Free The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb Page B

– selling imported artificial flowers, and Manish took it over. By his own account, he was drifting and unhappy. He was very close to his mother, with whom he still lived, but estranged from his father, who had been in the air force. Manish began thinking of selling cigars, and so he approached the man who was the only cigar importer in India. This man was much older than Manish and the cigars were simply a sideshow for him. His main business since the sixties had been as an arms dealer.
    Manish entered into an uneasy partnership with the arms dealer, who agreed to supply him with cigars for a very high share of the profits. In 2000, Manish opened what he described as ‘the first cigar lounge in India’. It was at the Park Royal in Nehru Place, the hotel that Arindam used for his company’s events and to which I would return in a few days to attend a leadership session conducted by Arindam. But as Manish started doing well in the cigar business, his partner began demanding an even bigger share of the profits. When Manish tried to talk to him about this, he threatened to cut off the supply.
    The problem with cigars, Manish said, was that they were a controlled luxury commodity. The arms dealer had moved into importing cigars because he was already importing weapons. ‘There is a strong relation between the two,’ Manish said, and in fact, when I met Manish again a couple of years later, he himself had expandedinto the ‘security’ business. The fact that rich Indians could afford to smoke Cuban cigars, Manish said, depended on the political situation in Cuba. ‘One hundred and sixty million cigars a year, that’s it, that’s all they produce,’ he said. ‘But there’s been an El Tardes office in Florida for ten years, ready to swing into action when Castro dies.’ When that happened, he said, Americans would move into the Cuban cigar market and that would be the end of smoking Cohibas for many people elsewhere in the world.
    When Manish’s relationship with the arms dealer broke down, he became desperate. He no longer had access to cigars and began calling exporters all over the world to arrange for a fresh source of supply. All the men he contacted refused to do business with him. They were already represented by the arms dealer in India and had no reason to enter into new arrangements with an unknown young man. Manish had very little money and just a couple more numbers to call, one of them belonging to a sheikh in Bahrain. He decided to meet directly with the man. He bought a ticket with the last of his money, flew to Bahrain and met with the sheikh. When the sheikh heard Manish’s story, he was so amused that he agreed to supply him with cigars, even giving him credit at the beginning.
    It was the kind of striving that Manish couldn’t find among his customers. I got the sense that in his mind they were like the arms dealer, coasting along, building on a success that had been present in their lives from the very beginning. They were brash and vulgar on the surface, and cheap and insecure underneath.
    ‘There is a certain kind of man who will walk in and say, “Show me the most expensive cigar you have,” ’ Manish said when we returned to his store. ‘And what I will do right away is relieve the pressure that such a man obviously feels. I’ll say, “Don’t even go for this one.” As soon as I say that and make it seem that the best cigar is not necessarily the most expensive one, he feels released from the need to spend as much money as possible in order to assert himself. I listen to this man and talk to him for a while and then he’ll tell me what he really wants. “Forget it, yaar,” he’ll say. “I’m going to a party and I just want a long cigar that I can show everyone.” ’
    ‘So what do you do when he says this?’ I asked Manish.
    ‘I tell him that he can buy a seven-inch cigar for fourteen hundred rupees, but he can also buy another seven-inch cigar for four hundred rupees.