To TopTo TopRupee Millionaires
by Joe Kovacs
This is a true account of my life that was.
Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.
And some to protect myself against the not-so-innocent.
Prologue
31st August 2011
Our anniversary lunch wasn’t much compared to Will and Kate’s recent love-fest, but The Raj did a mean vindaloo. More importantly, we were happy and I was happy. As Madge chatted to our usual waiter, I scanned the menu and came across ‘Warped Chicken raped with Bacon’. I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Indian restaurants and Indian menus always reminded me of my ill-fated quest to be a rupee millionaire. It seemed like a lifetime ago. For my ex-business partner (and fellow rupee merchant) Spud, it literally was a lifetime ago. It finished him off – just before he could finish me off.
Sometimes, not often, I could think of Spud and forget the anger and heartache and misery. Sometimes I could feel the tiniest pang of guilt at his squalid demise. And sometimes, like when reading the menu in The Raj, I would be reminded of a funny memory of Spud. Like the time he ordered bacon – no, it was sausages, wasn’t it? – in a vegetarian town called Pushkar.
But more often my mind was flooded with less funny memories, like the night he forced a vegetarian tailor to eat mutton curry at Ramadan, doing his best to invite an international fatwa on both of us. Yes, the bad memories dominated – the abuse, the mental torture, the drug plants and the many death threats. There was no doubt about it, I was much better off without that bald little menace.
Having pushed all the bitter memories to the back of my mind – and enjoyed a few Tiger beers – I was feeling contented by the time I arrived home. Madge had gone to pop the kettle on and I switched on the TV. Settling in for a quiet afternoon snooze, I stretched absent-mindedly across the settee and closed my eyes.
Then the phone rang.
It was my old friend and customer, Sharon in Poole, and what she said took my breath away.
‘You’ll never guess who just walked into my shop!’ she gushed. ‘Spud!’
‘WHAT?’
‘Yes, it really was him. He’s not dead at all. He’s been entertaining Her Majesty in Wandsworth for the past 12 years. He blew up the wrong house – one with a policeman in it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not a lot. Except that he’s heard you’re writing a book about him. And he wanted me to pass on a short one-word message.’
‘Which is?’
“Don’t.”
What follows is the full story of what Spud doesn’t want you to know...
Chapter 1
Market Days
Spud was under his table when the Petrovs showed up. There were two of them, Ivan and Sergei, and they had come to check out my market stall. They were particularly interested in all the silk I had just brought back from India.
Ivan, the tall dark handsome one, was polite. He waved at his own stall, packed with the very same silk, and said: ‘I think we have a problem.’
Viktor, his short psychotic brother, was less polite. He picked up my table with one hand, tipped it over and growled, ‘If that goes back up, I’m going to petrol-bomb it!’
I had heard enough of Viktor to take him seriously. According to Spud, Viktor had already dispatched two silk competitors that morning – one by holding him against a wall and punching him repeatedly in the head.
Always one to think on my feet, I gestured over my shoulder and said, ‘Have you met my new partner? He wants to know what you have to say about silk too.’
Viktor may have been a psycho, but he knew a worse psycho when he saw one. Spud reared up from his table like a demented bulldog – wearing his best lunatic grin and a pair of wraparound reflecting sunglasses. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He just stood there, rocking dangerously back and forth on his heels, until Viktor took a step backwards and the stand-off was broken. Ivan gingerly helped set the stall back up and a tacit agreement was reached. He would move his pitch up the road to Covent Garden, and I would stay put in St Martin’s-in-the-Fields.
It was a deal with the Devil, this partnership with Spud, but I had no other choice. Spud was so very good at scaring people. He was also funny, surprisingly intelligent, and full of big plans for the future.
The following morning, Spud appeared with a huge pile of scaffolding and welded our two stalls together. This was his idea of a partnership – no formal paperwork, just a brief handshake and a hastily combined double pitch. The day after that, with a much larger area to operate in, we took £500 in silk clothing alone.
*
The one miracle of my life before India was that I never got arrested.
Most people who knew me in those days – as ‘dodgy’ Joe Kovacs – thought I must be a drug dealer. It was probably the beaten-up leather jacket, the dusty trilby hat, and the dishevelled greying beard that fooled them, along with the round Lennon spectacles and the permanently abstracted expression I wore behind them.
But I didn’t just look weird. I was weird. And with my kind of background, that was hardly surprising. I’d lost my father early, at the age of two, leaving me and my Hungarian mother on the breadline, living in one room in the poorest part of London. My mother had been forced to work all day – and all night too, darning dresses – in order to keep a roof over our heads.
I didn’t get any pocket money. I had to earn my own – first by trading rare pennies with geeks in mackintoshes, and later on by sneaking into big auction houses and bidding for collectable stamps.
Around the age of eight, I got my first taste of market trading – cycling down to Whitechapel every Saturday morning to help an old cockney called Charlie on his second-hand book stall. Though this job didn’t last long.
‘He’s a very nice man, is Charlie,’ I told my mother, ‘and very generous too. Everyone in the market keeps giving him money, and he doesn’t keep it. He gives it to another nice man called Ronnie Kray, who says he’s there to protect them all!’
My mother promptly confiscated my bicycle.
As I entered my teens, my budding career as a pint-sized wheeler-dealer came to an abrupt end. I was packed off to a north London Jesuit school, where my mother expected me to receive the best education in the world. What I received instead – my natural exuberance crushed by grim, black-cowled priests – were daily punishments meted out with a leathered whalebone.
As soon as I reached university, I dropped Catholicism and took up astrology and Steiner philosophy instead. These paths were only clues to destiny, I knew, and had no power to change it, but they were infinitely better than the world of pain and cruelty I had left behind.
And so on to my twenties, a decade I preferred to forget – dead-end jobs in insurance, sales, publishing and social work, none of them lasting more than a few months. Only when I turned thirty and found Buddhism and India did I latch onto a faith and a country that perfectly suited me. Together, they gave me the freedom and the constant inner challenge which I craved, along with a growing sense of purpose.
*
India was fun. It took me two or three trips to really pick up on that, but as I did so, I found that the childlike quality of the country – the simple curiosity, the warm-hearted openness, the sheer craziness of it – struck a chord in me. Six weeks into my first trip, around February of 1985, I had forgotten that I had ever worn a suit to work. By the time I returned in April, I had vowed never to work again. Somehow, I determined, I would be going back to India on a regular basis – and that was when I started to write.
I wanted to write a book about the real India, a serious one about poverty, politics and religion. But the real India was far more surreal than serious. It was like a giant playground with everything – people, traffic and livestock – excitedly bouncing off each other at random. In India, I decided, one didn’t have a holiday. One had an experience.
Everything I had written before had never got past the first three chapters. I didn’t have the incentive to go any further. Now, with nothing else to look forward to, I had all the incentive in the world. It was either get paid to write about India or return to the drudgery of running an old people’s home in Clapham.
So, discarding the idea of a ‘serious’ book in favour of one based on my own personal experiences, I typed up the diary of my first trip through India and sent it off to forty-two publishers and agents. Straight after that, I hopped on a plane to Japan, spending every penny I had in the world, and prayed to the main Buddhist temple there that my gamble would succeed.
I came back with the worst case of flu in my life, but the phones started ringing. The first call was from a minor publisher who wanted my book. The second was from a bigger publisher who wanted me to write a travel guide to the whole of India. It was a dream come true and though the money they offered wasn’t much – £2500 advance and 7.5% of royalties on sales – all my flights were paid for and there were lots of free hotels thrown in. Suddenly, I was doing what I’d always wanted to, travel and write, and my life – so far on hold – finally began to move forward.
From this point on, I began to lead a split existence – half the year in India, the other half in England writing about India. And each time I came home, with a bagful of notes and tapes to transcribe, I carried more of India back with me. I felt lighter, freer, more at ease with myself. India was rubbing off on me, I realised, and when I laughed now, it was not shy and restrained as before, but loud and contagious – a true reflection of what I felt about myself and about India: that both things were so wacky, so absurd, that I just had to laugh.
Four years on, and I had written guides to not just India, but half of Asia too. I was now 35, and my mother was putting pressure on me to ‘get a proper job’, since I had never had more than £400 in the bank. That was when the business thing, the market stall, happened. And it happened in the most peculiar way.
It was a warm spring day in 1989, and I was sitting on the lawn of the Megh Niwas Hotel in Jaipur, talking to my old friend Colonel Fateh Singh, the genial proprietor.
I was telling him about my very first day in India. It was 3rd January 1985, and I was stuck on a traffic island in the middle of a busy Delhi thoroughfare, too scared to cross the road. Out of nowhere, a thin dapper little Sikh, dressed in an immaculate black suit and carrying a matching sleek briefcase, appeared by my side. He looked me up and down a bit and then, with no preamble at all, politely enquired: ‘And sir, what is your purpose in life?’
It was such an inappropriate question that I hadn’t known what to say, just stuttered: ‘Erm, to cross this road?’ Whereupon my new “friend” grabbed my arm and ushered me, like a tiny turbaned sat-nav, through the maelstrom of traffic to the other side.
As I walked on to the safety of my digs at the YMCA, I clearly remembered thinking: ‘Yes, what is my purpose in life? What am I doing here? I’ve come to India with one idea – to check out the birthplace of Buddhism – but so far, all everyone wants is to buy my watch and walkman, or to sell me something!’
Hearing this, the Colonel laughed. ‘Yes, we Indians do like to do business. It is in our blood. It is the key to our soul. You should try business, Joe! It would be a most spiritual experience!’
And that is how it started. One minute I was a struggling travel writer, with five guides in print but not enough money to pay the rent; the next, I was checking out semi-precious stones with the Colonel in Jaipur’s seedy Johari Bazar.
‘Buy my packet! Buy my packet!’ shouted the milling throng of grimy gem-cutters, climbing over themselves to sell me stones smuggled out – in mouths or under armpits – during their lunch-breaks. I was mesmerised.
‘What a buzz!’ I shouted over to the Colonel. ‘Spiritual or not, I was born to do this!’
I couldn’t have set up shop at a better time. It was the start of the yuppie ’90s and Maggie Thatcher was encouraging new businesses with her popular Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I was given a bank loan of £3000 and a weekly stipend of £40 to get myself going, and I spent it all on silver jewellery hand-picked by the Colonel in India. Six months down the line, when the Scheme called me into its offices to see how I was doing, I brought the whole place to a standstill by selling trinkets hand-over-fist to bored secretaries. That was when I knew I had it made.
Shy and solitary by nature, I blossomed as a market trader. I had my mother to thank for that. She didn’t approve of my new vocation (‘You don’t want to be a barrow boy all your life!’) or of my repeated visits to India (‘What’s with the earring and the hippy scarf?’) or of my girlfriends (‘Where did you find this one – on a beach in Goa?’), but while she was very short on praise, she was unstinting in her support, no matter what I decided to do.
So it was, one wintry day in 1989, that she helped set up my very first market stall in St Martin’s. It didn’t look much at first – just a bare 6 by 4 table with a rain-proof awning – but she quickly arranged it like an oriental boudoir: a neat pile of exotic cushions in one corner, a tempting array of glittering jewellery in the other, and a colourful portrait of a Chinese dragon as a striking backdrop. While I stood by, quiet and timid behind the table, she stormed forth and began tackling passers-by. She stopped them dead in their tracks, barraged them with stream-of-consciousness inquisitions about their lives, hopes and dreams, and generally made them feel like the most important people on God’s earth.
Her charm was irresistible. Nobody she spoke to ever left without buying something, and by the end of the day the stall was virtually empty. I looked on in awed silence. It had been like watching a hypnotist at work. And what she taught me was this – you can sell anyone just about anything. If, that is, you talk long enough and if you take a real interest in their lives. My mother was totally wasted as a housewife. She should have been an estate agent or a stockbroker.
The first year was a grind. Tall and thin, I grew leaner still. Even my hair began thinning, so I took to wearing a bandana. I had to travel to India six times that year, doubling my stock on each occasion and lugging everything I bought home by hand. On the final occasion, gambling everything I had on a good Christmas, I over-reached myself and turned up at Delhi airport with no less than seventeen suitcases of clothes, crafts and jewellery. ‘I’ll never get this lot through,’ I despaired, but then the Air India check-in lady beckoned me over.
‘Are you on this flight?’ she enquired, and when I nodded unhappily she asked me: ‘How many bags do you have?’ I pointed at the three bags in plain sight, and then – very reluctantly – at the long line of bags out of sight. She asked me what they contained and I lied that they belonged to a sick girlfriend in a Delhi hotel and that they contained rock samples for her forthcoming archaeological project. ‘Today is lucky day – festival of our Independence!’ said the lady with a complicit wink and sent all seventeen bags through labelled “Fragile’”.
My gamble paid off. Having made no profit all year long, I found myself on Christmas Eve standing in a shoebox full of snow with £10,000 in my pockets. I had worked, slept and breathed on my stall for three weeks solid, and was tired but triumphant. Nobody else on the market had been able to compete with my prices – they bought their stock from the London wholesalers and had to charge a lot more for it. In fact, until Spud turned up, I did not have one friend at St Martin’s. They all thought I was too cheap.
*
Life on a market stall was, however, no picnic. Even I had my good days and my bad days. And for every good day, when I might sell a £100 bedspread or a £50 marble chess-set, there were far more bad days. Days when it rained down in sheets and I sold just one backpack for £5 – not even enough to cover the rent of my table. Getting up every morning at 6am was yet another drag. Sometimes I was so tired that by the time I had finished putting up my stall, it was time to start taking it all down again. Then there were the customers, who ranged from the kind and enthusiastic to the downright tedious. The most tedious, in my experience, were the beach-freaks from Goa who lit up bongs on my stall and complained about the price of my nose-studs.
‘One pound for a nose-stud?’ they’d moan, ‘what a rip-off, man! They only cost ten pee in Goa!’
‘Well, go back to Goa, then!’ I’d snarl in reply. ‘And put that pipe away – we’re not in India!’
I got ripped off from time to time, too. One lady with a shop in Bournemouth liked my Tibetan bone bracelets so much that she ordered 800 of them. Then, when I’d lugged them all the way home from Delhi, she only bought 50 – saying that she’d take the rest ‘later on’.
I was distraught at first, with so much money tied up in unwanted trinkets, but then I turned the situation to my advantage. I put just one of the bracelets on my table, with a “Not for Sale” sticker on it. The very next day, a whole bus-load of American students turned up, and when they asked why it was not for sale, I simply replied: ‘It’s my lucky bracelet. It’s been personally blessed by the Dalai Lama, and it protects my stall.’ After that, they all wanted one – and at any price. I waited until the bidding went crazy and then I said ‘Come back tomorrow – there’s a Tibetan lama in town and he might have some more for sale.’ So come back they did, and I offloaded one hundred bracelets in an hour – at 20 dollars apiece. In the weeks that followed, as word got around, further bus-loads of Americans arrived and all 750 bracelets were snapped up. I made a real killing on that one. And when the original customer, the lady in Bournemouth, rang up for the rest of her order – some six months later – I happily informed her: ‘They’re all gone, so sorry!’
I didn’t feel bad about telling the odd ‘story’. As long as my customers were happy, I didn’t see anything wrong in stretching the truth a bit to make a sale. Besides, there were plenty of other traders around with far fewer scruples – and far sharper teeth. Ruthless traders like the Petrovs who were looking way beyond St Martin’s to expand their businesses. A new decade was dawning, and as London’s banks and stock-markets started filling up with young entrepreneurs known as ‘yuppies’, a completely different type of wheeler-dealer – the world-traveller merchant adventurer – was emerging on the other side of the world, in India.
Without warning, at the end of 1990, the tiny dot in the Rajasthan desert that was Pushkar suddenly became the small-business hub of the Asian world. No-one knew who started it, but this once-sleepy hippy resort – my favourite place in all India – began trucking in vast quantities of second-hand sarees from Bombay and making cheap funky clothing out of them. The profit margins, for anyone with a market stall or a shop back in the West, were huge and traders from all over – the US, Canada, Germany, Israel and France – were soon pouring in to place large orders. The whole town was instantly transformed into a mecca of multi-national mass production and the so-called ‘saree wars’ of 1991/92 kicked off.