The-Polyester-Prince

Viscosa via a long resident Italian businessman in Bombay, a Dr Rossi, while Kothary
handled only the Du Pont product from the United States and elsewhere. Dhirubhai
was a sporting rival, Kothary said: ‘He would always say: “This is what I’m going to
do, boy!” Whenever he fights an enemy he goes in the open.’ Not everyone in the
Bombay textile trade would agree.
Kothary and many others in the Pydhonie market remember intervention in a market
crisis in the mid-1960s when spiralling textile prices led government authorities to
crack down on speculation in the yarn market by banning forward trading, and then
arresting traders found to be continuing the practice. Consumers must have
complained to the government about fluctuations in prices-some people, about a
dozen, were arrested in the market,’ Kothary said.
The trading community was despondent as their colleagues languished all day in the
cells of the Picket Road Police Station. Approaches to officials by the Bombay Yarn
Markets and Exchange Association got nowhere. Then, late in the evening, Dhirubhai
arrived like a storm at the police station, shouting greetings to the senior officers,
and handing out snacks to everyone. Within an hour, all the arrested traders had
been released, and the complaints against them shelved. Kothary can only guess at
intervention. ‘The usual-India!’ he said.
Dhirubhai also emerged as saviour of the market when an even greater supply crisis
occurred in 1967, Kothary recalled. On a report that actual user import licences had
been traded and misused, the Customs authorities in Bombay under the then
Assistant Collector, a Mr. Ramchandani, impounded all incoming cargoes of artificial
fibres. The government insisted that whoever imported the yarn had to be the
manufacturer who wove it into cloth.
According to Kothary, about 40 million rupees (then about US$5.3 million) worth of
yarn was seized. Many traders then defaulted on loans taken out to cover the
imports. The entire artificial textile market was paralysed. ‘It could have made us all
insolvent,’ Kothary said. ‘This is when I came very closely in touch with Dhirubhai. It
was he who saved us all. We fought for about six months. I used to go with him to
lawyers day in and day out. We went to Delhi to see Morarji Desai [then finance
minister]. That was the time I could see he was a wizard. He used all the ways and
means.’ The crisis ended as quickly as it started, ostensibly after a one-day hearing
of the importers’ appeal in the Customs, Excise and Gold Appellate Tribunal under
Justice Oberoi, who found for the appeal. Kothary indicates that an agreement
engineered by Dhirubhai was behind the judicial settlement. The details are not
revealed, but presumably come under the category of ‘That India!’ also.
On their move to Bombay, Dhirubhai and his young family had moved into an
apartment on the 3rd floor of the Jai Hind Society building in Bhuleshwar, a very
crowded district of shops, markets and residential tenements in the central part of
the city. The building is what is known as a chawl in Bombay: numerous small
apartments, often just single rooms, opening on to open galleries around a central
courtyard which is set back from the street behind commercial premises. Quite often
the toilets and washing facilities are shared at ground level.
Later accounts of Dhirubhai’s early career often paint this home as Dickensian in the
extreme. The fat, since bought by a later tenant, had two small bedrooms, a living
room, kitchen and internal bathroom in 1995. Vakharia, who used to visit the
Ambanis for a holiday each Christmas from 1959 to the late 1960s, remembers it