saratkanur

Slowly as I settled into the job, the egyptian's interest in me grew that we were spending more time after hours together as he took me through the finer points of running and growing a business. I was picking up fast ,which he appreciated, and sometimes my ideas were superior,that he would get up and pat my back,sometimes give me a hug, and one day his hand was on my rump. At first I thought it was a careless gesture,but when he moved to the other and kneaded it, I looked him in his eyes. The gleam and sly shame in his eyes and his uncertain leer made me look down and beneath the table edge,I saw his robe hiked around his waist and his other hand stroking his distended and long curved penis, which he offered to me with a comic book face that I laughed.

"Do this ........ moshshibhi" as he pointed to my mouth,"and then "....... he indicated that I should remove my pants.

That was the moment I dreaded.I had been through this in my adolescence and didn't feel offended, but that he was gay made me a little uncertain.If I went along, I could be rewarded now which could lead to punishment later on , so my long term prospects didn't look too good at that point of time. While I was mulling over this, I felt his finger probe the centre of my trouser seat and the sheer ridiculousness made me laugh out, which made him think I enjoyed what he was doing to me.

"Look, this is more fun, what do you say? and started disrobing when the peep hole opened and two sharp peered through the gap. In a frenzy he twisted his penis between his thighs and hastily pulled on his robe and ambled to the toilet and his penis squished between his locked thighs..Someone banged the door accompanied by hoarse and desperate curses in arabic .It was one of the sheiks.

"ibilis "ibilis " saddakanith......ibin elmetmakaaa " they roared,along with some long dirty epithets a man could call another. The egyptian emerged back ,ashen faced, as sodomy was not really encouraged in islam and he ran to the door pleading mercy and forgiveness and wrenched the door open to see the two wizened old sheiks quaking in their robes ,who spat........"sad..dhammaniak....kulkhara....'
They pushed him aside and barged in and then hell broke loose as they ran around the room patting and searching their robes and then dishdashas and ogals flew in air as they serached each other ,while the egyptian cried...

"Oh my god" these bastards are going to kill us"...stab us to death... "run man run" and he ran through the door while I was unable to move. The sheiks ran after him locking the door behind them. I was so petrified and couldn't think properly and saw my life ending on the edge of curved daggers ,thrust deep between my heart. Then the door opened with a crash and two sheiks fell on the floor and rolled, begging forgiveness and protection from the mighty Allah.

I ducked below the table at the other end and thought the satanic act of their most trusted servant had made them insane, when the egyptian ran back in ,sweating through his robe. Fear and disappointment had twisted his long face sideways, and when he saw his bosses rolling on the floor , he laughed hysterically and then pranced around,rummaging his desk. I thought he was searching for a knife to kill the sheiks before they got us. But no, he ran out again,clutching a bag to his chest, and then came back in a dead heat, as an ear shattering whine and an accompanying crash of a thousand thunderbolts followed him through the door.

Saddam had attacked. Bombs rained and his tanks were blazing across the desert and the kuwaitis,sheiks ,both real and unreal ,ran for their lives.They were in a state of absolute panic and really didn't care what their loyal servant was trying to do and their curses were mainly aimed at Saddam and his mother for his wickedness and greed.

I had never heard so much gibberish in my life as the two frightened men tried to get their money from the safe at the rear end of the room. We dealt in foreign exchange and on any day , we had plenty of dollars and other foreign currency ,counted and bagged in the saferoom with an old heavy iron grill gate with dead bolts of which we held one key and they held the other and they carried it home after work.

All they wanted was their money, but they had forgotten to bring their key along, which had led to the second round of cursing and frantic run around,but it was too late as saddam's planes were whizzing overhead , raining bombs, as his army raced menacingly towards the heart of the kingdom .

The skirmish  between me and the scion started when a plan for bidding for a massive American air base / missile site in Uzbekistan came up for review and I had summarily shot down the idea stating the military implictions and the repurcussions ofRussian response to any such venture in Uzbekistan. THe pitfalls were too many and the price was more than a hundred fold our financial and operational muscle.  The next day I found myself with the old man in my office on the visitors sofa on the side while the young goon was sitting in my chair with his leg up on my desk. The message was clear, but the od man was too kind to just let me go american style, so he held out a check for 9 million dollars, something  for each year of my 18 year of service and gently hugged me as he let me go.  It was not a hand out and it just represented a miniscule part of our yearly profits for which I was greatly responsible.

Why, I used to lop off close to a million dollors on kick back  from suppliers besides a fancy pay packet and an unlimited expense account . It could have gone on for a few more years, but my understudy and future master saw through the subterfuge and let me go without chopping my head off. Any I acted cheered, slapped the young man on his back, wished him good luck, cursed him in my mind, took the cheque, wrangled a retainer from them for services in India, where I would open and office and manage their operations in India, which amounted to sitting at a desk and swatting flies and packed my bag for home. Surprisingly Su, my devoted wife and goddess of party and good life, had forseen all this and had everything in place so that we could move on to a new life in a new place, well, not so new a place,
and continue living as il the sky was there where it was before. I felt like shit.
Twenty years after leaving college, marrying, making babies, living a life the way I wanted it, ah it was shit. I didn't cry then or during the send off bash,but during the flight on my wive's shoulder ,feeling sad that she would be the one to really miss those times for it was she who had made it all possible.

on.
 

Funny how things turn out. Darren had found me a job in Kuwait as an assistant in a business run by two old sheiks who were brothers.I was to sit in a small room at the back with an Egyptian,who ran the business and mostly it was writing letters , keeping the books as the egyptian wanted, while the real bosses sat , rather slept ,in the adjacent room  with peepholes on both sides ,through which they peeked time to time to see the business was run well. They had inherited wealth and didn't know a thing about modern business, and the egyptian cooked the books and left just enough profits to keep the arabs happy.They didn't know much , neither did they probe too much except for appearing once in a while at a desk ,heads held high, hands firmly tied behind before flicking through the file on the desks as if they understood what was going on ,which nobody could really figure out except me and the egyptian.

I liked the job as the long afternoon breaks gave me time to relax on the couch and read books until the egyptian returned in the evening,baying for blood and chewing ass of the first man he encountered before running down the desks , abusing those who had fallen behind on work, calling them names in egyptian or berating them clear British English,

"Who is your bloody father,I wish to know,silly head, what was he doing while doing it'" was he making you or a bigger,stupid idiot than himself."

Behind his desk,a white board spanned the length of the room with the days and dates in running columns,where plans and work assigned were marked in coloured inks.
Smaller versions of boards were also hung behind every table and they had to chalk out their own plan to accomplish the tasks assigned to them . That's where the pasting took place, as the egyptian would come back from a site, look up one of the boards and launch an attack in well defined language.It was not fun to be hauled up in front of others and spat on.He was a scary man, and scared the shit out of everybody by his incessant bawling, ranting and froth from his mouth sprayed like a shower that people did their jobs on time to avoid being drenched in his saliva.

"Note down what I want done on that board"
he would tell me,and work was assigned and reviewed for progress every Saturday . Two columns were left blank and at the end of the week, work accomplished were given a plus and a negative marked for slack. All these were toted up and bonuses paid on the "number of positves accumulated after substracting the negatives"."Never pay for work not done,never, because it will make them complacent and then we will loose business.".
He liked me and decided to be my mentor.He was educated in England and demanded respect and total commitment from me, which was to help me get control of the firm later .

Summer vacations were always spent at our home in kannur, a small seaside town in the northern part of Kerala. The town is quaint and a small place where every fourth shop is a bakery. Arrogant bakers baked the best of buscuits and cakes and served customers with such insolence, that one started to believe the attitude added to the taste, for such was the throng on the shop front to buy the stuff.

One year during the school vacation,Nazheena and the two girls came along with us to India. We spent a day at my sister's place in Mumbai . Nazheena was upset by the visible squalor and poverty on the roadsides and the extravagance and opulence at the other end. She could not fathom such disparity in living conditions, though she herself admitted life wasn't that rosy in her own land.

"Huf can dis happaen, when so many peeple have no huss,vhy govermenth no beelding?" "We are notha riech in khzakisthan but noth this moch problaim in my cunthry" .

When we reached home , the state was in the frenzy of elections. She was so fascinated that I had to leverage my cousin's bureaucratic clout to get her in a polling booth as an observer.On the election day, we arrived early and sat along side the election officer . She was excited and didn't feel uncomfortable squeezed between me and the shrivelled old geezer, who seemed to enjoy her closeness and was trying to rub himself into her skin.She didn't seem to purticularly mind. In fact, she told him,

"I like voting and electing like dhis".

As the men amd women ,young ,old and infirm lined up and gently cast their vote, she started feeling the power of democracy. She was witnessing something that she never before experienced, and it overwhelmed her. She didn't know here communists were also crooks like fellow capitalists and hungered for power to steal and squander public money for bulding and boasting of bigger houses than their rivals .

....."Look at dhiss, nobodhy forsing theim and they are acoming in erly morninhgh".

The old man was thrilled and he squeezed himself more into her. "Isay , this is Indiaaa." he said, with the stress so long on the end syllable, it took him a minute to complete that.

Once outside ,the huge red banners ,hammer and sickle, giant cut outs of Marx, Lenin and Engels staring down from tree trunks, made her also pine. Here,the vestiges of an empire built on the ideology of contribution and rooted in the theory of class struggle for social equality was replaying itsef .Melancholy set and made her regress into a mood of sadness and rememberence.

"In my lendh where ith began they had abandonded it for freedoum and social uncerthainity, but who really cares?"

It overwhelmed her that somewhere , someone still believed in that nonsense and under the fluttering red banner she gently put an arm around my waist. She was so overwhelmed by her mixed feelings that she allowed me to make love to her. Not there ,right under Karl Marx disapproving countenance,but later when we returned to Kuwait. And that's another story.

.

Pranas Ramunabis and Nazheena were privileged,chosen children of Soviet Union, and were given the best of everything as they were to one day to stand up and show the world the success of the soviet system.They were university educated ,multi talented and strongly built demi-gods . He was a highly qualified engineer and she had universty degrees in physiology and physical education.Both of them were olympic quality athletes, excelling in basketball, she could play the piano and he could handle a variety of machinery, was a skilled plumber, electrician, carpenter and and could sing very very well. Truly, they were the icons of the communist system.

They were not real russians and though we called them that,these two were from two ends. He was a Lithaunian and part russian and she was a Kazakhi.They had met on a plane , while she was returning home to Almaty and he was returning to an institute where he was teaching and did research in petroleum engineering .The flew into love on that flight and were married soon after and using her father's influence ,had found herself both a job and an apartment at Atyrau,a small city on the edge of Caspian sea,where he worked and did research . All this was before the collapse ,and when that had happened , the first casualities were their parents, who were the first to be hounded out by marauding mobs.

Chaos descended when the soviet system collapsed and anarchy rend the union , before settling down as different nations and and for a time they had spent their lives not knowing on whose side to lean . Lithuania declared independence and they briefly returned to Klaipeda, his home town,but had soon fled and sold out to the highest bidder , a Norwegian oil firm, before moving on to an American firm who valued his expertise in green field sites and made him a head honcho. He was so valuable to them, even his farts were measured and paid for.

We became friends.They were multilingual and he spoke fluent English with a heavy accent, and was truly funny .Nazheena struggled to express herself in English but was fluent in German ,so sometimes she was confused and spoke english in german which was german to us. As we became closer , I started to admire the soviet system that made them so proficient for the world but they dismissed it as useless as it was built on a system of privileges which I did not understand ,for if the privileges were extended on merit, there was nothing to complain about. I tried to argue that and they said it was something that cannot be explained but can only realised from within. I didn't again understand what they meant, but a majority of them felt so , otherwise the system would have held.