Shantaram полностью

‘Black markets for things exist,’ he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, ‘because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they’re too strict. It’s all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won’t give you a black market. Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let’s say, pastries, but if there isn’t strict control on the baking of pastries, there won’t be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won’t be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market.’

‘You’ve put a lot of thought into this,’ I commented, laughing, but impressed and genuinely glad that he wanted to give me the ontology of currency crime, and not just the ways I could go about committing it.

‘Not really’ he answered self-deprecatingly.

‘No, I’m serious. When Khaderbhai sent me here, I thought you were going to give me a few tables of figures-you know, today’s currency exchange rates and all that-and then send me on my way.’

‘Oh, we’ll get to the rates and stuff soon enough,’ he smiled again, sounding very American in the light-hearted aside. I knew he’d studied in New York when he was much younger. Khaderbhai had told me that he’d been happy there, for a time. A little of that happiness seemed to have survived in the long, rounded vowels and other Americanisms of his speech. ‘But first you need the theory, before you can make a profit from the practice.’

The Indian rupee, Khaled explained, was a restricted currency. It couldn’t be taken out of India, and it couldn’t legally be changed for dollars anywhere in the world but in India. With its vast population, India sent many thousands of businessmen, businesswomen, and travellers out of the country every day. Those people were permitted to take out only a limited amount of American currency with them. They could change a fixed amount of their rupees into American dollars, and the rest had to be converted in the form of travellers’ cheques.

The regulation was enforced in various ways. When someone wanted to leave the country and change rupees into dollars to the legal limit, he or she had to present a passport and plane ticket at the bank. The bank teller confirmed the departure date on the ticket, and marked both the ticket and the passport to indicate that the holder had been granted the full limit of American dollars in exchange for rupees. The transaction couldn’t be duplicated. There was no legal way for the traveller to buy more American dollars for that journey.

Almost everyone in India had at least some black money under the bed. From the few hundred rupees that a working man earned and didn’t report to the Tax Office, all the way to the billions of rupees accumulated as profits from crime, the black economy was said to be almost half as large as the legal, white economy. Anyone who had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of undeclared rupees-as many Indian business travellers did-couldn’t buy legal travellers’ cheques with them: the bank or the Tax Office always wanted to know where the money came from. So the only real alternative was to buy dollars from the black-market currency dealers. And every day, in Bombay, millions of rupees worth of black American dollars, English pounds, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, and other currencies were bought and sold in a trade that was a dark mirror of the legal money exchanges.

‘I buy a thousand American dollars, from a tourist, for eighteen thousand rupees, when the bank exchange rate is set at fifteen,’ Khaled summarised. ‘He’s happy, because he’s three thousand rupees better off than he would’ve been at the bank. Then I sell the dollars, to an Indian businessman, for twenty-one thousand rupees. He’s happy, because he bought the dollars with black money that he couldn’t declare. Then I put three thousand rupees in the kitty, and I buy another thousand dollars, from another tourist, for eighteen thousand. That’s the simple equation at the heart of the currency racket.’