Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
I was on the verge of blowing my top off watching one of those idiotic T.V. elections specials when on an impulse I grabbed a copy of The Economic Times lying nearby for days, my interest in the world of finance being limited to bare essentials. It was an unusual thing to do for me. Yet as I opened it, my eyes caught a glimpse of the picture of a man I had met more than two decades ago in New York. The headline “Another Indian American bites the dust”, a headline said with a photo cut out of the man and Hillary Clinton demanded my attention.
It, of course, was a story about the rise-fall-rise of Sant Singh Chatwal, a high flying hotelier, restaurateur and a man of supreme confidence and boundless optimism. When I ran into him he had had his first brush with U.S. law and had taken Chapter XI (bankruptcy) which allowed him a breather, as it were, to restore some order to his finances. At the time he owned a couple of hotels and one of New York’s better Indian restaurants. And it was to his restaurant, Bombay Palace probably, that he invited me for lunch and that after giving me a tour of his very large Fifth Avenue office.
His wife, a lovely Sardarni from the Punjab turned out to be my host at the lunch. It was she who shared her misgivings about her husband’s craving for “name and fame” and, of course, to be regarded as someone from the Indo-American elite. She told me how she had joined her husband when he decided to convert from an Indian Air Force pilot to an NRI soldier of fortune in the U.S.; the first half of the journey took them to Ethiopia where he taught for a while, acquired a restaurant only to sell it and make for London en route to New York. She had loved it in London but he wanted to be in Amrika and New York it was where they landed and it was here that Sant Chatwal decided to steamroll his way ahead.
I was given a wee glimpse of it when one afternoon He asked his driver Sohan Singh to drive on to some address in Manhattan. The car pulled up at a street corner and Sohan was asked to wait there. My host then escorted me to what turned out to be an exclusive club with an indoor swimming pool, a dozen swings flanking the pool side. Only U.S. Senators and top lobbyists use the place, Sant told me as we wheeled in ” I’ll be back in 3 hours please enjoy yourself” I tried my best to enjoy but was truly very uncomfortable. I downed a drink or two served by a lissome lady before Sant’s three hours were over and he reappeared with a girl bringing me the happy tidings that “Sir, sunny is waiting for you”. It took me some 15 minutes to make myself presentable to the world outside my merry watering hole. We walked back two blocks where Sohan predictably was waiting with his car. “Kaisi rahi, Kotru Sahab?” “Thank you” I mumbled, not knowing what to make of this unusual encounter.
Next I heard of him was many years later in one of my Delhi clubs where he was due to be feted by some of his friends there. That was about the time when his son’s marriage was celebrated in at least three Indian cities with guests from home and abroad flown in chartered aircraft, many from the U.S. From port to fort (a Rajasthani palace hotel was the venue of the reception) guests were treated like royalty as I came to know months later courtesy a foreign T.V. channel which obviously had been given the rights to record the event for posterity.
Going through the ET story I was tempted to make a check on what exactly had caused Chattwal’s latest face off with American law. Acharya Jugal Kishore Shastri, my ever reliable New York contact told me that it was the usual thing that has followed Chatwal ever since he discovered America. Fifteen minutes of TV fame made living legends out of half of New York populace. And Sant Singh Chatwal’s low wattage star didn’t make it to an acceptable threshold of notoriety or genius. Pre-tech 80s was his heyday and late 90s, the doomsday. He had once misappropriated city subsidies to run a welfare hotel, tax fraud, and miscellaneous other legal troubles, had a local tabloid call him a ‘deadbeat’ years ago. But his acolytes kept him deluded; not so Uncle Sam. He was neither impressed by the size of his fortune nor the man behind it. Sant Chatwal came from a school of finance that believes if you borrow a million from a bank the borrower is in trouble but if you borrow a 100 million the bank’s in trouble.
And thus the troubles of Indian banks in New York of that era produced junk bond king Milliken and Bosky, both jailed later. Sant Singh Chatwal, on the lam all these years, is finally on the home stretch. Come September, he might go to jail. He has been a compulsive fundraiser for politicians, notably the Clintons, husband and wife. He was a successful mediocre who loved to see his pictures in the community tabloid News India that he bought when its owner was convicted for inflating circulation numbers. Bad company that he kept, wouldn’t you say? He got trapped between the cracks more by the judiciary slapping him with a likely four year prison term.
What a pity this good looking Sikh can’t stay away from trouble. A restaurateur, hotelier or would be entrepreneur. Always poised and suave he couldn’t keep his ambition on the straight and narrow and his financial shenanigans drifted from glamour into the illicit.
Courts have in recent years come down severely on Sri Lankan Raj Ratnam and Indian billionaire Rajat Gupta to send a loud message to those in control of financial levers. And Sant Chatwal tested the frayed nerves of a country that had had enough of financial meltdowns and fraudulent 1000 pound gorillas that thought no end of themselves. 80s were the heyday; late 90s the doomsday. He touched proverbial American dream and touched some Indian banks to finance the dream. He soared like a condor when he was raising funds for Clinton. Clinton probably got him off the hook with Indian banking authorities.
To sum up “behind every fortune there is a crime” goes the Godfather cliché that doesn’t anticipate crime that follows fortune. Sant Singh Chatwal couldn’t resist his addiction to splash and dash even though forewarned years earlier in his skirmish with American law. He has pushed his luck until his back is up against the wall. For someone who walked the mean streets of business in his early day he never learned the virtues of anonymity that might have kept him safe from the prosecutor’s wiretap and his self implicating utterance. He strutted the stuff of high life, ponzy schemes, Indian politics, and finally campaign donations in highly sensitive US politics.
It was a heady cocktail of drugs and the ‘high’ went awry. Rest is by now recorded history.
Early 90’s it was when he hosted me in his flagship Bombay Palace restaurant in New York. A charming man, who waved off billowing smoke of my cigar and talked to me about his personal business milestones. My heart, as I wind up, goes out to his charming wife one who believed that the family would have been happier had her husband not chase his American dream.
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