Free The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb

guarded about them and insistent about their
exclusivity
. He wouldn’t give me the names of his clients, usually picked out frommarketing lists compiled by companies like American Express, but he said that he had to see that people wouldn’t board
The World
and start talking about the amount of money they had made.
    I understood why Varma was concerned that people might talk about money on board the ship. India was full of people talking about money. Just half an hour earlier, in the men’s room, I had passed a drunken group listening to a man who was saying, ‘All the people I went to school with, they became doctors, engineers. I’m the one who became an ordinary garment exporter.’ He waited a beat before delivering his punchline. ‘I earn a hundred times more than them,’ he said, producing a burst of appreciative, alcohol-fuelled laughter from his listeners.
    To avoid such situations, Varma encouraged each prospective client to make a short trip on
The World
at a cost of $1,500 a day. ‘That’s the stage,’ he said, ‘when having dinner with other apartment owners, he’ll learn not to flash his wealth. Everyone around him will be super rich, and they’ll consider him crude if he talks about money. Either he’ll learn to shut up, or he’ll get off at the next port and not come back.’
    Manish was used to rich people who talked about money. He was a pleasant young man, handsome in a generic way and with a veneer of softness that made him good at his business as a cigar dealer. He was one of India’s two cigar importers, insinuating his products into hotels, bars and clubs, serving not only affluent metropolises like Delhi but also the second-tier cities that were full of people he described as ‘aspirational’. Manish started laughing when he talked about these aspirational people, but he was accommodating in every way possible to the whims of his customers. For those in Delhi, he held monthly gatherings, usually sponsored by liquor companies, where men sat around on stuffed leather couches, learning the fine art of cigar smoking in relative privacy and connecting with each other through a dense haze of smoke. But Manish also delivered cigars to the homes of his clients, to business celebrations and wedding parties, ready with suggestions if people were uncertain about which cigars might make the greatest impression on their guests.
    I had gone to see Manish in his shop, a glass-fronted store called ‘Kastro’s Cigars’. From the store, one looked out on to the winding walkways and upscale boutiques of the Santushti Shopping Complex, all of it built to a scale so small as to look like a shopping mall from Legoland. It could have been one of the more expensive retail complexes in America were it not for the fact that the land was owned by the Indian Air Force, and the cigars and designer handbags were being sold only a short walk from an airbase guarded by dour soldiers with thick moustaches and big rifles. The rents were subsidized, and the shops were offered only to senior defence personnel and their relatives, or to those with political contacts.
    On the afternoon I visited Manish’s store, we sat by ourselves in the front section. He had one employee, a Mizo woman from the north-eastern part of India dressed smartly in a Western suit. She brought us cappuccinos from a nearby Parsi restaurant and receded into the background, while we lounged on the armchairs, looking out at the shoppers trickling through the boutiques, at heavily jewelled women holding the hands of thickset men, and an ayah with a pushchair following a mother and her friend. Behind us, separated by a picture window and a door, was the temperature-controlled part of the shop where the cigars were kept on partitioned shelves running along one wall. On one side of the shelves were copies of
Cigar Aficionado
, while on the other end were lockers where customers kept their stock, each locker the distillation of a life.
    Manish’s best