out of the country every day. Those people were permitted to take out only a limited amount of American currency with them. They could change a fixed amount of their rupees into American dollars, and the rest had to be converted in the form of travellers’ cheques.
The regulation was enforced in various ways. When someone wanted to leave the country and change rupees into dollars to the legal limit, he or she had to present a passport and plane ticket at the bank. The bank teller confirmed the departure date on the ticket, and marked both the ticket and the passport to indicate that the holder had been granted the full limit of American dollars in exchange for rupees. The transaction couldn’t be duplicated. There was no legal way for the traveller to buy more American dollars for that journey.
Almost everyone in India had at least some black money under the bed. From the few hundred rupees that a working man earned and didn’t report to the Tax Office, all the way to the billions of rupees accumulated as profits from crime, the black economy was said to be almost half as large as the legal, white economy. Anyone who had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of undeclared rupees—as many Indian business travellers did—couldn’t buy legal travellers’ cheques with them: the bank or the Tax Office always wanted to know where the money came from. So the only real alternative was to buy dollars from the black-market currency dealers. And every day, in Bombay, millions of rupees worth of black American dollars, English pounds, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, and other currencies were bought and sold in a trade that was a dark mirror of the legal money exchanges.
‘I buy a thousand American dollars, from a tourist, for eighteen thousand rupees, when the bank exchange rate is set at fifteen,’ Khaled summarised. ‘He’s happy, because he’s three thousand rupees better off than he would’ve been at the bank. Then I sell the dollars, to an Indian businessman, for twenty-one thousand rupees. He’s happy, because he bought the dollars with black money that he couldn’t declare. Then I put three thousand rupees in the kitty, and I buy another thousand dollars, from another tourist, for eighteen thousand. That’s the simple equation at the heart of the currency racket.’
To find the tourists, and entice them to change their money, Khaderbhai’s mafia council employed a small army of touts, guides, beggars, hotel managers, bellboys, restaurateurs, waiters, shopkeepers, airline officials, travel agents, nightclub owners, prostitutes, and cab drivers. Keeping tabs on them was one of Khaled’s jobs. In the mornings he phoned all the businesses to establish exchange rates for all the important currencies. There were update calls every two hours throughout the day, advising of any fluctuations in the rates. A taxi was at his disposal around the clock, with two drivers operating in shifts. Every morning he visited the bagmen for each area, and handed over bundles of rupees for the street traders to use as their float. Touts and other street-level crooks dealt with the street traders, guiding tourists and businessmen to them. The traders changed money, and kept the foreign currencies in bundles to be collected. Bagmen did the rounds of traders throughout the day, supplying them with cash as they needed it. Collectors made several sweeps during each working day and night to pick up bundles of foreign currency.
Khaled supervised personal collections and exchanges at hotels, airline offices, travel agencies, and other businesses that required a greater degree of discretion. He made two major pick-ups from his collectors in the key areas; one at noon, and one in the late evening. Relevant cops in every area were paid to look away from anything that might offend their sensibilities. In return, Khaderbhai promised that any violence he deemed necessary, in the event that someone tried to rob his men or hold out on them, would be swift and sure, and would never involve the police or threaten their interests in any way. The responsibility for maintaining discipline and enforcing Khader’s control fell to Abdullah Taheri. His team of Indian goondas and Iranian veterans of the war with Iraq ensured that irregularities were rare, and ruthlessly punished.
‘You’ll work with me, on the collections,’ Khaled announced. ‘You’ll learn it all, in time, but I really want you to concentrate on the tricky ones—the five-star hotels, and the airline offices. T
he shirt and tie jobs. I’ll go with you, especially at the start, but I think it’ll be good if a gora, a well-dressed, white foreigner, does the hand-overs in those places. You’ll be invisible. They won’t look at you twice. And our contacts will be a lot less edgy, dealing with you. After that, I want you to get into the travel business. I can use a gora there, too.’
‘The travel business?’
‘Oh, you’re gonna love it,’ he said, meeting my eyes with that same sad smile. ‘It’ll make that stint you did in Arthur Road seem worth it, because it’s first class all the way.’
The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and labourers, were usually paid in foreign currency. Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader’s mafia council offered the employers and the workers a shortcut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favourable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left them with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.
For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They, too, had caches of undeclared, untaxed money under their opulent beds. Syndicates developed to organise the payment of Indian guest workers in rupees when they returned to India. The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn’t have to negotiate with hard-nosed black-market dealers personally. The bosses were happy because they made profits from the payment through their syndicates. The black marketeers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travellers. Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.
‘I … this whole business was once something of a specialty with me …,’ Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended. His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.
‘When I was studying, in New York,’ he went on at last, ‘I was working on a thesis … well, I wrote a thesis, on un-organised trade in the ancient world. It’s an area that my mother was researching, before the ‘67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started to write it myself, I called it Black Babylon.’
‘It’s a catchy title.’
He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn’t mocking him.
‘I mean it,’ I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. ‘I think it’s a good topic for a thesis, and it’s a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it.’
He smiled again.
‘Well, Lin, life has a lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain’t happy ones for a working stiff. Now I’m working for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it’s Black Bombay.’
The bitterness in his voice was disconcerting. His jaw began to set in a grim and almost angry expression as he stared at his joined hands. I moved to steer the conversation away from the past.
‘You know, I’ve been involved with a part of the black market that might interest you. Have you heard of the lepers’ medicine market?’
‘Sure,’ he replied, interest glittering in his dark brown eyes. He ran a hand over his face and up across the short, military haircut, prematurely streaked with grey and white. The gesture wiped his gloomy recollections away, and he gave me his full attention. ‘I heard that you met Ranjit—he’s incredible, isn’t he?’
We talked about Ranjitbhai, the king of his little group of lepers, and the black market they’d organised across the country. Their mysterious trade fascinated us equally. As a historian—or a man who’d once dreamed of becoming a historian, like his scholarly mother—Khaled was intrigued by the long evolution and secret conduct of the lepers’ organisation. As a writer, I was provoked by the story of their suffering and their unique response to it. After twenty minutes of excited, actuating discussion, we agreed to visit Ranjit together to find out more about the history of the black market in medicines.
And with that pledge between exiles, between scholar and writer, Khaled and I established a simple but enduring bond of intellectual respect. We became friends in the rapid, unquestioning way of criminals, soldiers, and other survivors of disaster. I visited him every day in his sparsely furnished, Spartan apartment near Andheri station. The sessions lasted five or six hours. They roved freely from ancient history to reserve bank interest-rate policies, from anthropology to fixed and floating currencies, and I learned more about that very common but complex crime in one month, with Khaled Ansari, than most street traders in dollars and Deutschmarks learned in a year of dealing.
And when the lessons were complete, I went to work with Khaled every morning and every evening, seven days a week. The pay was good. The wages I earned came in such quantities that I was often paid in thick blocks of rupees, direct from the bank and still bearing their steel staples all the way through the notes. Compared to the slum-dwellers I’d known as neighbours, friends, and patients for almost two years, I was already a rich man.
To ensure that the cuts and wounds of prison healed as quickly as possible, I’d taken a room at the India Guest House, at Khaderbhai’s expense. The clean, tiled shower and soft mattress did help me to heal, but there was more to the move than physical convalescence. The truth was that the months in Arthur Road Prison had damaged my spirit more than my body. And the lingering shame I felt over the deaths of my neighbour Radha in the cholera epidemic, and the two boys from my English class, gave me no peace. The prison torment, and my failures in the cholera epidemic: I might’ve survived either one of them on its own, and gone back to those loving, wretched acres when I was well enough. But both of them, together, were more than my frail self-respect could endure, and I couldn’t live in the slum or even sleep the night there.
I visited Prabaker, Johnny, Qasim, and Jeetendra often, and I continued to help out at the clinic, attending to patients for two afternoons every week. But the strange mix of arrogance and insouciance that had permitted me to be the slum doctor was gone, and I didn’t expect it to return. There’s a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbour’s life—failed even to know that she was ill. And there’s an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. That innocence faltered when I stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons. Moving out of the slum had as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds on my body.
For their part, my friends from the slum accepted my decision without question or comment. They greeted me warmly whenever I visited, and involved me in the daily routines and celebrations of the slum—weddings, festivals, community meetings, or cricket games—as if I still lived and worked with them. And despite their shock and sorrow when they saw my emaciated frame, and the scars that the overseers had branded on my skin, they never once mentioned the prison. A part of that, I think, was sensitivity to the shame they knew I must’ve been feeling; the shame that they would’ve felt had they been imprisoned. Another part, in the hearts of Prabaker, and Johnny Cigar, and perhaps even Qasim Ali, might’ve been found in guilt—that they hadn’t been able to help me because they hadn’t thought to search for me. None of them had realised that I’
d been arrested. They’d assumed that I’d simply tired of life in the slum, and that I’d returned to my comfortable life in my comfortable country, like every other tourist or traveller they’d ever known.
And that, too, found its way into my reluctance to return to the slum. It astonished me, and it hurt me, after all I’d done there, and for all that they’d included me in the ragged skein of their too-many lives, that they still expected me to leave them, without a word of farewell, whenever the whim possessed me.
So, when my health improved and I began to earn real money, I didn’t move back to the slum. Instead, with Khaderbhai’s help, I rented an apartment in Colaba at the landward end of Best Street, not far from Leopold’s. It was my first apartment in India, and my first indulgence of space and privacy and domestic luxuries such as a hot shower and a functioning kitchen. I ate well, cooking high-protein and high-carbohydrate meals, and forcing myself to finish off a bucket of ice cream every day. I put on body weight. I slept for ten hours at a stretch, night after night, healing my lacerated body with sleep’s ravelling repair. But I woke often, with my arms flailing, fighting, and the wet-metal smell of blood still fresh from the nightmare.
I trained in karate and weightlifting with Abdullah at his favourite gym in the fashionable suburb of Breach Candy. Two other young gangsters—Salman Mustaan and his friend Sanjay, whom I’d met at my first visit to Khader’s council—often joined us. They were strong, healthy men in their late-twenties who liked to fight about as much as they liked sex, and they liked sex just fine. Sanjay, with his movie-star looks, was the joker. Salman was quieter and more serious. Although inseparable friends since childhood, they were as hard on one another in the ring as they were when they boxed Abdullah and me. We worked out five times each week, with two days off to allow our torn and swollen muscles to recover. And it was good. It helped. Pumping iron is Zen for violent men. Little by little, my body regained its strength, muscular shape, and fitness.
Shantaram: A Novel Page 55
