The Name’s Bhupathi — Mr Bhupa
The Name’s Bhupathi — Mr Bhupathi
The other day, Abdul Lathief wrote a short note about Bhupathi and Arun Diaz, both of whom had served at the Chartered Bank in Dubai in the late seventies and early eighties. It brought back memories of my own younger days there — days when Dubai was still a quiet trading town, and the bank occupied a corner of my life as permanent as the sea.
The first Indian officer sent to us from the Chartered Bank in Madras was a Mr Srinivasan. This must have been the mid-to-late seventies, when the bank had few British officers capable of dealing with the Indian traders who formed the heart of Dubai’s foreign-trade business — the bills, the letters of credit, the guarantees that kept the old dhows, and their modern successors, busy.
When I joined the bank, Srinivasan — whose first name, I confess, has escaped me — was already there. A short, dark man in his thirties, with a pleasant, unassuming manner. He wore bright, broad ties with coloured shirts and bell-bottom trousers, very much in the style of the South Indian film stars whose pictures adorned every other shop in Ceylon, where I had come from. In dress, at least, he recalled Sivaji Ganesan.
Appearances, of course, can be misleading. Beneath the colourful ties and flamboyant trousers, Srinivasan was courteous, capable, and entirely without airs.
He was a gentleman.
He would chat with me often, telling me how the bank arranged his personal effects — his and his family’s — to be shipped back to Chennai through Gray Mackenzie. A man thinks of home, I learned, in the weight of his furniture.
Just before Srinivasan departed, his replacement arrived from the bank’s office in Chennai. His name was Krishna Bhupathi. Nobody knew him by his first name. In the bank, he was Mr Bhupathi — and the way he carried the name, he might have been licensed by it.
More than his finance skills, he was a tennis player of the first order. Up to then, tennis had been the foremost domain of the British expatriates in Dubai. Bhupathi changed all that. Within months, he was the best tennis player in the emirate. By two in the afternoon he would finish his work, change into his whites — white shorts, white t-shirt, white shoes — and off he would go to some club in Jumeirah. Soon his name began appearing in the local papers. He told me he coached his son from a young age, just as he had been coached in India.
The way I remember Bhupathi is this. Back then, I had the habit of visiting my parents and kid brother in Sri Lanka every six months. Bhupathi told me his wife was from Sri Lanka, and would hand me a small parcel for his father-in-law. I agreed, as one does. The day after I arrived home, a Morris Oxford would come up our driveway — sand, in those days, not the modern concrete kind — and Bhupathi’s father-in-law would collect the parcel. I remember him in his white shirt and khaki pants, chatting with my father. Two men, standing in our verandah, conducting the quiet business of family.
After two years, Bhupathi’s posting came to an end. By then he was established in Dubai — a star outside banking circles, a man who needed no introduction on the tennis court. He resigned from the bank and joined a rival. It was, one might say, the perfect backhand.
His replacement came from the bank in Mumbai: Arun Diaz. Tall, composed, he managed the expanding foreign-trade portfolio. But it is not Arun I remember so much as his wife, Lakshmi Narayan. Lakshmi was a liberated woman from India — in those days, an unheard-of species. She had kept her maiden name, and she was a famous journalist in her own country. She joined Arun in Dubai and became an editor of the newly established Gulf News.
Lakshmi and Arun were so liberated that they were quite public about their decision not to have children — another rare and bold announcement, in an age when such things were whispered, if said at all.
Dubai has changed, of course. The sandy roads are gone, and the dhows have successors of their own. But some things remain constant: a parcel delivered faithfully, a name carried with dignity, and the quiet courage of people who lived exactly as they chose.
And for that, Mr Bhupathi, Mr Srinivasan, Arun and Lakshmi — I remain, respectfully, shaken but not stirred.
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