Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Ranjit is on the phone as we drive. He runs a small travel agency, and he is trying to sort out the crisis of a client who has been denied a visa to Canada. “This guy,” says Ranjit between calls, “pays 70 lakhs [$140,000] income tax a year. He’s a businessman with a wife and two children. But his travel history is weak. That’s the problem.”

The evening is only just beginning: we still have to pick up another of Gautam’s friends from his shop in Sadar Bazaar, a large wholesale market near the railway station. The roads around there are packed with activity, and before long we have ground to a halt in the commercial mêlée. The driver in front of us takes advantage of the stasis to open his door and spit a red stream of paan onto the street. Cycle rickshaws manoeuvre around us, piled with chemicals in drums and stacks of printed packing boxes. I watch a group of women sitting on the sidewalk making brooms. Further down, mechanics are putting the finishing touches to a stretched “Hummer” limo. They have welded this thing together entirely from the parts of a Jeep. But it looks a lot like a Hummer and they have put a Hummer sign on the front. Now they are spray-painting it gold.

We inch forward. A cycle rickshaw is hemmed in next to us, the driver a bright-faced adolescent, dripping with sweat, who shrieks out loudly in a perfect imitation of a car horn. He wears a T-shirt which bears the words, “I can cure your virginity.” We draw level with a textiles workshop whose owner sits on a bench outside gluing together paper bags which have been cut out of newspaper. I can see why he is not inside: he has divided the normal-height room into two levels so that he can fit in double the number of tailors at their machines. But it’s impossible to stand upright in there.

Makeshift accommodation has been built on the roofs of these workshops, to which people climb up by ladder. Workers’ underwear flutters overhead like so many grey flags. In every room you can see a great number of water vessels: gathering and storing water is the great enterprise hereabouts. The water pump by the side of the road is in constant operation. People flock to it with buckets, bottles, plastic drums. Next to it is a vast and luxurious peepul tree around whose trunk statues of Shiva and Durga have been propped up: a large woman sits there, her breasts exposed, babbling to herself.

We arrive at Pratap’s metal shop. He is not there. We wait in the heat. The shop, whose front is open to the street, is not large enough to drive a small car into. Pratap’s son, Amitabh, is perched on a huge stack of one-kilogramme nickel plates, talking on the phone. More plates are being unloaded in front of the shop: they clang loudly as they are put down, but this is incidental to the background din of car horns and auto-rickshaw engines. Amitabh must shout for his deals to go through.

Pratap buys metal in bulk and sells it to big consumers: manufacturers of car components, bicycles, bathroom fittings, and the like. The whole business rests on the vagaries of metal prices, which are in constant flux. Amitabh’s mobile phone is hung on the wall so he can watch the flickering prices on the London Metal Exchange throughout the day.

“It’s very intense,” says Amitabh, joining us. “You invest money in a quantity of metal and you have to make it back. But prices can fall at any time. Of course we read reports, we keep on top of everything that’s going on in the metal markets. But it’s basically unpredictable. And now we’ve started importing our own metal, in addition to what we buy from dealers. It takes a whole month for your metal to arrive, once you sign the deal. In that time anything can have happened to the price. And price is everything. If you are one rupee more expensive than the next guy, no one will buy from you.

“The mental pressure can be huge. Sometimes you make a crore [$200,000] in a few minutes, sometimes you lose it. Sometimes you have to sell property to cover losses. There are men in this business who drink a bottle of whisky every night to deal with the tension, and they take it out on their wives and kids. My dad was never like that. He never spoke about it at the end of the day, even when he’d lost a lot of money. He knows how to relax. He takes us for weekends in Hong Kong or Bangkok just so we can all chill out.”

“How much does your business make?”

“We turn over about 100 crores [$20 million] a year.”

“And it’s just you and your dad?”

“And my cousin. My father brought his sister’s son into the business too.”

Pratap came to Delhi in 1980 from a small town in Uttar Pradesh. A friend of his from the same village had migrated some years before to Sadar Bazaar, where he found work as a broker with a successful metal trader dubbed the Metal King. The friend arranged for Pratap to apprentice with the same trader and, since brokers are entrusted with a lot of cash, he gave guarantees to his boss that he would pay for the losses should Pratap disappear. Pratap’s monthly salary was 600 rupees (then $75).

“He worked hard and he learned. He had a dream. He saved his money: he used to walk three kilometres to work to save fifty paise (then $0.06). He wanted to eliminate the label ‘broker’. A broker is nothing. A broker gets ignored. Some of them earn a lot of money. But they are just middlemen, and if they come into the room, no one takes any notice. A businessman is something else. You give value to that person.”

After fifteen years of learning and saving, Pratap struck out on his own. He bought his own stock and got himself this shop. He worked methodically, never risking too much, always knowing his limits.

“My father is happy with normal risk and normal profits. He doesn’t like to lose too much sleep and take big risks. He says, ‘Remember the Metal King!’”

A few years ago, the Metal King was ruined. He was over-exposed to nickel when the price of the metal crashed. He had debts of millions of dollars. He sold real estate to pay off his debts and then retired from the metal market. His sons had started a carpet manufacturing business, and he went to work with them.

“Just imagine. Twenty years you ruled that market, and then you lose everything. It’s years now since he started working in carpets, but people still call him the Metal King.”

We stand just outside the shop smoking cigarettes. Nearby, a man is frying samosas, which smell superb. A goat is chewing at a tuft of grass growing from the crack between the shop wall and the sidewalk: where its tail should be is a massive sagging tumour, which we discuss for a while. It holds a macabre fascination.

A big Toyota pulls up. Pratap’s workers rush to move their bikes, which have been stacked in his parking space so that no one else occupy it. Pratap gets out of the car, a blazer slung over his shoulders like a cape. He has been exchanging news with other metal traders as he does every evening; any one of them who misses this session is at a disadvantage the next trading day. He stands for a moment, waving to us like a patriarch, and then ducks back inside the car to escape the heat. Gautam goes to get his car and pulls up outside the shop so Ranjit and I can get in.

“Are you coming?” I ask Amitabh.

“I’ll stay and shut the shop,” he says evasively. The suggestion that he should go drinking with his father is obviously out of place.

I get in the car and we set off behind Pratap.

“That Toyota he’s driving?” says Gautam. “He had great difficulty buying it. He takes home 10 or 15 lakhs a day [$20,000–$30,000] but none of the money goes into the bank. He pays almost no taxes. There is no record of his money. So no one would give him a loan to buy his car. You can’t buy a car with cash. Eventually he had to take a loan against his property just to buy a car.”