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  Lily gave him a detailed account of our ordeal. Nirvana was so upset that he was speechless. We assured him that everything would be all right. How anxious the others at home must have been when he told them about our situation! But talking to him brought us an enormous sense of relief.

  As we were returning to the lounge after the phone call, we could hear an elderly lady shouting ‘Hello! Hello!’ into the phone. The connection had been lost again! Poor thing.

  The hotel elevator started working again, two hours after the quake. Neither had it fallen to the ground nor was anybody trapped inside. We used the elevator to return to our room and started to take out our suitcases one by one. As I was pulling out the last suitcase, I again looked into the bathroom. The half-full bottle of mineral water was still intact.

  ‘That’s a good omen,’ Lily said. ‘Don’t worry, Babu. The worst is over.’

  I wanted to believe her.

  The elevator was overcrowded as we descended to the lobby again. The guests in the lobby were rushing back to their rooms, while those in the rooms were emerging with their baggage. Even in the frigid February weather, most of them were in T-shirts, shorts or pyjamas. Nobody had bothered to put on warm clothes. Fear may send a chill up your spine and leave your hair standing on end, but at the same time beads of sweat roll down your face!

  We had to wait for a while to get space in the lift. Lily dug out a shawl from a suitcase and wrapped it around her shoulders. ‘Babu, should I take out a jacket for you?’

  I was still wearing only a T-shirt and trackpants, but I did not feel the need for a jacket. Lily too was feeling warm and was wiping the perspiration from her forehead with the edge of her shawl.

  Once we brought our baggage downstairs, I asked the receptionist to call up the airport. It turned out that no one had any idea when flights might resume. I inquired about the state of the roads. After making a few calls, the receptionist said, ‘A car might be able to get to the border.’

  It is a six-hour drive from Santiago to the small Argentinian border town of Mendoza. We had stayed there for two days on our way to Santiago from Ushuaia. Now, it seemed fate was taking us back there.

  ‘I can’t say for sure that the roads are clear,’ the receptionist said. This put us in quite a dilemma. Eventually, I decided it was worth taking a chance. I asked Lily for her thoughts. ‘Let’s give it a go,’ she said.

  The hotel arranged a car for us.

  7 a.m.–noon

  The situation outside was chaotic, more frightening than inside the hotel. There were large cracks zigzagging across the roads. A road journey seemed precarious. Upturned vehicles were everywhere, and the bulldozers were out, trying to clear the streets. Flyovers had collapsed along several stretches. We did not see any house intact. Windows had shattered, and roofs and walls had collapsed. The same roads had been bustling with life when we were exploring the town only the day before. Now, our ears were assailed by the screeching sirens of ambulances and fire trucks.

  Lily was pointing things out as we passed. ‘There’s the place we had dinner last night. My God! It’s lost its roof. Look! There’s the mall where we shopped yesterday. Remember how we had to pause after every few steps to reach the other side of the street without getting run over? Every window has been shattered.’ She had not even removed the price tag from the new sunglasses she had bought there. I looked from side to side as Lily pointed things out. I had seen a town built overnight in China. Here I was seeing one devastated overnight.

  The Chilean driver spoke very little English. If we asked him something, he would reply in broken English and then lapse into his local dialect. We tried to make sense of what he said, and had a surprisingly good conversation! We could read a lot from his expressive eyes. After all, humans share common emotions.

  Approximately twenty-eight kilometres away from the hotel, he suddenly jammed on the brakes. We stuck our necks out of the taxi and looked out. The road was blocked by a flyover that had completely collapsed. Bulldozers had arrived to clear the road, but it was obvious they would not be finished before evening.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  The driver did not answer.

  ‘Is there another route?’

  He shook his head, ‘No.’

  We waited there for a while, but clearly could not go any further. We had no choice but to return to the hotel, dejected.

  Some of the guests were glued to the television streaming live news from CNN. A few others were sitting on their suitcases, biting their nails nervously. I did not want to stay there a moment longer after my experience the night before, which had left me shaken to the core. Lily was in a similar state. She did not want to stay there either.

  As we could not leave Santiago immediately, we decided to move to Hotel Marriott, a bigger and better place than the Kennedy. It was also in better shape. Even if you cannot escape a crisis, you do feel more secure under a strong roof.

  Lily wanted to book a room on the ground floor, or at least no higher than the second floor, so we would have a better chance of running outside if another quake struck. Unfortunately, there were no rooms available on the lower floors, and we found ourselves on the twelfth floor again. Tourists like us who had also moved in from other hotels were crowding the lobby in search of a safer place.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll spend yet another night in the lobby while our luggage occupies the room!’

  Lily started to chant ‘Sai Ram’.

  We tried to contact Kathmandu from the Marriott, but to no avail. We managed, however, to get a call through to a friend of Nirvana’s who lived in Rio de Janeiro. She had been briefed about our situation already, and was quite worried about us. We asked her to let people in Kathmandu know that we were okay.

  Once again, a fresh sense of relief swept over us.

  Tuesday, 2 March 2010

  We had experienced more than fifty aftershocks in the preceding twenty-four hours, three of which measured 6.6 on the Richter scale. Though the television signal was weak, CNN kept us updated. When we tried to watch television in our room, the TV would suddenly start to shake and then go dead. When we turned on the tap in the bathroom, the water flowed out of it like a snake. There was some respite downstairs in the lobby, but even there it was only temporary. The tables and sofas would begin to rock and the chandelier sway precariously, its crystals clanging. A glass flower vase slid to the edge of the table. After two sleepless nights in a row, most of the tourists looked exhausted, with eyes as red as tomatoes. Lily’s eyes too were slightly swollen. I was in better shape, but having not shaved for a couple of days, probably looked worse than she did.

  ‘Mr Chaudhary,’ a receptionist jolted me out of a power nap in the lobby. ‘There’s a caller on the line from Brazil.’

  It must be Nirvana’s friend, I thought. Had she come up with a plan to get us out of here? I ran to the reception desk, wiping my eyes.

  ‘Hello, Uncle.’ It was Nirvana’s friend.

  She told me how worried Nirvana was back in Kathmandu. He had even thought about chartering a flight to rescue us but, of course, the airport was still closed. He had also contacted the Indian ambassador in Kathmandu, Rakesh Sood. Sood had briefed Pradeep Kapur, his counterpart in Chile, about our situation.

  I asked the receptionist for a piece of paper and jotted down Kapur’s number.

  Dejection turned to hope as I immediately dialled his number.

  ‘Hello, Mr Kapur . . . This is Binod Chaudhary speaking.’

  He responded with familiarity as soon as he heard my name. He said he had been posted at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu from 1996 to 2001, and had actually met me several times. I could not recall him, but when we met, I felt there indeed was something familiar about him.

  He personally came to pick us up, and we went to his residence. I silently thanked Sood.

  We felt at home with Mr and Mrs Kapur; we felt indescribably relieved, as though we had been brought back from the brink of death. Kapu
r urged us to stay for a few more days but I turned down his offer.

  ‘I wouldn’t stay here even if they let me open a big factory,’ I said.

  That struck a chord with him, and he laughed.

  ‘Do you have any suggestions about how we can get out of here instead?’ I inquired.

  ‘The border with Argentina is just a six-hour drive from here,’ he said.

  ‘Mendoza?’

  He was taken aback.

  ‘We already tried that but had to turn back,’ I said.

  ‘We have information that the road will be cleared by tonight,’ he said. ‘Mendoza has a small airport. Narrow-bodied planes can land there.’

  Our faces lit up.

  He advised us that a bus would be safer than a car for the trip along the precarious road. ‘If you start tonight, you’ll be there in the morning,’ he said.

  He helped us get tickets at the bus station. Many had heard that the road had reopened. By nightfall, the bus station was crowded.

  Wednesday, 3 March 2010

  A chilly wind was blowing as we stepped out of the bus in Mendoza.

  Lily had wrapped herself in a shawl. I had put on a jacket as it was cold inside the bus during the night. But the jacket alone could not keep me warm any longer. I also put on a sweater and a scarf, and zipped my jacket up to my chin. I felt better.

  We walked straight to a telephone booth at the bus station and called home. The line was now clear, and we were connected right away. Lily was so overwhelmed to hear Nirvana’s voice that she could not speak. I took the receiver.

  ‘Hello, Nirvana!’

  He tried to clear his throat as soon as he heard my voice. He was crying.

  ‘My boy, why haven’t your plane arrived?’ I asked, trying to cheer him up.

  His laughter sounded like a whimper.

  From Mendoza, we caught a flight to Buenos Aires and from there, another to Sao Paulo. After that, we went to Dubai and straight onwards to Kathmandu. We arrived after two nights and one day of continuous travel.

  Nirvana had come to meet us at Kathmandu airport. My eyes brightened as soon as I saw him. I felt as though I was seeing the light of day for the first time in years. He hugged both of us tightly for a long time, but could not say a word. We were speechless too.

  Lily did not step out of the house for two days after we returned to Kathmandu. She stayed inside, continuously chanting ‘Sai Ram’, and I did not want to stop her. All said and done, we depended on His mercy.

  There is a lot worth mentioning from my memories of fifty-seven years. I have deliberately chosen to start this book with the events in Chile because that experience had a profound impact on me. The fear of imminent death and the realization that I might, in fact, have died in that earthquake, left me badly shaken. You lose your nerve in the face of death. Life is hope, a beginning, a dream to be realized, whereas death is the end, a void and extreme desolation. A dreamer lives on hope, always looking forward to the future, not focusing on ‘the end’ or giving way to despair. But eventually, every dreamer has to wake up too.

  The Chilean earthquake pushed me into a period of my life when I could see nothing except the void, despair and ‘the end’. I was a man who had set out to conquer the world, but suddenly I had been brought to the realization that my achievements, in which I took so much pride, could have been snatched away from me in a single moment.

  Time is fleeting. I want to share something of myself with others. I might have earned billions of dollars, but my most treasured possessions are my experiences and my memories. This is the story of my life.

  PART I: BIRTH

  1

  The Beginning

  Many Nepalis call us Maade. This could be a colloquial, short form for Marwari, or it could have originally been a disrespectful term intended to belittle us, perhaps out of jealousy.

  The Marwaris are among the oldest trading communities in the world. The community, which spread out from the Indian state of Rajasthan in the nineteenth century, has a strong presence in the industrial and commercial sectors in India and Nepal. The Marwaris have achieved this as a result of their willingness to take risks on the basis of their skill as traders.

  Marwaris have never received the respect they deserve—whether in Nepali or in Indian society. The Indian author Gurcharan Das has observed this in his book India Unbound. Wherever Marwaris have established themselves, they have not been the local entrepreneurs. In India, the Parsis, Khojas and Bhatias dominated the industrial sector in Mumbai, while Gujaratis and Jains dominated in Ahmedabad. The presence of Marwaris in the business sector can be traced only to the years after World War I, but today they are among the most successful of India’s entrepreneurs. According to Gurcharan Das, Marwaris own roughly half of the total industrial capital in India. By the year 1997, eight of the top twenty industrial houses in India belonged to Marwaris.

  The Marwaris’ situation in Nepal is not very different. They control the bulk of the total private industrial capital in Nepal, though there is no formal data to confirm this. The local Newars are another big trading community. If we look at the history of world trade, we realize that local trading communities still dominate local business everywhere. Newars and Marwaris are the dominant trading communities in Nepal.

  The word Marwar comes from Jodhpur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Historically, Jodhpur was known as Marwar. Later, the traders who spread to other parts of Rajasthan, especially Shekhawati, Udaipur, Bikaner, Ramgarh and Fatehpur, were collectively known as Marwaris. Among the Marwaris, those who come from Old Bikaner and the Shekhawati area of Jaipur have been particularly successful.

  I would like to quote here from India Unbound:

  For centuries Marwaris had been bankers and helped finance the land trade between the East and the West, as the great trade route passed through northern Rajasthan. During the Mughal days, they were financiers to many princes, including the emperor’s family . . . a Marwari Oswal was a banker to the nawabs of Bengal . . . As the British created a national market during the nineteenth century, there was a huge migration of Marwari traders into the smallest and remotest villages of India. The migrants began as petty shopkeepers (often with capital advanced from a wholesaler from their own community) and slowly graduated to moneylending, then moved up to finance farmers for their commercial crops . . . The railways accelerated the process.

  Some Marwaris became hugely successful and created large and famous firms . . . around 1900.

  Why the Marwaris turned out to be so spectacularly successful had a lot to do with their wonderful support system, explains Tom Timberg in The Marwaris. When a Marwari traveled on business, his wife and children were cared for in a joint family at home. Wherever he went in search of trade, he found shelter and good Rajasthani food in a basa, a sort of collective hostel run on a cooperative basis or as a philanthropy by local Marwari merchants . . . When the Marwari needed money, he borrowed from another Marwari trader on the understanding that the loan was payable on demand, “even at midnight”, and that he would reciprocate with a similar loan. At the end of the year, they tallied and settled the interest.

  I belong to a community with a proud history.

  My grandfather was born in Shekhawati in Rajasthan in 1870. We take his birth as the time of origin of the Chaudhary Group. He moved to Nepal when he was less than twenty years old. Nepal was under the control of the Rana regime in those days. Though Nepal was a kingdom, the Shah kings were mere figureheads under the Rana oligarchy. The Rana regime, which assumed power in 1846 following a royal court massacre, was toppled by the first democratic movement in 1951.

  Towards the turn of the twentieth century, the Rana prime minister Bir Shumsher had written to four Marwari families in Rajasthan formally inviting them to start trading in Nepal. My father thought the four Marwari families were those of Mangal Sahu (Suraj Mal’s family), Maya Ram Bhola Ram (the Tibrewal family), Hanuman Sahu (Banawari Lal Mittal’s family) and Mahavir Prasad Brijwala (the Kedia
family). My grandfather came to assist Mangal Sahu.

  Until the Malla period, Nepal used to be on the trade route between India and Tibet. Nepal’s internal trade was comparatively robust. After Chinese traders drove the Newar traders out of Tibet and established their dominance there, trade between India and Tibet through Nepal began to dry up. Some of those Newar traders fled to Sikkim, where they have a strong presence even now.

  Nepal’s trade sector began to shrink because of external political factors. The local Newar business community somehow sustained the internal trade in the country. The Ranas, who were then just beginning to gain exposure to the outside world, were concerned about Nepal’s poor trade environment. It was around the same time that the Marwaris started to spread out from Rajasthan. The Ranas then decided to invite some of them to Nepal to expand trade there. That is how my grandfather and other Marwaris found themselves in Nepal.

  Makhan Sahu was what the local residents used to call Mangal Sahu. He sold fabric and clothes in the Makhan area in Kathmandu. My father (Lunkaran Das Chaudhary) told us that grandfather’s first job in Nepal was at Makhan Sahu’s fabric shop. Though my father had never seen the shop, he had heard about it from my grandfather and my grandmother Saraswoti Devi Chaudhary. Grandfather was about fifty years of age when my father was born. I think he could not afford to have a child earlier, as he had to struggle until late in life to make a living, having left his home and his loved ones behind.

  In those days, the Indian cities of Muzaffarpur, Ahmedabad and Bombay (now Mumbai) used to host textile mundis (trading hubs) for Nepal as well as India. Grandfather would go to those mundis, walking all the way up to Birgunj, a Nepali town that borders the Indian town of Raxaul in Bihar. He had to walk for days along the old Indo-Tibetan trade route of Chisapani Gadhi to reach the border. At Raxaul, he would board a train. Having worked with Makhan Sahu for a long time, grandfather had become acquainted with the mundi traders. Soon he decided to start his own business.