We left Mahipal’s house and headed in the other direction, towards Anand Reddy’s house. The old man I had seen before was still there, still dusting away. He nodded when Saveen asked him if we could come inside. We walked past the black Ford to the house, and even though we could have just stepped in through the gaps where the windows had been, we followed convention and went up the steps to a little porch, through a doorway whose wooden frame had been charred into black coal, and into the living room where the white marble floor was disfigured by great black patches.
Even in its present state, the house seemed opulent. Saveen appeared awed by the wealth it spoke of, and he whispered that it felt wrong to walk around inside the house without permission from the owners. He needn’t have worried. Some of the owners were at home, upstairs, and the old man had gone to call them. I turned around to see three people coming in: an elderly lady, a woman in her thirties and a girl in a school uniform.
My attention was drawn to the woman in her thirties, everything about whom suggested that she was the mistress of the house. She was wearing a bright blue sari, from the fringes of which one foot displayed a gleaming golden toe ring. She was slightly plump, and light-skinned – attributes that declared the upward mobility of the man who had married her with as much clarity as the marble and teak in the fittings of the house.
The woman was Mrs Anand Reddy, perfectly poised and quite unperturbed to find two strangers examining her devastated residence. ‘It’s all because of that Mahipal Reddy,’ she said, her fair face darkening a shade as she mentioned the name. She said that her husband and his brother had run a seed business for years in Armoor without any trouble. ‘We’ve never cheated the farmers. This time we didn’t even have any business with the farmers. It was Mahipal Reddy who made the arrangement with them. So why did they attack us?’ It became clear that her anger was directed at Mahipal rather than the farmers. ‘The kharif season is coming up,’ she said. ‘The farmers have taken out loans and were expecting to clear their loans with the payments for the red sorghum. They wanted to buy seeds to plant rice, for fertilizers and tractors, but they had no money and so they went berserk.’
She had just moved back to the house a couple of days earlier with her mother-in-law and daughter and was living on the upper floor, the least damaged part of the house. ‘He grew too big too fast,’ she said, still thinking of Mahipal. ‘He made his money too quickly.’ She lowered her voice. ‘There are rumours that the collector got some benefits from Mahipal.’
‘What kind of benefits?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Well, the collector’s daughter was getting married. We heard that Mahipal made a gift to the daughter, an oddalam.’
‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said.
‘It’s a gold belt that women wear on their waists in this part of the country,’ she said, looking amused. ‘The one the collector got was supposed to be worth fifteen lakh rupees.’
I tried calling Mahipal soon after we’d left his rival’s house. He said he was still in Nizamabad and would have to cancel the meeting. When I insisted, he asked me to try him again around five. Saveen, who had been listening in on the conversation, said that Mahipal was avoiding me and would keep putting me off until I went away. I said I would just go to the warehouse and wait for him there, hoping that he would show up at some point.
Saveen looked worried when he heard this. ‘These are not very safe people,’ he said. ‘Do you have to meet him?’ When he realized I was determined to see Mahipal, he said he would take me to see a friend of his who was a business partner of Mahipal’s.
We rode on Saveen’s scooter to the outskirts of Armoor, stopping at the fraying edge of the marketplace where the highway curved away from the town. Saveen led me up to the first floor of a shabby concrete building where, in a room that was bare except for a desk and a few chairs, there was a man talking on the phone. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, wearing an expensive-looking shirt with black and grey circles patterned on the white background. But it was his hands to which he had devoted special attention, with a big gold ring on his right index finger, while above a red sacred thread on his left wrist dangled two thick gold chains.
He was also the first rude person I had met in Andhra Pradesh. He asked me something in Telugu, and although I didn’t understand the question, the tone of his voice and the tilt of his head made it clear that he wasn’t being particularly polite. Saveen hurriedly launched into an explanation to which the man listened carefully. Then he asked us to sit and switched to Hindi. His name was Rajkumar, and ethnically he was a Marwari, from the western Indian state of Rajasthan. In other ways, though, he could be considered a local man, with his family having settled down in the region many generations ago. The primary family business was in gold and jewellery, Rajkumar said, which meant that they were also moneylenders. ‘But don’t assume too much from what you see here,’ he said a little threateningly. ‘This is a small office. Just a front. My business is elsewhere, and it’s not only in jewellery. I’m a partner of Mahipal’s, among other things.’
‘I’d like to meet Mahipal,’ I said, ‘but it’s proving hard to do that.’
‘If I take you, he will meet you,’ Rajkumar said, snapping his fingers at an attendant to bring us tea. ‘But why should I take you? Who are you to me?’
He listened lazily to my answer and then to Saveen’s more elaborate explanation. He occasionally grunted in response to Saveen, but for the most part he seemed uninterested in our presence and was busy texting on his mobile phone. I was surprised when he stood up and said, ‘Come, the car is here.’
There was a white Toyota Innova van parked outside, its seats covered with white cloth. There was another passenger in the car, a man of about Rajkumar’s age who looked like a minor political functionary in his spotless white kurta-pyjamas and dark sunglasses. ‘He’s one of my business partners,’ Rajkumar said as he slid smoothly into the car. ‘He’s a farmer. A rich farmer.’ The rich farmer nodded and began texting as the van pulled out.
9
The Toyota sped away from the town, past the black rocks of Navnath and through the countryside. The hum of the air conditioning, the liveried driver, the white covers on the seats and the expressionless faces of the two business partners, both now wearing dark glasses, added a touch of menace to the more commonplace aura of power and wealth in the car. I felt as if I was in the company of cocaine lords, and that impression was only heightened when the Toyota honked at the gates of Mahipal’s warehouse and drove in. We climbed out of the car, and as servants ran around to get plastic chairs, we joined a circle of men sitting in the yard, one of them intent on counting a large stack of currency notes.
Mahipal was eyeing me sheepishly, which seemed to indicate that he knew who I was even though we hadn’t yet been introduced. Rajkumar took him aside to talk, and when they returned, Mahipal asked me to sit next to him. Here, finally, was the man at the centre of the red sorghum story, someone who had either been the victim of a conspiracy by other dealers or who was directly responsible for all the chaos.
I had been expecting a hard-edged man, but Mahipal, with his glasses and wavy hair, looked very soft, especially when compared to the villainous Rajkumar. He began to speak quickly, almost airily, as he tried to show me how well his business was doing, his comments supported with enthusiastic exclamations from the surrounding crowd of yes men. ‘I am first and foremost a farmer, and the son of a farmer,’ Mahipal began, sounding as if he was addressing a political rally. ‘Everything I have done, I did it for the farmers.’
He had started as a small farmer, he said, with little education but with sufficient foresight to get into the seed dealing business in the late eighties. By 1990, he had built his warehouse and was dealing in seeds supplied by big companies, including multinationals, and supplying buyers from all over India. The other dealers in the area had been in the habit of giving low rates to farmers, who had naturally begun moving to him when he be
gan offering them more money. This year, when the collector called an auction of all the dealers, Mahipal had been the only one to meet the asking price of 15 rupees a kilo from the farmers. It was a reasonable offer for him to make, he said. There was a lot of demand for lal jowar in North India, where many of his buyers were located. ‘Not just in North India,’ Mahipal said. ‘In other parts of India too. Even in Pakistan.’ The only condition he had set was that he wanted the entire crop of the area because he was worried that his rivals might buy some red sorghum and dump it on the market to drive down the price. But this happened anyway, he said. ‘These other people, they went around and offered twenty-two rupees to the farmers. Five villages sold it to the other dealers at that price. They took it to Delhi and sold it for thirteen, at a big loss. Why did they do that? They wanted to finish off Mahipal Reddy.’
He paused to catch his breath, and the men around him nodded with approval at how well Mahipal was telling the story.
‘I applied for a loan of forty crore rupees from HDFC bank to finance the seed purchase,’ Mahipal continued. ‘The bank gave me a letter approving the loan, and I gave them a bond as security. Then these other people, they went to the bank and said that lal jowar was fetching a market price of only six or seven rupees. The bank called me and said they were cancelling the loan. I asked the collector for his help. He spoke to the bank, then to some of the other banks, but none of them would give me a loan. The other dealers then created a team to make trouble. They wanted to set fire to this warehouse and to murder me. Some farmers, mostly the Maoist party people, began a hunger strike. Then they held a big protest with some antisocial elements joining in with them.
‘I was in Hyderabad at the time, and not in the warehouse. I was afraid of what the antisocial elements hired by the other men might do to me. But they came after me in Hyderabad too. I have a house there and I was going home one evening when I got a phone call telling me to turn back. I asked the driver to slow down when we approached my house. We could see two cars parked right outside the house, both filled with men. I called my family to come out quickly and get into the car. We drove away and the cars followed us, but then, when they saw me driving to the Taj Banjara Hotel, they backed off. There were too many people for them to do what they wanted to do. We stayed in the hotel that night. Later, I found out that my house in Armoor had been ransacked and burned down. I took a loss of one crore rupees on the house. They didn’t even leave a spoon.’
I asked Mahipal if Anand Reddy was the dealer who had caused all the trouble.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The real villain is a man called Vijender Reddy. He lives in Hyderabad, not here, but he runs Ganga Kaveri Seeds. He’s the one who stopped the bank loan. The people who went on hunger strike, he sponsored them. He’s the big dealer in the area.’
I had the odd feeling that I had heard Mahipal’s story before, but I couldn’t quite pin down the source. Later, I would remember the account Arindam Chaudhuri had given me of his father being driven to the campus of his management institute and seeing the men waiting to assault him. It was like an archetypal scene in the lives of men rising upwards in the new India, with similar elements: the mysterious phone call, the shadowy rivals, the view through the windscreen of a car, the thugs waiting at the end of the road and the refuge found in a hotel.
But I didn’t make the connection right then. The setting was too different, with an edge to the men who sat around me even if Mahipal himself seemed smooth and polished. I was also busy trying to figure out if I had followed all the parts of Mahipal’s narrative: the bidding, the syndicates, the price fixing, the loans, the rumours, the threats, the thugs, the hotel, the car, the arson and the riot. It brought back the feeling that I was tracing a story about cocaine rather than red sorghum. And perhaps there was a relation between cocaine and red sorghum in the way speculation filled the space between the supposedly neutral market forces of supply and demand. If one changed the scale of the profits so that the seed bought for 15 was sold to the wholesale buyer not for 22 but for 2,200, the scene around me would naturally be transformed. The dealers would be tougher, their warehouses heavily guarded and Rajkumar would presumably thrive. Red sorghum, in that sense, was just a very cheap kind of cocaine.
‘What is red sorghum for?’ I asked. ‘Can people eat it?’
‘No, no,’ the people around me cried out. ‘It’s for bhains, cattle, and for chicken.’
Mahipal smiled and said, ‘It makes them fat, makes them produce more milk, more eggs, more meat, so that people in the cities can eat them and get bigger.’ He asked one of the attendants to see if there was any red sorghum left in the warehouse. The man returned with a handful that he poured on to my palm – hard, small grains that were reddish in colour, opaque objects that seemed so static and yet whose value went up and down on the market.
I had been leaning close to Mahipal to hear him better, and I suddenly smelled the alcohol on his breath. It hadn’t been much past four when we came in, so he must have started his drinking early.
‘My business is fine in spite of all the trouble,’ Mahipal said. ‘Look at all this work going on around me. I’m going to be expanding even more next year. Look at how busy I am!’
He had two mobile phones on his lap which rang incessantly, one of them playing a pop version of the song ‘Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone’. On his left, there was an anxious-looking man with whom Mahipal began to discuss transporting seeds. The man had a creased plastic shopping bag from which he pulled out wads of money.
‘This is one lakh,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you two lakhs tomorrow.’
‘That’s fine,’ Mahipal said, looking unconcerned.
The man tied the bag up with a piece of string and handed it to one of the attendants, and after looking at Mahipal with an air of expectation and receiving no response, he left.
Dusk was setting over Mahipal’s warehouse, although the sun seemed to hold its light steady for the men sitting in the circle. The engines of trucks roared behind us as they were backed up, one by one, to the loading ramp of the warehouse, while to our left the electric lights came on in the two-storey concrete building where Mahipal lived when he wasn’t in Hyderabad. The mood of the gathering seemed to have eased now that the red sorghum story was over, and Mahipal became friendly. Saveen and I got up to leave. I was planning to take a bus from Armoor to Nizamabad, where I was supposed to have dinner with Prabhakar and his family at nine.
‘You can’t go now,’ Mahipal said. ‘You must have a drink with us. What do you drink? Whisky?’
I was anxious to go, exhausted now after closing the circle of the red sorghum episode. I knew I could keep pursuing the story, perhaps chasing down the villain’s villain, the man in Hyderabad whom Mahipal had spoken of as the biggest dealer in the area. But I also felt done, and I was tired of Armoor and the surrounding landscape. But Mahipal was so insistent that I agreed to have a drink.
An attendant was dispatched to Armoor to buy whisky and beer. The circle around Mahipal grew smaller and more intimate, and as darkness consumed the yard where we had been sitting, we moved to the house. There were five of us – Rajkumar, Saveen, a man with very small eyes, Mahipal and me – and we sat in a bedroom on the upper floor. There was a television, a bed and a coffee table on which a servant had put plates of pakoras and potato chips mixed with chopped onions and green chillies. The bottles were opened – Kingfisher beer for Saveen and me, Blender’s Pride whisky for the others – and the television was switched on to a news channel.
There had been a series of bomb blasts in Bangalore, and the men wanted to hear news of this. But the anchor of the Telugu channel, a woman dressed in a Western suit, hadn’t got to the blasts yet, so the attention of the drinkers drifted away from the television. The sleek air conditioner hummed away in the background, the conversation grew louder, while Saveen became ever quieter, uncomfortable in this gathering of men who made money with such ease. The conversation stopped when there was a news clip
about a Bollywood starlet called Shilpa Shetty. There was a slight grin on the male reporter’s face as he displayed a pin-up of Shetty, the lower half of the picture blanked out by a black square. Somebody made a joke and everybody apart from Saveen laughed.
Mahipal’s phone rang. He began speaking rapidly into it in Hindi. I was sitting next to him and I followed the conversation with ease, drawn in by Mahipal’s pleading tone. He was begging with the man who had called him, asking him for a loan of 5 lakh rupees. I was surprised by how small an amount Mahipal was asking for, especially given the scale of his business and the tens of crores we had been speaking of earlier. But as Mahipal kept talking, unaware or unheeding that I could understand him, I began to get a sense that things were precarious for him.
‘I’m in a bad shape,’ he said. ‘My jowar seeds are still lying in the godown and I need at least thirty-five to forty lakhs. I’ve sold off the land in Hyderabad and that’ll give me some money, but if you can give me at least ten now, I can then hold out till I get the money from selling the land. That cunt Pappi, he doesn’t answer his phone even though I’ve called him so many times.’
When he hung up, he seemed as relaxed as ever, perhaps even more boisterous. He was going to Delhi next week, along with Rajkumar and the man with the small eyes.
‘We’ll fly there and then we’ll hire a Tata Sumo to go and visit our buyers in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab.’ When Mahipal heard that I was going to be in Delhi too, he became insistent that I meet them there. ‘We’ll have a nice hotel room, yaar. We can drink as much as we like.’
Since the beer had gone to my head, I spoke as loudly as the rest of them and said that of course we would meet up.
‘If we can’t meet in Delhi, we’ll meet you in America,’ the man with the small eyes said. Mahipal and he would be going to Texas, where the latter’s son was an engineer with Motorola. Then they would go to Illinois. Then, where should they go after that? they asked me. Las Vegas? Niagara Falls? Atlantic City? New York? Where and how would they be able to spend all the money that they made?
The Beautiful and the Damned Page 19
