“Right”, said the tall Englishman in the Orvis bush hat and Barbour shooting jacket, “When I say pull, pull that lever.” “Pull!” Diogenes Fernando pulled, and with a loud clang, a metal arm whipped forward, flinging a tin of best Army & Navy mulligatawny high into the air. Bang! Bang!
The tin disintegrates in a welter of red lentils, barley, and shreds of carrot and apple, not unlike the stomach contents of a pampered partridge. Sir Crispin Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, KCMG, MC, FRHS—“call me Sir Crispy”—tucked the Purdey shotgun, one of a matched pair inherited from his father, under his arm.
“Shooting is like doing business,” he said. “You aim, you pull the trigger, and you hit or you miss. And I don’t often miss.”
The two are standing in the overgrown front garden of Sir Crispy’s run-down up-country estate, a former rubber plantation gifted by his Great-Aunt Agatha. They are awaiting the arrival of The Man, for whom Diogenes’ fleet of tuk- tuks provides a discrete 24-hour delivery service, and loan-shark, Boris ‘The Bite’ Fernando, who financed the operation.
The meeting is to discuss Sir Crispy’s proposal that his company, ElectroDynamic Solutions, India & UK, act as a business angel for Diogenes’ would-be electric tuk-tuk startup. The Man, not caring where the money comes from so long as it comes through his own offshore bank account, is all for it.
The Bite, on the other hand, is not so sure. Do we really, he asked, want to do business with an ex-British Army major who hangs the colours of the 101st Regiment of Foot (Royal Bengal Fusiliers) above his ancestral fireplace?
A good question—and Diogenes himself, having just witnessed a trigger-happy Sir Crispy in action, is beginning to have second thoughts. At first, he had sung the errant knight’s praises, as well he might after Uncle Testosterone’s disastrous foray into the murky world of NGO enterprise funding. Where else, he had asked, would we find the money to jump-start electric tuk-tuks in Sri Lanka— which, incidentally, is already happening in India?
But with coronavirus stalking the land and uncertainty upending global supply chains—is now a good time to bet everything on red when the wheel may be spinning out of control? He recalled the wise words of the late great Omar Khayyám: “The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
But here’s the thing: is the fickle finger of fate beckoning him onwards, or is it poised to poke him in the eye? Or both? Is Sir Crispy a knight in shining armour or a Don Quixote, with himself in the role of a hapless Sancho Panza? More to the point, what choice does he have? As his sainted late father, Euripides Fernando III, was wont to say: “In business, as in life, there are winners and losers. Don’t be a loser.”
To be continued.