49 Fresh Vegetables and Buffaloes

In the Bombay of the 70s, it was a common sight to see Arabs and folks from the Middle East come to Bombay during the monsoon season. So, following the introduction from my school classmate Brian Alexander, Sailesh and I met this Arab importer from Bahrain at the Natraj Hotel on Marine Drive. He was a friendly person and after some expected haggling, he placed an order for 23 tons of fresh vegetables including lemons to be shipped to Bahrain. 

This was the easy part as we realized later because it was very difficult to get charter flights to air lift this perishable cargo. Thus began an endless chase to find and persuade cargo airlines to handle our cargo. Our Volga gang tried to help us and, in the process, we met many interesting people as I will narrate now.

 The Arab trader had in the meanwhile issued the Purchase Order to us and opened a transferable letter of credit for the first shipment – I think the value of this was about INR 8 lacs which in the late 1970s was a tidy amount. 

Our Parsi friends Pesi and Cyrus from our Volga group knew the owner the of Cambata Aviation and they promptly took us to meet the owners who had their office atop the Eros Cinema theatre. But unfortunately, they were fully committed to their other shippers and could not accommodate us. Our other friend Naushad Patel, who ran a successful Buying Agency for shrimps and frog legs also tried to assist help but unfortunately nothing happened on that front too!

We now met another interesting character one Mr Joy from Kerela who was in the Export business. He was a slick talking Malayalee who promised to help us if he could transfer the letter of credit to his company. Being rather naïve, we agreed to do so and promptly agreed to transfer the letter of credit and then began the nightmare of chasing Mr Joy and persuading to ship the fresh vegetables. He would give us various excuses whenever we met him but finally the letter of credit expired, and we were left in the lurch. Mr Joy gave us endless sorrow and all our dreams of becoming export tycoons came crashing down.

Nevertheless, Sailesh and I were an optimistic duo and soon another opportunity to export livestock came along. These were Buffaloes to be exported to Saudi and there was a buyer who was interested in giving us this business. We were still in touch with Mr Joy despite the failed attempt to export fresh vegetables and we mentioned to him the possibility of exporting buffaloes to Saudi. He again charmed us and persuaded us to introduce the Saudi buyer to him. We did so foolishly and predictably he was successful in persuading the buyer to place an order on his company. Mr Joy in turn gave us a letter confirming our commission for this deal.

Again, shipping he Buffaloes on a Cattle Carrier had its own challenges but we had the opportunity to go onboard various Cattle Carriers to inspect them in the Bombay Port and see how the livestock was transported but alas to our utter disappointment, Mr Joy was not able to effect the shipment and we were back to square one.

Finally, we heard that Mr Joy was arrested by the Economic Offences Wing as he had swindled many Exporters and was also involved in foreign exchange related rackets. The last thing we heard of Mr Joy was that he was cooling his heels in the police locker at the police headquarters near Crowford Market in Bombay!