The-Polyester-Prince

As he developed more familiarity with the trade, Dhirubhai was sent to market Shelland Burmah lubricants around the Besse network, visiting traders in FrenchSomaliland, Berbera, Hargeysa, Assem, Asmara (Eritrea), Mogadishu (ItalianSomaliland), and Ethiopia. Some places were not accessible to steamers, so theBesse salesmen would travel by dhow, the traditional wooden sailing vessels ofArabian waters. Lodgings would be extremely rough, and the food difficult for thevegetarian Gujaratis.Dhirubhai was outgoing, robust, and helpful to newcomers. He was physically strongand proud of his physique. The other young men tended to be bashful aboutnakedness in their shared bathrooms, and a common prank was to whip away thetowels they wrapped around their waists while crossing the living space in the mess.Dhirubhai would walk around without hiding behind towels. His solid footsteps couldbe heard from a distance, and his colleagues soon started calling him ‘ama’s after afamous Indian pehelwan (wrestling champion) of the time. Navin Thakkar, a formercolleague at Besse, remembers that Dhirubhai taught him to swim by simplythrowing him into the sea, at the swimming place down near the Aden dockyardwhere they used to go on Saturdays and Sundays.Dhirubhai delighted in stirring up pandemonium. Old colleagues describe it as bichuchordoa or ‘letting loose a scorpion’. Despite his affability, some of his old colleaguesdescribe Dhirubhai as a ‘dark character’s not just because of the darkish skin heinherited from his father-but for the ambition and risk-taking he hardly concealed.‘Ramnik was more or less a saintly man,’s said one ex-Besse colleague who laterwent to work for Dhirubhai. ‘Dhirubhai was a daring one. He was already advising meto go for business and not to remain in service.’ career with Besse was progressingsteadily, and the Shell Division was one of the most rapidly expanding areas ofcompany business. By 1956, when the Suez War broke out after Egypt’s PresidentNasser nationalised the Suez Canal; Dhirubhai was managing the Shell refuellingoperation at the Aden military base. He was also able to observe construction of theBP oil refinery in Aden, gaining an early insight into the production linkages of thepetroleum industry.In March 1954, Dhirubhai married at the age of 22, in a match arranged by hismother (his father had died in 1951) but which Dhirubhai himself had supervised. Hispartner was Kokila Patel, the daughter of a postmaster in Jamnagar, the port on thewestern side of Kathiawar. Her family was not particularly wealthy, so it was not afinancially advantageous match for Dhirubhai. But Kokilaben was also a Modh Bania,as the strict caste endogamy of the time demanded and her character complementedthat of Dhirubhai, a solid home anchor very much, grounded in traditional values andreligious piety.Although he was doing well, Dhirubhai was far from happy with his position as anemployee. ‘I saw in him he was somebody that was different than others,’s recalls M.N. Sanghvi, who worked alongside Dhirubhai in the Shell division and later went towork for him back in India. ‘I could see he wanted to make something of himself.’His room-mate Susheel Kothari also remembers the ambition. ‘Right from thebeginning he was determined to do something big,’s Kothari said. ‘He was nevercomfortable in service. He was a born businessman.’s After office hours, whichfinished at 4.30 in the afternoon, Dhirubhai would invariably head for the Aden souk.Initially he just watched the Arab, Indian and Jewish traders in action. Later hebegan taking positions in all kinds of commodities, particularly rice and sugar, in