The-Polyester-Prince

exchange controls? Which foreign companies would want to plug products they could
neither export to India nor make locally?
The wedding invitation was a good excuse to break away from this stalemate in New
Delhi, and make contact with the Indian commercial class in Bombay. There it looked
as if a raw entrepreneurial spirit was straining to break through the discouraging
political crust. Word of the Ambani family and their company Reliance Industries had
spread to Hong Kong as prime examples of this brash new India which might finally
have its day, courtesy of the changes the Gulf War symbolised.
Everything about the Ambanis, in fact, was a good magazine story 'The young
couple’s courtship had been a stormy one, ready-made for the Bombay show-biz
magazines. The bride, Tina Munim, was a girl with a past. She had been a film
starlet, featuring in several of the Hindi-language films churned out by the hundreds
every year in Bollywood most including improbable violence, song-and-dance
routines, and long sequences with the female leads in wet, clingy clothes. Before
meeting Anil, Tina had had a heavy, well-publicised affair with a much older actor.
The groom, Anil, was the tear away one of the two Ambani boys. His parents had
frowned on the match. Bombay’s magnates usually tried to arrange matches that
cemented alliances with other powerful business or political families. This one was
not arranged, nor did it bring any more than certain popularity. Hired assailants had
been sent with acid and knives to scar Tina’s face, so went the gossip (apocryphal:
Tina’s face turned out to be flawless).
Anil had threatened suicide if he could not marry Tina, went another rumour. Finally,
the parents had agreed.
The father, Dhirubhai, was no less colourful and even more controversial. He had
first worked in Aden in the 1950s. I recalled a stopover there in my childhood,
aboard the S. S. Oronsay, a buff-hulled Orient Line ship, en route to my father’s
posting in London with his Australian bank in 1958. The image was of grim, darkbrown
peaks surrounding a harbour of brilliant blue, a host of merchant ships tied up
to moorings, and a busy traffic of launches and barges. The trip ashore was by
launch, landing at Steamer Point, where Arabs and Indians besieged the white faces,
trying to sell us Ottoman-style cushions or to drag us into their duty-free shops. Now
someone like those desperate salesmen in Aden was a tycoon in Bombay.
Ambani had got into polyester manufacturing in a big way, and got huge numbers of
Indians to invest in shares of his company, Reliance Industries. In India, the home of
fine cotton textiles, it seemed that people couldn’t get enough polyester. The only
constrain on local producers like Reliance was the government’s licensing of their
capacity, or where they built their factories. To jack up his capacity, Ambani had
become a big political fixer. In the recent minority government formation, it was
said; his executives had been shuttling briefcases of cash to politicos all over Delhi.
There had been epic battles, with the press baron Ramnath Goenka of the Indian
Express and with a textile rival from an old Parsi business house, Nusli Wadia. A year
or so earlier, a Reliance public relations manager had been arrested for plotting to
murder Wadia. The man had been released, and nothing was moving in the case.
Was it genuine or a frame-up? Indian colleagues were not sure: no conspiracy was
accepted at face value.
So we took our first trip inside India, making our way down to New Delhi Railway
Station in a yellow-and-black cab, one of the 1954 Morris Oxford design still being