The Polyester Prince by Hamish McDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

Arabian waters. Lodgings would be extremely rough, and the food difficult for the vegetarian Gujaratis.

    Dhirubhai was outgoing, robust, and helpful to newcomers. He was physically strong and proud of his physique. The other young men tended to be bashful about nakedness in their shared bathrooms, and a common prank was to whip away the towels they wrapped around their waists while crossing the living space in the mess. Dhirubhai would walk around without hiding behind towels. His solid footsteps could be heard from a distance, and his colleagues soon started calling him ‘Gama’ after a famous Indian pehelwan (wrestling champion) of the time. Navin Thakkar, a former colleague at Besse, remembers that Dhirubhai taught him to swim by simply throwing him into the sea, at the swimming place down near the Aden dockyard where they used to go on Saturdays and Sundays.

    Dhirubhai delighted in stirring up pandemonium. Old colleagues describe it as bichu chordoa or ‘letting loose a scorpion’.

    Despite his affability, some of his old colleagues describe Dhirubhai as a ‘dark character’-
    not just because of the darkish skin he inherited from his father-but for the ambition and risk-taking he hardly concealed. ‘Ramnik was more or less a saintly man,’ said one ex-Besse colleague who later went to work for Dhirubhai. ‘Dhirubhai was a daring one. He was already advising me to go for business and not to remain in service.’

    Dhirubhai’s career with Besse was progressing steadily, and the Shell Division was one of the most rapidly expanding areas of company business. By 1956, when the Suez War broke out after Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Dhirubhai was managing the Shell refuelling operation at the Aden military base. He was also able to observe construction of the BP oil refinery in Aden, gaining an early insight into the production linkages of the petroleum industry.

    In March 1954, Dhirubhai married at the age of 22, in a match arranged by his mother (his father had died in 1951) but which Dhirubhai himself had supervised. His partner was Kokila Patel, the daughter of a postmaster in Jamnagar, the port on the western side of Kathlawar. Her family was not particularly wealthy, so it was not a financially advantageous match for Dhirubhai. But Kokilaben’ was also a Modh Bania, as the strict caste endogamy of the time demanded and her character complemented that of Dhirubhai, a solid home anchor very much, grounded in traditional values and religious piety.

    Although he was doing well, Dhirubhai was far from happy with his position as an employee. ‘I saw in him he was somebody that was different than others,’ recalls M. N. Sanghvi, who worked alongside Dhirubhai in the Shell division and later went to work for him back in India. ‘I could see he wanted to make something of himself.’ His room-mate Susheel Kothari also remembers the ambition. ‘Right from the beginning he was determined to do something big,’ Kothari said. ‘He was never comfortable in service. He was a born businessman.’

    After office hours, which finished at 4.30 in the afternoon, Dhirubhai would invariably head for the Aden souk. Initially he just watched the Arab, Indian and Jewish traders in action. Later he began taking positions in all kinds of commodities, particularly rice and sugar, in gambles against rises and falls in prices at time of delivery Doing business on one’s own account was strictly forbidden to Besse employees by the terms of their contract, and his older brother Ramnikbhai disapproved, so Dhirubhai would simply say he was ‘studying the market’.

    Dhirubhai made some profits, and learned the fundamentals of business and money. But he also made some near disastrous mistakes, which almost wiped out his capital. On one occasion he suffered a tight financial squeeze when an incoming cargo of sugar was damaged by sea-water and his customer refused to accept delivery Pending settlement of his