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STORY so far: When things went wrong, Chandru was the wrong man in the wrong place for the wrong job, I learn from boss. Gupta, the production chief, meets me at the airport lounge to tell me more about how the whole drama could be the handiwork of Govind. But I have my flight to catch.

Episode 19

Those who have read Herman Hesse's Siddharth would remember about the three things that one should know — to listen, to wait and to fast. Useful tips, actually, for flyers, because the long wait starts after check-in. Most airports, especially after the terrorist attacks, insist on prolonged wait for air travellers and after some time it can become a punishment.

But I had my laptop to keep myself busy with and it had a full charge to last for at least 90 minutes. There were pages of info about Bank Aha that I had downloaded into a folder and began studying the same. Until late 1990s, it seemed that almost a decade of financial liberalisation had paid off for Indonesia. Seventeen of the country's top banks made the global Top 1,000 in a survey based on Tier-1 capital strength while the largest, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), ranked 40th in an Asian Top 200 survey.

Prolonged buoyant economic growth, lowering of entry barriers, loosening of lending restrictions, a stable exchange rate regime, and heavy capital inflow fostered an environment of rapid credit expansion, observed Catherine Chou in an ADB paper, "Indonesian Banks: Survival of the Fittest". And Aha was one of them. It had taken a heavy beating during the currency crisis that swept across the region in mid-1997. It exposed the cracks in the banking system. There was a 70 per cent plunge in the value of the rupiah against the dollar and it started domino effect across the entire economy, resulting in a financial crisis.

In the new survival game, Aha was fighting to keep its neck above water, and tugging at straw to stay afloat. Perhaps they wanted to extricate something through Chandru and use the amount to pay their staff arrears salary.

The Govind-Aha connection seemed too elusive for me to reason. There had to somewhere some link that shows the logic to implicate the secretary in the secret operation. Or, was it that he was aware of the problem at the Bank end and so avoided the risky tour? I let the thought simmer at the back of my mind, because one cannot afford to be indulging in too much thinking when a laptop is on and is draining the battery fast.

I quickly ran through what I could do when getting bored in the long flight. Well, there was the detailed proposal from the architect about redesigning the company's front office, a Word document from the industry body on what they wanted from the FM, an e-book with Phantom comics, and the full text of `Macbeth'. 58 per cent of battery life remaining, showed the icon on the laptop tray, and I shut it down to conserve for my in-flight use.

After the frisk, X-ray, check, double-check, board, catch place in the luggage rack, check safety belt, leaf through old papers and mags at the seat, demo of oxygen mask usage, and such routine stuff, the late night travel started over a city that lay like a carpet of lights.

But, as if to prove that the world is small, I discovered after a brief conversation with my co-passenger, that she was in fact my classmate Vaishu, and I was meeting her after ages. There was very little for me to recognise her, a sports enthusiast in school events. There were those worry lines that had almost killed her youth, and burdens seemed to be weighing over her shoulders.

"It's my marriage," she told me. "I got cheated."

A promising alliance had been brought to her parents by a relative, and initial exchange of letters had shown that the boy was well-educated, working in a big Indonesian company, and they were making no demands. Shortly, a grand marriage was celebrated and for all world it had seemed the couple would live happily ever after. "The real shock came when I landed in Jakarta," Vaishu recounted. "He was already married."

(To be continued)

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