The-Polyester-Prince

great caution, leading to constant tension with Dhirubhai who was a risk-taker. The
final rupture came after one clash when, at Dhirubhai’s urging, Reliance built up a
large holding of yarn in the expectation of a price rise. Damani pressured Dhirubhai
to cut back their exposure. So Dhirubhai sold the yarn stockpile-to himself, in secret.
Two or three weeks later the price of yarn shot up and Dhirubhai made a killing.
‘Later Dhirubhai told Chambaklal: “I am prepared to share profit with you,” Vakharia
said. “But in future if you do not know the business, do not intervene.” Many others
among Dhirubhai’s ex-colleagues and trade associates also believe the partners were
incompatible.
‘He takes so much risk that people fear something will go wrong,’ said Vradial
Depala, who knew Dhirubhai in Aden. ‘But the risks are all calculated. They are not
blind risks.’ ‘You may be a co-passenger in a car with me, but if you don’t like my
driving you might be a little fearful,’ said Manubhai Kothary, a leading Bombay
textile exporter and long-time president of the Silk and Art Silk Mills Research
Association.
‘Someone advised partner that he had made sufficient money and now should come
out,’ said Susheel Kothari, the ex-colleague from Besse & Co who later worked for
Reliance. ‘s business is catching live serpents.’s Chambakial Damani himself will say
only that ‘he agreed to separate willingly’ or that ‘he just became separate as
friends’. But he agreed that the version given by Kothari and others about
differences over commercial risk were to some extent true’. Damani went into
trading in a new company, while Dhirubhai and his brothers paid some Rs 600,000 to
buy him out of Reliance. Soon after, Dhirubhai moved the office to bigger premises
in the more central Court House building at Dhobi Talao, named for the laundrymen
who originally worked in the area.
After ten years at Bhuleshwar, in 1968, Dhirubhai moved his home out of the chawl
to a more comfortable fat in Altamount Road, one of the city’s elite areas on a hill
overlooking the Arabian Sea. Fond of driving fast, Dhirubhai had first bought a Fiat
car, and then moved on to a Mercedes-Benz. Later, in the 1970s, he indulged a taste
for flashy automobiles by acquiring a Cadillac, one of the very few in the country
then or since.
Friends remember him as a dashing figure, the slightly dark skin inherited from his
father (the only such characteristic, some say) offset by a white safari suit, the hair
slicked back into a duck’s tail. For a while he put on weight, and then trimmed down
by taking vigorous dawn walks along the three-kilometre sweep of Bombay’s Marine
Drive, enlisting friends, colleagues and neighbours as companions.
Within a year of splitting with Damani, Dhirubhai took Reliance into textile
manufacturing for the first time. He decided to locate it in Gujarat rather than
Bombay, because of the cheaper land prices, and sent his older brother Ramnikbhai
to select a site. Ramnikbhai enlisted Vakharia, then starting to get known as a
lawyer in Ahmedabad, and the two drove around the state in a small Fiat.
They settled on a 10000 square metre plot, the last going in a new industrial estate
developed by the Gujarat state government at Naroda, on the fringes of Ahmedabad.
Vakharia had got a contact, state minister for industries Jaswant Mehta, to approve
the purchase, and by a further stroke of luck the farmers owning some 100 000
square metres of adjacent land were willing to sell. Dhirubhai had a simple factory
built, installed four knitting machines, and appointed his brother as plant manager.