| About 2xus | My Articles | My Blog | My Business | My Pictures | My Portals |

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

By Prakash Subbarao

This is a true story is set in the year 1975.

As you may have gathered by now, I started my marketing career with Chloride India Ltd., then a bluest of blue  chip  multinational headquartered in Calcutta.

Calcutta is now Kolkata but it was then Calcutta and so it will remain, for the duration of this story.

One of he first things that one did, after joining the marketing department, was to put in a short spell of around six weeks at the factory in Shyamnagar. This was a training program where I was supposed to learn how batteries are made. What I did learn is that batteries have a very high incidence of lead in them and that this can cause brain damage and that one should stay a healthy (pardon the pun!)  distance away from batteries when they are being manufactured! However, I digress. Let's get on with the story.

The company had quite a decent and lively residential colony attached to the factory and it had several cottages that were reserved for visiting dignitaries such as us management trainees!

The cottage that I was allotted to was a small and cozy one and I was delighted when I saw it the first time. The weather was also very amenable; it was winter and one generally repaired in the p.m. to the warm club house on the premises  to have a peg or two and chat amicably with the other inmates. One also occasionally was invited to Rabindra Sangeet sessions. During these sessions stern faced manufacturing managers suddenly changed to meek and henpecked folk music singers who sang with their family and possessed a great repertoire of Bengali music within them. Since these sessions occurred in very "wet" surroundings, one participated with gusto. These sessions literally "broke the ice" with the (temporary) manufacturing bosses.

It was here that I first met Paul.

He was from Colombo, in Sri Lanka, and had also come in for a training program. He went by the distinctive name of Rajarathnam Hilarion Paul Junior and, if one ignored this pomposity, was a really nice guy. He had just joined Chloride and hence his presence in India. To get trained.

We started off by playing table tennis in the evenings before heading for the bar. He convinced me pretty soon that table tennis was a waste of time and that we should head to the bar asap. I compensated by going to the club a little earlier than Paul reached there, because I looked forward to my game of TT with a lovely teenage lass nicknamed Tuktuki........... but that's material for another story.

Paul had the capacity to down an unlimited number of drinks and remain stone cold sober. I soon learned that it was prudent for me to have one drink for every four of his. That way I could remain relatively sober.

Soon Paul and I were great chums. We used to head out in the evenings to discover the nearby towns and villages to see whether there was any restaurant that offered decent fare as an alternative to the monotonous food we ate on campus.

Paul was in for a longer training session than me and when my time came to go back to Calcutta, I forced him to agree to come there on weekends and stay with me.

We had several great weekends together and he told me about his life in Colombo and his girl friend, who he hoped to marry soon and who ran a boutique there.

One day he asked me whether she could write to him care of my Calcutta address and I readily agreed. This was in the days when there was no internet or email and people wrote letters in longhand using a pen. Letter writing was an art then, and an enjoyable one at that.

Her letters soon started arriving with great regularity and I kept them for Paul to peruse on his weekends at my place.

He would invariable turn up around 4 pm on a Saturday evening and leave late on Sunday back to Shyamnagar and we would have a terrific time in between.

One day he was reading one of her letters and a frown creased his head. "The bitch is asking me to buy all kinds of things" he said (he invariable called her a bitch. I assumed that it was either the "Sri Lankan" way or that he was genuinely fond of her). "She has even given me a shopping list! Does she think that I am rolling in money?" he rhetorically asked. (In those days, one hardly got any decent stuff in Sri Lanka, I was told, and even basic things such as custard and jelly and a whole host of things used to be purchased in India).

Soon Paul started getting his dirty laundry to Calcutta to have it washed and ironed over the weekend. And he would continue to be baffled by the continuous requests for goods from Calcutta.

The tone of the letters soon changed. His girl friend must have realized that her pleas were falling on deaf ears and she changed her strategy. In one of the letters she wrote: "How are your shirts? Have you washed your shirts? Have your ironed your shirts?" and Paul was flabbergasted. "Why is the bitch referring all the time to my shirts and underlining the word shirt?" he asked. Suddenly he picked up a shirt and started feeling its collar. "Come here, Prakash" he said. "Feel this collar. Doesn't it feel strange?". Yes, it indeed felt strange. It's texture was very different.

"Get me a blade" he ordered and he started cutting away the lining of the collar. Soon he gasped with surprise. Inside the shirt's collar was a $20 bill. As he kept opening the lining, more and more dollar bills began emerging. We found more than $500 that evening, in all his shirts and in some pants too!

Paul was so stunned that he was speechless for quite a while. "Here I am in Customs in Colombo and they ask me whether I have anything to declare" he hoarsely said "and I tell them to fucking check everything because I have nothing to declare, since I have not violated an laws. They believed me and let me go through. If I had got caught, the fucking CJC (Criminal Justice Commission) would have put me behind bars!" Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and it was the first time that I saw an unflappable Paul really rattled.

Paul soon got over this shock and I remember that he returned to Colombo with all the gifts "the bitch" had requested. They probably got married and lived happily ever after.

I lost contact with Paul having (a) got married and (b) moved away from Calcutta. I think of him every now and then and plan to track him down if I ever go to Sri Lanka. Since I have used his full and his real name in this story, maybe he will decide to Google his name and see what the fuck comes up, in which case he will "find himself on the Net" much to his great surprise and he will, hopefully, send me an email and we will reminiscence about the dollars in the collars and how the bitch nearly got him arrested and all that.

Stay tuned. Nothing is impossible. I will keep you posted as and when (and if) it happens.

To the  Article Index!

All articles © Prakash Subbarao. All rights reserved.