Rupee Millionaires

by Frank Kusy

  ‘So Frank, how much profit do you think you make in a year?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, scratching my head. ‘Maybe thirty grand?’

  ‘And how much does it cost you to live in Surrey?’

  I hesitated, then admitted, ‘I haven’t really thought about it. Thirty grand again?’

  ‘So you’re living on your “profit”? Where’s the profit in that?’

  I had no answer for her. All this time, during the long two years since separating from Spud, I had been cutting my prices in order to be the cheapest wholesaler in England. Now my prices were so low that Martin had once coined an epitaph for me: ‘Here lies Frank. He was really cheap!’

  *

  Sharon was right. If I took all my expenses into account—not just the food and household bills, but also the cost of running my van and storing my goods—I was making no profit at all. In fact, I was probably making a loss.

  ‘What kind of mark-up do you charge on your goods?’ she persisted.

  ‘It used to be 200 per cent,’ I said. ‘But it’s more like 100 per cent now.’

  ‘That’s crazy!’ she snorted. ‘Whatever I buy from you I mark up at least three times. I couldn’t survive otherwise. If you’re only doubling up, and your overheads are thirty grand, you’ve got to sell sixty grand worth of stuff each year just to live!’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘Don’t rub it in.’

  Having taken stock of my customers, I now had to take stock of my stock. Spud had gone bust for two reasons: half his stock was rubbish, and the other half was too expensive. I had the opposite problem. Most of my stock was good, but because I was charging too little for it, it was worth less than rubbish.

  ‘I think I’ll have to retire,’ I informed Sharon on our next meeting.

  ‘Oh, you’re always saying that!’ she jeered. ‘Why don’t you just put up your prices?’

  ‘I tried that, and nobody liked it. How would you like it if I said you couldn’t have a five pound ring tray in your shop anymore? That it would now have to be a ten pound ring tray because I was charging you double?’

  Sharon’s face fell, then brightened. ‘Tell you what,’ she suggested. ‘Put up your prices for everyone but me, and I’ll give you a good idea!’

  Sharon’s idea was that I stop trading for the whole period leading up to Christmas. All of my shops would be forced to buy elsewhere, she reckoned, and when I resurfaced with my hiked-up prices they would be falling over themselves to pay them.

  But when I returned to my shops four months later, half of them didn’t want to see me.

  ‘It’s not your prices,’ explained Pam in Sidcup. ‘It’s just that you weren’t there when I needed you.’

  ‘Where were you before Christmas?’ accused Ed in Gosport. ‘I rang and rang, and you didn’t return my calls!’

  Against my will, I was forced to take desperate measures. ‘Follow the money,’ Spud had once said, so follow the money I did. I brought all my prices back down again and made every effort possible to recover my customer base. If I found a shop with another wholesaler in it, I made sure the other wholesaler was relegated to a back room by offering impossibly big discounts. If a shop lady said, ‘I don’t want to buy much,’ I read her palm, did her horoscope, asked about her family, told her how nice her hair looked, even bought her a Chinese takeaway. Anything to change her mind. I was using all the Indian tactics I’d learned over the years. If all else failed I played the Satish card and gave her ‘free’ presents.

  Elsewhere I spent hours listening to people’s problems before I even got to open my van. Topics for discussion might include the health of their cat, the sexual disinterest of their partner, the need to decriminalise cannabis, the best hospital for gynaecological problems, and why everybody should live in tipis not houses.

  Finally—and this was a major no-no in the wholesaling world—I started selling to two, even three, shops in the same town. I knew this would force them to compete against each other, using the exact same clothing and jewellery, but I had too much at stake to do otherwise. I had a hundred grand worth of stock in my warehouse, most of it still unpaid for, and I had a lot of strong competition. Spud was out of the frame, yes, but there was a whole load of new wholesalers coming in from India, all of them bombing around the country in big white vans and threatening my livelihood.

  I survived. Just. But the next time I saw Sharon, I was not well disposed towards her.

  ‘I didn’t think much of your “good idea”,’ I said. ‘It nearly cost me my business!’

  ‘Oh, stop complaining,’ she admonished me. ‘Have you got any turquoise rings?’

  Well, no, I hadn’t, but I wasn’t saying so. I wanted her to pay for her lousy advice. So I said, ‘Malachite is this year’s turquoise’ and sold her a bagful of cracked malachite instead. Then, when she wanted purple beads (because ‘purple went well last time’) I stole her glasses and sold her lurid pink instead. Finally, when she rejected the five hundred silk scarves I had specially ordered in for her from India (because ‘they’re not exactly like my sample’) I sold her a pile of base metal toe-rings and called them silver.

  ‘What’s all this shit?’ she shouted down the phone at me when she finally found her glasses.

  ‘Oh, stop complaining,’ I scolded. ‘Have you got any more good ideas?’

  Chapter 27

  Busy Bobby

  Around this time, I got a surprise phone call.

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice. ‘It’s me.’

  My heart leapt. 'Spud? Is that really you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve just met a friend of yours. Justin. He thought I might like your number.’

  I fought to remain calm. ‘Oh, I thought you had it.’ I lied. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Forget the pleasantries,’ Spud said. ‘There are some papers in the post. I need you to sign them.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘You’ll see. And remember, if you don’t sign them, I know where you live.’

  The phone clicked off, and I began to panic. After three long years, my bald nemesis had found me. I was no longer safe. But when the post arrived the next day, and Spud’s letter with it, I was relieved.

  ‘There’s some tax due on our old partnership,’ Spud had written in his spidery script. ‘Just pay the first six instalments with me, and we’ll call it quits.’

  The six monthly payments totalled £6000, and though the bill had nothing to do with our old partnership and everything to do with Spud’s own tax problems, I immediately wrote out six £500 cheques—my half of the deal. It was a small price to pay for Spud’s goodwill. Besides, my own recent drug experiences had given me a new sympathy for my brain-addled ex-partner.

  ‘It’s my last act of kindness,’ I assured Madge. ‘He won’t bother us again.’

  Talk about naïve.

  I was also naïve concerning my Buddhist prayer bag. That had been missing for ages, presumed lost. When it turned up again, along with Spud’s letter, I took it as a gesture of reconciliation, his method of burying the hatchet. I did a quick check to assure myself that everything was there: my favourite prayer beads, my liturgy book, a few precious photographs, and I thought no more of it.

  Really, I should have.

  By this time, mid ’99, many of Spud’s old customers had come over to me, and I was supplying half the country with Indian silver and handicrafts. I did not consider this to be a problem, but apparently it was. In June of that year, I received a letter from the VAT man.

  ‘Dear Mr Kusy,’ it read. ‘Our records show that you imported £146,000 worth of goods from India during 1998, but you have only declared sales of £49,000 for the same year. Before we send out an inspector, can you please inform us of the location of the outstanding £100,000?’

  The outstanding £100,000 was in my pockets—or rather it was in the pockets of people like Satish and Gordhan who had given me unlimited credit. I had only posted sales of £49,000 because that was just below the Value
Added Tax threshold, and that saved my customers and me from paying 17.5 per cent extra. To keep my prices even lower—indeedthe lowest in the country—I had taken the rest of my sales in invisible cash, failing to declare them to the tax office.

  ‘That’s not a very Buddhist thing to do!’ Madge scolded.

  ‘I know,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Karmically speaking, I really must sort out the Inland Revenue in this lifetime.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or I’ll probably come back as a beggar on a Delhi sidewalk.’

  I was, by my own admission, the worst Buddhist in the world. I smoked, I drank, I told fibs, and I didn’t recycle. I was also partial to sausages, despite their well-known impact on greenhouse gases (not to mention my own, as Madge liked to remind me), and I had only the faintest interest in world peace. This was bad, since my brand of Buddhism was all about world peace. But I never stopped thinking I could improve myself, that I could someday abandon my superficial materialism and grow into a more rounded, more mature spiritual being. In the meantime, I consoled myself, while I didn’t have much time for the rest of the planet, I did give to those few I felt merited it—to the point of exhaustion.

  What I had to decide now was whether the Inland Revenue merited it. I was only planning to dodge tax for a year or two, I told Madge. Just until I had paid off all my creditors and was finally making some profit. But I could hardly tell the VAT this. They would have shut me down without blinking. Instead, I rang my new accountant, Jules, and asked his advice.

  ‘It does look suspicious,’ said Jules slowly. ‘Where is all that outstanding stock?’

  ‘In my warehouse,’ I lied. ‘They can go see it if they like.’

  ‘Okay,’ drawled Jules, sounding somewhat dubious. ‘Do you want me to have a word with them?’

  ‘Oh, could you?’ I asked sweetly. ‘You’re so very good at this sort of thing!’

  After that, I sat by the phone and waited. I had drawn Jules, an immovable force of total dedication, into negotiations with the VAT man, an irresistible object of trained tenacity. My money was on Jules. He was at once the most polite and the most relentless person on the planet. Nobody, to my knowledge, had threatened one of his customers without quickly regretting it.

  Sure enough, when the phone rang it was Jules, and he had good news.

  ‘I’ve just been onto the VAT,’ he proclaimed happily, ‘and I spent over an hour explaining your situation to them.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what happened,’ he admitted, ‘but all of a sudden, just as I was about to explain everything for the umpteenth time, I heard this low moan at the other end and they hung up on me.’

  I had been lucky. The VAT man never bothered me again. But I’d learnt my lesson. Now that I had nothing left to prove, now that I knew I could make it without Spud, I decided to be sensible and cut back. From now on, I would sell far less stuff to far fewer shops.

  The first thing to go was clothing. Yes, the profit margins were huge on the clothes that I sold, but the rest were so riddled with rips, tears, stains, and faulty seams that I had to throw them away. Clothes were also time-consuming – both to make and check in India, and to store and sell in England.

  So I decided to farm out all my clothing to big festivals like Glastonbury, and sell only silver to my shops. This semiprecious metal had never been cheaper: only US$5 per troy ounce in 1999, compared to its peak of US$25 back in 1980. And the labour costs of turning it into jewellery in India were minimal. Best of all, unlike clothing, it didn’t take up much room and could be transported around England in a few suitcases.

  In those days, nobody in India sold more silver than Busy Bobby. Bobby had a three-storey shop at the top of Main Bazar in Delhi, and his ambition was to supply every big wholesaler from the West. To this end, even though he was not much to look at—a pudgy Punjabi with white-powdered skin and a mass of slick black hair—he went out of his way to appear Western. He wore fashionable T-shirts from London, fancy designer watches from Bangkok, and expensive brand name shoes from Rome. He travelled abroad as much as possible, showing at prestigious jewellery fairs, and displayed photos all around his shop of his meetings of important people like Tony Blair and Prince Charles.

  But all that came later. When I had first met Bobby, in the spring of ’95, he wasn’t busy at all. He took me out for meals and to the cinema, and we had a lot of fun together. I liked him for three reasons: he was funny and modest, he had the cheapest silver in India, and he never said ‘No.’ If asked for something he didn’t have, he gazed up at the ceiling and asked, ‘Tea? Coffee?’ If this failed to distract, he moved onto the subject of food: ‘Chow Mein? Chinese fried rice?’ If asked a third time, he suddenly remembered a dying relative and vacated the shop.

  When I flew into India in May ’99, I carried a big sheaf of silver orders and a thick wad of cash—nearly £20,000—to give to Bobby. I knew I was taking a chance, that Bobby was juggling so many customers that he’d started dropping them, but I was gambling that the sheer size of my order, which was over sixty kilos, would compel my busy friend to prioritise me. I was also gambling that paying Bobby up front and in cash would—for once—get my order made on time.

  To succeed in my line of work, I reflected, one needed the cunning of a fox, the stoicism of a sacred cow, and the agility of a rooftop monkey. Each buying trip was like a game of Monopoly. You started out with a fixed amount of money to spend, a clear idea of what to buy, and a fairly clear idea of who to buy it from. But then you began to move your piece across the board and the whole neat strategy quickly disintegrated. The dice fell for you, but mainly against you. And for every plus card one drew – like cheap merchandise, good foreign exchange rates, and fun travelling companions – one got a lot more penalty cards, like national strikes, early monsoons, and unforeseen sickness. Somewhere along the line, inevitably, one ran out of money and started playing on credit. And that’s when it got tricky – because while Indian traders insisted that ‘credit is not a problem’, if you didn’t pay them back soon, it was a case of ‘Go to Pakistan, go directly to Pakistan, and don’t come back...ever!’

  Having left all my money in Delhi, I travelled on to Pushkar and began living on credit. I didn’t want it, I didn’t need it, but I couldn’t resist it. With two whole weeks to kill before my silver was ready, I was tempted by so many attractive ‘buy now, pay later’ deals that I started buying clothing again. Once I started, I simply lost track of what was going on. Some orders were being negotiated, others being checked, and still others were being confirmed or cancelled. So many balls were flying around I was dizzy. I wasn’t used to buying on my own any more, and with no Spud or Madge around for me to wind down with, my brain filled up with business and went into overload.

  I knew I’d reached critical mass when I arranged to meet Satish at 11am and didn’t reach him until four hours after that. I was dealt such a relentless sequence of penalty cards that by the end of the day it was nearly Game Over.

  Things started out innocently enough. My 10am breakfast was slightly delayed due to my lemon pancake being cooked on one side only. Then Jagat Singh turned up with an out-of-town Nawab, who wanted me to plug his new hotel in my guidebook. It was no good telling him I wasn’t writing any more guidebooks. He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

  It was gone noon before I escaped the hotel, and as I went I was followed into town by a one-string fiddle player, a guy with a cart, and a trio of desert prostitutes. I tried to walk straight to Satish’s but was quickly detoured by a shop offering me the exact same sarongs as Satish had, only three rupees cheaper. Shortly after that, I was lured into a second shop offering me sarongs for two rupees cheaper than shop one. What was going on here? Was Satish ripping me off?

  While I was considering this, I was collared by a local sadhu, dressed in grubby saffron robes and wearing a small monkey on his head. He led me to a nearby ghat to see ‘something special’. This was his friend, sitting by the s
ide of the road selling crocodile oil. Six baby crocs, sweating out tears in the pre-monsoon heat, were crawling around in a small metal basin. And every now and then, the friend was siphoning off the ‘crocodile tears’ and selling them on as a medicinal cure.

  I finally made it to Satish’s at 3pm, only to find him ‘gone in house.’ I rang him there but got his non-English-speaking wife who had no idea who I was. Bored and restless, I went for a shave and emerged with a crick in my neck—the result of an over-enthusiastic head massage. Satish, who had ‘just arrive,’ took one look at my bare face and shouted ‘Ha! Chickana!’ (fresh-plucked chicken).

  Satish and I then held a long and heated discussion over the price of his sarongs. I let myself be convinced that they were worth the extra expense because, as Satish and Sanjay comically demonstrated, they could not be pulled apart by two bull elephants charging in opposite directions.

  But I now had a thumping headache, so at 5pm I retired to my room for a sleep. An hour and several aspirins later I returned to the fray, only to find one supplier ‘gone to wedding,’ a second ‘gone to mind children,’ and a third ‘gone Ajmer.’ Frustrated, I decided to spend the rest of the evening with Satish, checking the 1000 sarongs which he was making me on credit.

  Then came another problem. Satish had dyed all the material brown. It looked like it had been dipped in cow shit.

  ‘All order cancelled!’ I shouted hysterically and stormed outside to cool down.

  I returned an hour later to find Satish grinning widely. ‘You are lucky man!’ he chuckled craftily. ‘These things just come!’

  And with that he unveiled 1000 metres of sarong material without even a trace of brown in it.

  ‘You are lucky man!’ I growled back at him. ‘And I think you have these things all the time. Why you show me rubbish first?’

  ‘You are my older brother,’ intervened Dinesh dimly. ‘Why you no give me calculator as present?’

  Feeling my sanity slipping away, I retired to the hotel to stick my head in a bucket of cold water. I had been lied to, shouted at, and generally harangued for twelve hours solid.