Kingpin: Made in Singapore, Destroyed in Dubai

Kavita Daswani is a bestselling author and an international journalist who covers fashion, beauty, travel, design and celebrities for a range of global publications. A former fashion editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and Asian correspondent for Womens Wear Daily, she also currently writes for the Los Angeles Times, JustLuxe.com, Prestige,Crave and the international editions of Vogue, Conde Nast Traveller, Hello! and Grazia Italia. She is a former lifestyle and fashion correspondent for CNN International and CNBC Asia. Her previous books include For Matrimonial Purposes,The Village Bride of Beverly Hills, Lovetorn, Salaam, Paris and the Bombay Girl series. Kavita lives near Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Kavita Daswani

KINGPIN

For my parents
With thanks for all you have given me

Kodaikanal, India

ANIL SAT IN the centre of a small field, the grass parched and scratchy from too little rain this year, something he had heard the townspeople talk about constantly.

Now, approaching sunset, it was the prescribed hour for meditation, and Anil had forced his eyes closed, taken a few deep breaths, and attempted to clear his mind, just like he had been taught. A fly droned peskily around his nose, and each time he tried to wallop it, his concentration, such that it was, evaporated.

Anil had been here two weeks yet still couldnt manage to maintain the deep-breathing-focused-mantra-recitation required of him, for more than a few minutes at a stretch. Even Prabhu, a slightly-stooped volunteer at the ashram, who had taken it upon himself to help Anil towards tranquillity, had thus far failed.

For how could Anil feel at peace, really, when so much had happened, when he still thought about every detail, as if it were yesterday?

Each time Anil gazed down at his forearms, covered today with the light white cotton of a simple kurta, he would see the thin red scores made by her painted fingernails, like the track marks of a junkie.

Each time he tried to sleep, he saw her eyes, fierce with tears, her twisted mouth bawling words that no wife had a right to say.

It had been 13 days since he had left her, and come to this place, chosen because it was cheap, random and remote, where he ran no risk of bumping into anyone from his former life.

He wished he could profess to loving it here, or to at least being grateful for it, to trusting that this unpretentious ashram encircled by sun-speckled hills would not just be his refuge, but could also be his salvation. That when he left here, he would be a man renewed.

But right now, he could not say that.

He had baulked when he had first seen his accommodation, and still resisted returning there every evening, after the dinner of lentils that were too salty, and chapattis that had gone cold when the platter piled high with them finally reached him.

The first time he had walked into his rooma basic wooden bed stacked into a corner, a bare bulb circling from a grey wire overheadhe thought of where he once slept: a king-size bed, in his king-size room, in the ornate Greek Revival manor that was the most coveted house in the contrived mini-kingdom that was Emirates Hills, in his adopted home of Dubai. The last he had seen of his wife was her shrieking at him as he fled with his small black overnight bag, running out like a hostage finally set free.

At least Joseph, Anils trusted driver, knew what to do. He had brought the car around, held the door open, his expression unquestioning. Anil had flung his bag in, slammed the door shut as his wife came bounding barefoot down the marble stairs, chasing after the bright white Bentley as it crunched down the long driveway, and out through the lanky iron gates. He had searched his mind frantically to think where he should go nexta friends house? A hotel? But Anil wanted to get further, even further away.

Take me to the plane, he told Joseph. He turned around, saw the outline of his wife in the gathering shadows of the setting sun, and thought just for a second, Shall I go back? If his daughter was there, he would have. He would never have left his only child. He didnt even know what he was running away from: the lunacy of his wife, the unending threatening phone calls that had besieged him since the series of fiascos that started all this, bankers beating down his door. His life had unspooled, radically. He had gone from being the most celebrated tycoon in three emirates to having a wife who acted as if she wanted him dead and an empire on the precipice of collapse.

It was, as his friend Kumara master of understatement would say, A less than ideal situation.

For now, he could not stay here.

In the car, his eye had fallen on a sketch pad Joseph had inadvertently left in the back seat, in which his driver would sometimes doodle domes and minarets during the endless hours he waited for his boss. On the front was an enlarged printed Biblical proverb.

When pride comes, then comes disgrace. But with the humble is wisdom.

Shit, Anil said, letting the enormity of what was happening bear down on him. Shit, shit, shit.

By the time his life had spiralled out of control, Anil was almost fifty years old.

Behind him, he had left many women disappointed in himdisappointed not because he didnt marry them, but because they eventually figured out that, at his core, he was not a man worthy of their affection. He had treated them so poorly that they would have been quite within their rights to start a support group.

To his name he also had a devastated business empire, a decimated marriage, a daughter he barely saw and parents who suffered from failing health.

Yes, there were girls he perhaps could have had by simply touching their forehead.

But in the end, those girls wanted more, and better. They wanted communication, and empathy, and kindness. These were skills he never cultivated, because his mother told him he didnt need to. She told him that pretty girls from good families would want him, regardless of his deficiencies.

Anil wished it were his time now, in this quicksilver, tech-happy, post-millennial era. Maybe things would have worked out differently if he had had the tools then that single people have now. Young people today can tweet their affection, stalk their crushes on Facebook, Instagram their most attractively deceptive photographs. They Photoshop their pores and pounds away. They can present themselves in the way that suits them, showing any face they choose. But they can also try to know one another, if they care to, and to explore before making those vows.

But in Anils day, when he was single and had people looking for a bride on his behalf, he had no such aids. Unions were formed in a much more calculated way, as a result of an unabashedly direct conversation between two families. Mental lists were made, potential candidates targeted, vices and dysfunctions ruled outand, when families could finally be aligned in status, net worth and what could be brought to the table during wedding week, an offer of marriage would be made.

Sitting here now, in the ragged room of the ramshackle guest house adjacent to the ashram that would be his home indefinitely, Anil realized how little he actually knew. He was alone, after having wasted far too many years with a woman who should never have wanted to marry him. People would probably say to him: Think of how much you have learned.

These are lessons he could have done just as well without.