MONEY TREE Read online

  ‘Mission accomplished, Tonto. But I’m out of silver bullets.’ He brandished a six gun. ‘The place was full of bushwhackers and bandits. Tell Sheriff Oscar that he won’t have any more trouble round these parts.’

  ‘I will, Kemosabe.’

  ‘Time we were out of here, Tonto. Let’s ride!’

  This time the screen dissolved without anyone riding into the sunset. Erin removed the memory stick and closed down her computer. She took a last lingering look around her office, locked it and left the building.

  She hoped to God, Oscar Feldstein was as good as Ted thought he was. And that Oscar was as disinterested in money as he said he was. If neither was true, alarm bells were already going off, telling the world – including Warwick Stanstead – that Erin Wishart, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific region, had just sabotaged the entire head office computer network.

  Or worse. She knew the admin systems were physically separate from the operational and in theory the layers of firewalls protecting customer accounts, treasury systems, the dealing rooms and the bank accounting systems were impenetrable. But if Oscar Feldstein was really at the top of his game, she might just have handed a hacker the keys to riches beyond avarice.

  FOURTEEN

  Ted Saddler was clamped in his seat on a 747 coming in to land at Kolkata airport. He was dehydrated from the in-flight bar. His head hurt and his body was imploding. As the big jet bounced down the runway and jammed on the air brakes, death seemed a good option. It made Ted doubly determined that this would be the fastest report in journalistic history. In and out before his lungs had fully emptied of fresh Manhattan air. That was the plan.

  He picked up his old Samsonite and wandered out of Kolkata’s international airport terminal to be slammed by heat and light. The gleaming new concourse was littered with people sitting or lying in sprawled groups. He stood, surrounded by bodies; Wyatt Earp after the OK Corral. Only the flies were stirring. Like a plague ward. He was spotted. Some figures jumped up and made towards him with intent.

  He fought his way through the ambush to the first taxi. He stared at it. It was an evolutionary branch-line of the motor car. A black bodied, canary-topped relic of the British Raj. The Brits also left the gift of irony; the cabs were called Ambassadors. He was certain that it would have all the mechanical artistry of a broken pen-knife.

  He squeezed into the back seat, his knees pushing into the driver’s back. Then they were off into lunatic traffic. It took so long to work up speed through the clunking gears that the driver was loath to lose it. So he tackled roundabouts left elbow on the horn, right arm out the window – holding the roof on maybe – with a fine disregard for the grandma on her bike, and the family of 7 piled on the two-seater trike.

  The roads were a bedlam of bicycles, scooters, stumbling rickshaws, gas-spewing three-wheelers with 5-up plus the driver, dented trucks and black and yellow taxis like his. Everybody hell bent on keeping the middle of the road. He guessed it was their Mogul blood. They wouldn’t retreat or take avoidance action unless and until mayhem was imminent. Roundabouts were the only medium for converting certain death at a crossroads into an even chance.

  They passed miles of corrugated-iron shacks where the sidewalk should have been. Each was a good bit smaller than Stan Coleman’s office and without the amenities. People’s lives were on show like a thousand TV sets jammed side by side, all showing personal disasters. Closer to the city, old colonial buildings mouldered in the heat and sagged into the street. They’d given up the fight long ago when the Brits left. Maybe it was to teach the West a lesson about trying to change things; trying to implement Anglo-Saxon discipline in equatorial torpor.

  Ted felt overwhelmed with the sheer foreignness of it all. He wanted to turn the taxi round and get the next flight home. Then, soaring out of the gloom, was a white castle. His castle apparently. The Oberoi Grand. They pulled into the sanctuary of the white courtyard. He trundled his sweat-encased body into an oasis of greenery and wood panelling away from the eyes of the poor and thirsty. Ted checked in, shivering in the air-conditioning, and when he got to his room, tried to dispel his anxiety with two stiff Jack Daniels – ice-free for fear of bugs.

  Ted sat on his bed and fought the urge to phone Mary. He’d always phoned her first thing on arrival if he was travelling on business round the States. He’d never worked out whether it was to share the moment or to provide a comfort blanket. Her brisk voice would chop the distance and make him brave. Now, though the need was stronger, he had to face his middle-aged fears alone. He’d get even less sympathy from the hardnosed Miss Erin Wishart.

  He had the afternoon off to recover from the flight. So he showered, raided the mini-bar again, lay on his bed, switched on CNN and fell deeply asleep. He woke much later, feeling worse than before, stunned and disoriented. It was dark outside. To prove something to himself he showered, put on clean shirt and pants and stepped out into the fetid night. In seconds the clammy air plastered his clothes to his body. Within ten yards, the lights went out. His safe white towers were blotted out as he stepped through this looking glass into the underworld.

  An urchin tagged him and softly jabbered at his big white bulk. Maybe he was importuning. Maybe he was cursing him gently for having so much. Ted shook him off with difficulty. The boy was tough and well filled out. His conscience let him off the hook for this one. He passed a slim woman in an electric blue sari rooting in a heap of garbage by the roadside. She was intent on her plunder, driven by a need stretching back to a family somewhere.

  He stepped over sleeping figures, their arms twisted for a pillow, dirty cloths round their thin hips. Their skins glistened as if they’d been dipped in oil. Other figures moved in the shadows, creeping to their beds or to assignations beyond his imagination. He tried not to see people, or watch them or catch their eyes just in case. But there was no smell of danger among all the other stinks of urine and stale food. You wouldn’t feel so relaxed on Brooklyn’s meaner streets.

  Then he saw her. Framed in an open ground-floor window. On a pile of mats surrounded by tumbling boxes whose guts spilled into the street. A man by her side. Father? Pimp? Please, not that. She was ram-rod straight, in a red sari, poised like a princess with calm sovereignty over her midden. He looked at her once and shied away and then again. Into her eyes. Large and dark in a face of perfect symmetry. She was all of 12, with a life that should have been special going forward. But how could it. How could it?

  Kolkata’s heat and humidity grew too much. He left it behind for his cool hotel. Result, he found himself fighting a chill - but not the onset of malaria he initially imagined. He slept fitfully and woke at 3 and 5 and finally at 7 am.

  The image of last night stayed with Ted as he headed off into the frantic morning for his interview. He felt stupid at coming over maudlin and sentimental. Who was he to judge what was going on around here? Maybe this was what they chose? How they wanted to live? If he’d learned nothing in his twenty five years of reporting, he’d at least understood you couldn’t apply Western rules and standards to the outback.

  But whatever the reason – needing a drink, jet lag or still smarting at having to make this trip at all - Ted was angry. It made him mad to think of some bastards cleaning up from high interest loans to these poor suckers. He’d seen it before in the burst housing bubble across America. Ghost towns created by banks foreclosing on homes they valued less than their mortgages. Millions of poor bastards suckered onto a housing ladder with low starter rates that flipped to high regular rates beyond their income levels. Now the same wolves were marketing the foreclosed houses – people’s homes – as great investments. Bankers always win and always find another variation on the sucker loan.

  By the time he arrived at the head office of the Peoples’ Bank, Ted Saddler was spoiling for a fight. The taxi shuddered to a stop and several pairs of hands dragged at his cab’s door handle. All these scruffy gents pretending to be doormen at the Waldorf. He eased out, and took his bearings. They we
re well off anything that could be called a main street. Yet the small brass plaque on the wall confirmed it was the People’s Bank head office. It said so, beneath a stylised engraving of a tree. The bank was housed in a block that would have been condemned and knocked down in Harlem in the ‘70s. Its façade was distressed concrete and smeared glass.

  He forced his way past the human barrier and into an echoing hall of concrete slabs and doorways. It was about 20 degrees cooler – making 90 seem bracing – and a fan chugged round overhead, spilling the humid air at him. A young woman in a cream sari sat behind a counter at a window on the right. He went over to her.

  ‘I have an appointment with Mr Ramesh Banerjee. The name’s Saddler.’

  She consulted a screen in front of her. It shouldn’t have taken long. No-one else was waiting.

  ‘We are all very pleased to welcome you, Mr Saddler. May I offer you a nice cup of tea?’

  While smiling at the quaint offer, he thought of the billion bugs he could get from the water, far less the milk, and politely declined. He took a seat on the other side of the small lobby from her window and went over his interview questions one last time. Then he got back up and began to pace up and down, relieved that despite his fears some of the old excitement was working its way through. The hunter’s instinct not yet dead.

  All the time he paced he felt her proprietorial eye on him. She half-bowed at him every time he looked her way. He guessed he’d been prowling for five maybe ten minutes when a door opened in the centre of the lobby facing the exit. A little man came through. He looked like any one of the threadbare characters Ted had seen around the hotel and streets this morning. Maybe a porter or clerk or something. He came over. He was wearing glasses and looked maybe mid-forties. He was thin and short. His black hair smudged with grey around the ears. He smiled. Ted smiled back, wondering what he wanted.

  ‘Mr Saddler?’

  ‘That’s me.’ He stood, assuming the man had been sent to get him. The man reached out a hand and they shook. Then the face became familiar from the news clip.

  ‘My name is Ramesh Banerjee. Please call me Ramesh.’

  FIFTEEN

  Ted Saddler had met many top men in his time. Ramesh Banerjee fitted none of the profiles. His unheralded and low-key arrival almost punctured Ted’s annoyance. But of course it was all for show, all planned. Ted easily regained his sense of anger and injustice on behalf of the poor people of India.

  He followed Ramesh through the swing doors and into a shabby corridor. They pushed through another set of doors into a large room. It was full of desks, computer screens, people and mounds of papers. They wove their way through the crowded units, with Ted trying desperately to avoid knocking down the paper towers with his bulk. The clerks smiled and wished the CEO and Ted a good morning as they passed.

  They stopped in front of a desk no bigger than any others but considerably less cluttered. Behind it, on the wall, was a giant version of the bank’s logo. The bank’s title was in gold across the spreading branches. This time the tree was coloured green and the branches were studded with fruit. Its roots were as long and powerful as its surface limbs.

  ‘This is your office?’

  ‘I only need a desk and a phone you see. It helps to be with my colleagues. In the West you call it open plan.’

  Ted thought that there was open plan and then there was ostentatious humility; something for visitors to see, especially reporters.

  ‘How do you motivate people if you can’t give them something to aim for?’

  ‘A big office is important in the West, not here. Every one of us – me included – will spend time working in the branches, setting up credit and collecting loans. Everyone is important. Everyone is equal.’

  Ted was hearing sanctimonious bullshit, but he smiled and said, ‘In that case, call me Ted.’

  Ramesh smiled back, then the civilities were over.

  ‘Why do you hate me, Ted?’

  He asked it like he was asking if Ted took milk in his coffee. Ted blanked his face. He wasn’t the one who had to explain himself.

  ‘I don’t hate you. I hate what you’re doing. Your bank has a clever marketing angle to make money out of the poor. Your own government, the World Bank - just about any bank of repute in the world - they all think you’re pulling the wool over the eyes of people that can’t fend for themselves. My job is to expose you.’

  Ted’s voice took on the ringing tones of the righteous, the temple clearer. At that moment, he believed it. Ramesh looked at Ted quietly for a minute or so, until the silence had dragged itself out too long.

  ‘Sometimes even the most honest men reach views using incorrect information. That is why I am glad you have come. Unlike those who criticise from afar. My books are open to you. As am I,’ he added as an afterthought.

  Ted had the grace to look slightly abashed at the noble motivation credited to him. A rivulet of sweat ran down his spine reminding him of his plans to get back to civilisation as fast as a 747 could carry him.

  ‘Good. Do you mind?’

  Ted brandished a small tape recorder at Ramesh. At his shake of the head, Ted set it between them and turned it on.

  ‘Mr Banerjee, why did you set up this bank?’

  ‘When I came back from the USA, I set up the investment bank operation for Kolkata Regional bank. We began to make good money from local businesses and from Western businesses coming into the city.’

  Ted wondered why he omitted his stellar background; a first degree at Kolkata, then a post graduate course at Cambridge, England and an MBA at Harvard. Four years in New York with JP Morgan Chase. Why would anyone would want to come back to some crummy bank job in India at a twentieth of the salary?

  ‘But every day, when I came to work and when I went home in the evening, I saw what you saw, Ted, unless you were asleep in your taxi. I kept telling myself that I was helping to cure this, but that it took time. If I helped top businesses make money it would trickle down to the poor. Eventually. The Western model worked and it would work here.’

  He took off his glasses and Ted could see the tiredness under his eyes. He could also see the intensity.

  ‘For five years I fooled myself. I made a great deal of money for the bank. But out there – on the streets and in the villages - nothing changed.’

  ‘Are you saying capitalism doesn’t work here?’

  ‘That is a very interesting question. Capitalism requires all the ingredients to be in place before everyone begins to benefit, and not just the top layer. Here in India there is a big missing piece. It is mass ownership.

  ‘That sounds pretty Marxist.’ Or Erin Wishart, he thought.

  ‘Is that what you will write about me now?’ He smiled.

  ‘Well, are you?’

  Ramesh sighed. ‘There are many truths in Das Kapital, but I am not an advocate for communism, just for working capitalism. Capitalism is about trade. Trading your right to work for a wage, trading your future earnings for a house, your crops for money, your credit-worthiness for a loan. If you have nothing, if you own nothing – no land, no money, no roof over your head – if you don’t even own the right to work - then you cannot trade, and you cannot trade up. More than half my people don’t own a thing, and work exists only in the form of slave labour. So they cannot participate in the merry-go-round of capitalism.’

  ‘And the answer is. . .?’

  ‘Banking services to the poorest people. It buys them a ticket on the merry-go-round.’

  ‘Why set up a new bank? Why not within your Kolkata Regional Bank?’

  He nodded. ‘I took my ideas to the board. But they could not comprehend my proposal. They were not bad people. They honestly believed in the theory of trickle down of wealth. They saw the millions I was earning for them from investment banking and wanted me to stick to that, not go into some poor people’s retail banking that would lose money. And certainly not loans to women or Untouchables. It was unthinkable. It would upset the whole caste system that is
no longer supposed to matter here. I could not convince them. So I left and set up the People’s Bank.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  Ramesh smiled at some memory. ‘No. By no means. I had to beg for funding from one or two philanthropic foundations. I had to bring in people to help me without any salary at first. I sold or mortgaged everything I owned.’

  He looked down. ‘And my wife left me. I don’t blame her. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she married a successful investment banker. The first three years were touch and go. But I was right. And now, thanks to the internet, we are building a global service.’

  ‘So now you’re a global money lender.’

  ‘It’s not just loans. We insist on saving.’

  ‘But your savers earn a pittance; half a per cent? While interest on loans hits 35% and above, for god’s sake. We call that sharking.’

  ‘We are like the old mutual societies in England. Presently we only lend what we can afford from the deposits and the loan repayments. Which is why we were unaffected by the madness of sub-prime lending, Collaterised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and all the rest of the gimmicks that brought down the mighty Western banks. We lend tiny sums to very many people. The cost of setting up and administering these loans is very high. But each year we improve our systems, and we are bringing these rates down.’

  ‘So, you admit it.’

  ‘Our loans are very short term, usually to a small group of people – women mainly – and over 98% repay their loans on time. We lend to tiny businesses, not to people who want to buy flat screen TVs. That is key. The interest payments are affordable.’

  Ramesh turned and pointed behind him at the stylised tree with its deep and spreading roots, and its flowering and seeding branches.

  ‘This is our logo. The neem tree. It is a remarkable tree, indigenous to India but now growing in many parts of the world in some of the poorest and hottest conditions imaginable. It stays green throughout the year on very tiny amounts of water. Its roots go deep, you see. Its seeds and leaves and bark have a multitude of uses. We have cultivated this tree for thousands of years – it is known in Sanskrit medical literature. It is called the village pharmacy. Interestingly, one of your western drugs companies has managed to take out patents on some of the tree’s properties. A fine example of western capitalism, don’t you agree?’