Devil in Pinstripes (24 page)

‘Then why all this noise about not being able to pay three EMIs to NFS?’ he wondered. ‘Probably, Tulsiram’s state of mind caused him to get the name of the finance company wrong,’ he thought as he got into a waiting white Hyundai Accent cab. He also immediately realised that his mind was making its best efforts to console and stop the sickly feeling in his stomach.

‘Somajiguda branch,’ he said to the driver, who just nodded. The driver was a regular and hence knew where to go. The drive was a comfortable one as it was relatively early in the morning and there wasn’t much of traffic on the road. He was casually looking out of the car window. Shops were flying past in the reverse direction. Buildings were coming up on both sides of the road. Hoardings were hopping behind. ‘What a city?’ he thought. ‘Why the hell do they screw up the city skyline by putting up hundreds of hoardings? Why doesn’t someone do anything about them?’ he thought even as he compared the hoarding menace to that in Mumbai. City people love to complain about and compare the problems in their city with those of others. ‘Amchi Mumbai has left no stones unturned either. The menace comes with double the force there,’ said his interior monologue.

Flying past him in the reverse direction were a mix of large metal hoardings and a number of small untidily tied cloth banners. Back in Mumbai, the cloth banners were banned. They were unauthorised. However, nobody ever gives up. Every night, some unscrupulous vendors would put up tens of hundreds of cloth banners in Mumbai . . . across roads, along railway stations, between electric poles, in the market, in every conceivable place, only to be removed the next morning by the municipal corporation. The huge numbers of banners across Hyderabad streets made him feel that maybe the corporation was not as effective in Hyderabad as in Mumbai.

In the midst of all this, there was one banner which caught his attention. All along the route he would have seen over a hundred of that particular type of banner. It was in Telugu, the local language, and hence he could not make head or tail of it. Every banner had pictures of two individuals on it. One of which was constant in every banner. The second picture changed every two to three kilometres. There was a symbol at the bottom, that looked like an election symbol, making him realise that it was a banner put up by a political party. However, he had no clue of what was written on it. There was something about the banner which gave him an uncomfortable feeling. In fact, there was an eerie sense of familiarity about the banner, but he could not figure out what it related to.

Victor was waiting for him at the Hyderabad branch of NFS. He was the head of collections for NFS for the state of Andhra Pradesh. Victor had taken over the head of collections role for the province around the same time that Amit moved to his new role in NFS. He was Amit’s man.

The main door of the branch was locked. Victor led him inside through the back door. The collections team was waiting for him. All of them looked worried. After the initial round of discussions and updates, he stepped into the conference room.

‘Show me his file.’ Amit asked for Tulsiram’s loan application set.

‘In a moment,’ said Victor as he stepped out of the room. Within minutes he was back in the room with a copy of the customer file. Amit reached out and took it from him. The first sheet of paper in the document set was the application form that Tulsiram had filled. A photograph of Tulsiram was pasted on the application form – Tulsiram in his driver’s uniform, photographed outside the Marriott. Seemed to be a decent chap. A nice photograph is often a positive when you evaluate a loan application form. A pleasant looking photograph often disposes the loan officer favourably towards the applicant.

‘There is something very familiar about this guy. I have seen him somewhere,’ thought Amit. ‘Maybe at the Marriott. I have stayed there so many times in the past,’ and he dismissed the thought as he moved on to critically examine the customer file. The salary slip seemed perfect; the bank statements were in order and the verification reports were fine. The entire due diligence process seemed to have been followed. In the normal course something like this would definitely have got approved. So giving him a loan was in line with the policy of NFS. It was not an error. Nobody had committed a mistake in approving a loan for him. As he closed the file, he suddenly chose to have one last look at Tulsiram’s application form. And then he shut the file. Something was nagging him.

‘Give me the detailed collections report,’ he said, wanting to see if there was any instance of collection excesses on Tulsiram. He knew that everything was in order; however, he wanted to double check. It was a sensitive case and could blow up anytime. Hadn’t it already?

While Victor stepped out to get it, Amit walked out to the wash- room. The washroom in the Hyderabad branch was in one corner of the floor – a small niche converted into a washroom, overlooking the main road. It had a small hole in the wall which was a window now . . . it probably would have housed an exhaust fan in the past.

He managed to squeeze himself into the washroom and looked at the mirror above the wash basin. Age was beginning to show on his face. He splashed a few drops of cold water on his face and looked up again. The water was a relief from the heat that he was facing in his professional life. The tissue box was hung on the left of the mirror. He reached out and pulled one. Beyond the tissue box was this small window, through which he looked out into the street below. He casually looked at the passing cars, the struggling rickshaw puller, the beggar at the traffic signal, and then moved his gaze up to the mall across the street. The mall housed a large Louis Phillipe store. Next to it was a fancy showroom. He could see the front façade where the words ‘SALDI’ were written in bold red, multiple number of times. He tried to guess the brand, but a large banner was blocking his view. Straining his neck, he tried to look over and around it, but couldn’t make out which store it was. He washed his hands still trying to figure out the brand.

‘Up to fifty percent sale is not bad. Maybe I should look at it before I leave the city,’ he thought as he turned back. And suddenly, as if hit by lightning, he craned his neck to look back at the road again. There it was. The nagging feeling was not without reason. He hurried back to the room. Victor was already there. He quickly opened the file and turned the papers to get to the application form. He looked at Victor, ‘This guy. This guy . . . what is he doing on the banners there? All the way from the airport to here, I saw this guy’s photographs on banners. They are all over the place. Why? What’s written on those?’ Worry lines conquered his face while the colour drained out of his cheeks.

Victor’s expression was a give away. He squirmed a bit and said, ‘Amit, I was about to tell you. The opposition party here has taken Tulsiram’s story to town. They have put up posters all over, publicising this suicide, especially in poor localities.’

‘What do they say? I can’t make out a word of it. It’s in Telugu.’

‘The banners which have been put up by the Telugu Rakshana Party, a local fanatic party, implore people to contact them in case recovery agents were to harass anyone. They have offered to help them deal with the recovery agents. They have put pictures of all their politicians alongside Tulsiram . . . one-by-one. Tulsiram has become a sort of a cult figure for loan defaulters. With elections due in twelve–eighteen months, this seems to be an issue that can be converted into a vote magnet.’

‘Goodness me! Have they named us in these banners? What’s the impact?’

‘Thankfully, not yet. They are quite generic and do not single out any particular bank. It has however impacted our ability to collect. The collection agents have not been able to go into the field to collect from defaulting customers. Last evening, four of our collectors got beaten up. The rest are now reluctant to go and collect. And . . .’ he hesitated.

‘And what?’

‘This morning before you walked in, six of my agents have resigned. Their families do not want them to be in collections and risk their lives,’ Victor added. Amit was reminded of his mother’s call, the night before he was due to take up the new job. ‘Don’t take it up beta. This is a dirty line,’ her voice echoed in Amit’s head.

‘Where will they go? Don’t they need their salaries?’

‘That’s not a problem, Amit. The mall mania is taking its toll. All these guys will find jobs in numerous new shopping malls that are opening up. Maybe even at a higher salary. They get to work in a less intimidating environment and an air-conditioned atmosphere. Personal security was never an issue thus far, you see. Now it has become one. It’s normal for families to be concerned and parents stopping their wards from working in collections.’

‘That’s bad news.’

Victor nodded in acceptance. He had a sombre look on his face. ‘Do you think meeting with the higher ups in the police will help? I can meet them today and argue our case,’ asked Amit.

‘No, it won’t. This issue has become so big that the government is not going to let it die down so easily. As I said, elections round the corner. The police will not do anything which will attract an adverse reaction from the masses. The police is under their control and will follow their instructions. We must not do anything proactively. In any case they have asked for the name and address of the head of collections for all banks who have doled out loans to Tulsiram. At this point I do not think it will be an issue for us because as far as our records show, he is not a delinquent customer. Why should we go there on our own and make it an issue for ourselves? Fortunately, they have not singled us out, though initially most of the newspapers tried to exploit our MNC status and make us the torch bearers of inappropriate collections practices.’

‘Hmmm . . .’ was all that Amit could say.

After another forty-five minutes of reviewing, Amit was convinced that it was not worth risking aggressive collections in this environment. Not only would it put the entire collections team at risk, it would also put the NFS franchise at risk. The brand would come under the media glare and that was not a good thing. He was also convinced that they were not in the wrong. Their name just happened to be mentioned along with a few others because they had lent money to Tulsiram.

‘OKAY,’ he said as he prepared to leave the office to catch a flight back to Mumbai. ‘Tread carefully. Don’t send your collectors out to collect from difficult customers. Lie low for a couple of weeks. We will take a hit on delinquencies and portfolio performance for a month or two. I will sensitise everyone and manage expectations at the management level. We will try and cover up for this month’s performance shortfall when the situation improves. And no media interviews or discussions please. All queries from the media to be directed to the public affairs team in Mumbai. Tell your team too.’

He got into the car and left for the airport. En route he passed a procession – a long one – wherein people were carrying placards and banners and were screaming at the top of their voices. This time around he recognised the picture. It was none other than Tulsiram. ‘Tulsiram, what did I do to you? You have become such a pain for me,’ thought Amit, even as he felt sorry that the entire family had got wiped out in a span of two nights. ‘Maybe it was good. In any case, they would have struggled without Tulsiram’ was his last thought of justification and consolation before he closed his eyes for a short nap. He couldn’t sleep. The airport was forty-five minutes away.

He had a disturbed flight that night. The flight was smooth but his mind was going through a fair bit of turbulence. The air traffic congestion at Mumbai added to the chaos. The flight took over three hours to land in Mumbai . . . something which should have taken him less than two hours. ‘Flights are meant to catch up on sleep,’ he would normally say. Not today. He was wide awake. He ignored repeated offers from the crew for dinner and kept staring at the back of the seat in front of him. He was not getting a good feeling about it. A voice at the back of his mind kept telling him, ‘Something is going to blow up somewhere, watch out’. If only he knew when and where . . .

Chanda was awake when he walked in. The tense look was not lost on her. She still cared for him. Initially when she heard about his role in collections, she had been worried. So were both their parents. But once he had made that decision under Aditya’s influence, she had supported him wholeheartedly.

Amit tossed and turned in bed almost the whole night. She had never seen him restless like this before. In the middle of the night, she woke him up. Actually she didn’t need to as he was wide awake. She sat up with him and humoured him for over an hour. They spoke about his career, his college days, his bank, their parents, etc. What a conversation to have in the middle of the night! Amit had put on some weight off late and Chanda was worried about his cholesterol level. When Amit kept tossing in bed, Chanda’s mind started working overtime, making her feel that these could be sure-shot signs of an emerging cardiac problem. Just to ensure that it was not so, she decided to stay awake with him for some time. It was a long never-ending night for both of them.