Kishore Singh: Strangers in the night

I’m not at my best at three o’ clock in the morning, a time when even party animals are winding up for the night, but a host of circumstances had conspired to keep me awake. At least part of it had to do with a newly acquired friend who, even though we had not met but only spoken on the phone, was furiously posting SMSes that kept pinging with military-like precision as she poured her heart out about relatives and akin species. Somebody, she texted furiously, was posing as the sole heir to a fortune that should have been hers by marriage. Another was trying to mutate properties in his name. “They’re all bloody thieves,” she wrote.

 

“Tchch-tchch,” I tried to shake awake my wife, who oblivious to my new friend’s pain, was snoring gently by my side. Ignored by her, I enquired concernedly, “What are you going to do next?” Immediately a message flashed, “Who knows about tomorrow, but I bought a sugar mill this morning because I was depressed.” “I’m depressed,” said my wife, who has an antenna for these things and had managed to shrug off her slumber, “I need to buy some new clothes.”

I could actually imagine somebody going shopping as an antidote to the blues, or rushing off on a vacation to the seaside, or putting the deposit on a new condominium — but who buys a sugar mill as Prozac? Just the previous evening, I’d had a conversation with an real-estate tycoon, which I’d dismissed then, but found myself thinking about now. “Making money is a disease,” he’d mused, “you can’t help yourself, you want to make more of it than is good for you,” blaming his son for what he saw as nothing more than greed. “I have enough money, where is the need for him to make any more?” “I suppose,” I said sagely, perhaps even philosophically, “you can never have enough.” “How would you know,” said the industrialist bluntly, “you don’t have any!”

“You see,” he added, “it’s like having an affair, you need to have the guts for it,” a conversation I found dangerous considering his wife was within earshot. “Foolish people get caught,” he chortled, “but I made a lot of money — enough,” he said, “for my son to have all the affairs he wants, instead he only wants to make more money.”

I admit I didn’t understand the logic of it either, but now my new friend was messaging that she hoped to have at least another industry up and running in the next eight months and wanted to finalise the plans as soon as she was back from her cruise — or better still, why didn’t I join her on the ship so she could discuss her plans with me. “Me,” I texted her back, “I think not, I have a job, besides what will the wife say?”

A short pause later, another message pinged in, “Wife? Job? Do I know you?” Somewhat taken back, I messaged her my credentials all over again. “What are you doing messaging me this late at night?” she shot back. “Not me,” I corrected her, “it was you who started the whole thing with your petty money-laundering secrets and plans to subvert the family business.” “You twit, you absolute moron, you mindless numbskull, didn’t you realise I thought you were someone else, why didn’t you tell me sooner instead of — my god! — ferreting out all my business plans. Are you,” she hastened to ask, “employed by my in-laws? Is this,” she ended abruptly, “a sting operation?”

“Now, I’m seriously depressed,” I murmured to my wife. “Go buy a sugar mill,” she tittered, “and if you can’t afford it, I’ll be happy to settle for a sari or two.”