Santosh Nair - Bulls, Bears and Other Beasts: A Story of the Indian Stock Market

Bulls, Bears

and

Other Beasts

Santosh Nair

PAN

My name is Lalchand Lal to friends who knew me at school and college, and Lala to friends and acquaintances in the stock market. I was born in 1968 in a nondescript nursing home in Bhandup, a suburb of Mumbai. Father, or Bauji, as I called him, worked at the Bhandup factory of the engineering firm Guest Keen Williams as a plant technician till his retirement in 1992.

My parents were originally from Jaipur, and had moved to Mumbai under difficult circumstances, the details of which are not relevant to the story I am about to narrate. At the time of my birth, they were staying in the Shivram Singh chawl, off the arterial Jangal Mangal Road in Bhandup West. Bauji was just about able to make ends meet in those days, and having to provide temporary lodging for job-seeking relatives from Jaipur strained his meagre resources further. His generosity irked Ma at times, as it would fall to her to manage the house on a shoestring monthly budget.

I got into bad company early on not my fault entirely, when you consider the environment I was exposed to in the chawl, located as it was in one of the crime-infested suburbs of the city. But looking back, I feel I was always inclined to get on the wrong side of the law, despite the decent upbringing my parents provided me.

I studied in National Education Society, among the better schools in Bhandup at the time, and well known for its Hitler-like principal whose very sight had the boys running for cover. Bauji had managed my admission through a well-connected friend of his.

When I was twelve, we moved into a one-room kitchen flat in a newly constructed building not far from our chawl. Bauji had to really stretch himself financially to buy the flat. But he was determined to move out of the chawl, not so much out of any desire to move up the social ladder as much as from the realization that the chawl was not a place where his children should grow up. He was aware that I was moving around in wrong company.

The change of locality made little difference to my delinquent ways. By the time I was in the ninth standard, I had already tasted hard liquor and had taken a liking to the occasional cigarette. My buddies at school were Arthur and Shankar, both a year senior to me, but two years older in age, having flunked the ninth standard. Arthur was a violent boy, always spoiling for a brawl. Shankar was cool-headed, but the strongest of us and also the cruellest.

Shankar used to moonlight for Babu, brother of municipal corporator Kim Bahadur Thapa who was later killed in a gangwar in 1991. I was taller than most boys my age and of decent build too. But more importantly, I had what Shankar used to call daring. Looking back, I shudder at the crazy things I did in those years.

Shankar ran petty errands for Babu, which meant intimidating hawkers who did not pay up, keeping a close watch on or beating up people at Babus command, buying him groceries and other such things. Arthur and I assisted Shankar in his assignments.

I was an average student but was good at Maths. It was Baujis cherished desire to see me become an engineer. He had not studied beyond the twelfth standard, but had a good technical bent of mind and was an expert at repairing gadgets, from radios to kitchen taps.

You know, beta, seeing me fix a fault at the factory, trainee engineers often ask which engineering college I am from. I tell them that I am not an engineer, but some day my son will become one, he said more than once at the dinner table.

But gradually, his hopes faded as word of my exploits slowly got to him. As with every father, there was the initial disbelief when he learnt of my misdeeds.

I was in standard ten when my father smelt alcohol on me. He had long suspected it but the reality unsettled him. Later that night I heard him tell Ma that unless he took some drastic steps, I would ruin my life and theirs too. What probably helped him stay sane through the trouble I was causing him was that my brother Satish and sister Anju were shaping up well academically.

Within a month of the alcohol episode, Bauji sold off the flat in Bhandup, and we moved into a rented house in Dombivli. I was halfway through my last school year, but Bauji had decided that I was not to set foot in Bhandup so long as he could help it. Using some connections, he managed to get me admission in the South Indian Association High School in Dombivli West.

Our moving house caused more inconvenience to my father than to me, since he now had to commute more than half an hour in a crowded local train to reach his factory, whereas previously it took him less than ten minutes by a BEST bus.

The new school was not to my liking, but I had little say in the matter. An overwhelming majority of the students were south Indian, and so were the staff. There was a bully or two in every class, and some mawaali types as well, but they were a far cry from the Shankars and Arthurs I had got to know so well.

I was slow when it came to making new friends, and perhaps that helped me focus on my studies. I scored 71 per cent in my SSC, which even in those days was not good enough to ensure admission to the science course in any of the reputed colleges. Not that I was keen on taking up Science, but it had been my fathers dream to see me become an engineer. But by now Bauji too had realized he would not be able to pay the hefty donations that almost every decent engineering college barring the top two or three demanded. He had some money left from the sale of our Bhandup house, but it was too much of a gamble for him to stake that money on my academic career.

So that Bauji did not nurse any false hopes for me and set himself up for further disappointment, I confessed to him that I lacked the aptitude for science and would be more comfortable studying commerce, or any of the arts subjects.

He did not try to change my mind, and after consulting some friends and relatives, advised me to take up commerce. Truth be told, Baujis decision to shift to Dombivli was not a sound one. It could have easily backfired on him but for an unexpected twist of events.

Because of massive real estate development in the suburb, Dombivli soon became a thriving ground for thugs and other antisocial elements. Street fights were common, and so was extortion in public view. Disputes over land led to the rise of organized gangs, and rival groups periodically took on each other in broad daylight with crude revolvers, hockey sticks and cycle chains. In many ways, Dombivli was turning out to be worse than Bhandup on the crime graph.

For somebody like me, who could be provoked easily and was not averse to violence, it was a struggle to stay out of trouble and resist the lure of bad company. I had learnt a few things during my association with Shankar and Arthur, and more than once it crossed my mind to moonlight for one of the local dadas of Dombivli.

But the enormous daily inconvenience that Bauji was enduring just to keep me on the straight and narrow somehow stirred my conscience. That Satish and Anju still looked up to me embarrassed me, and yet I was pressured by what I thought was my responsibility towards them. Torn inwardly, I kept to a small group of friends and to my studies in college.

I was in the twelfth standard when Bauji had an accident at the factory that left him physically disabled for a while. It would be ten months before Bauji was able to get back to work. The last two and a half months of his confinement at home were without pay. That period was very tough on all of us, emotionally as well as financially; at one stage, we were not sure if his foot would recover fully to enable him to resume work as before.