Barclay and David
I am working super-fast, rushing to finish my work, and thinking of the game of table tennis that I plan to play after work. Till late last night, Rohit and I practised our dashes and strokes. We are determined to beat everyone at the youth club later today. So my friend Rohit will wait for me after school, and we plan to head to the club together.
I am ready to show my sporting rivals who the real champs are. I need to work fast to finish my work. I am pumped up and am in overdrive.
The outline
Before I go any further in this story, let me describe the setting, where I work, the kind of work I do, my co-workers and some background info.
The year is 1978. I work in financial services at Chartered Bank in Dubai, run by British expatriates. I operate the bank’s private communication network and the telex equipment. Mine is a one-person show, the only qualified techie cum operator for this specialised work. The work is time-bound, with currency and money market deals and large fund transfers that have tight deadlines. Efficiency is the name of the game. No messages can be held for tomorrow.
I work in an office closed off to everyone except the managers. It is a high-pressure job for a young lad, new to the workforce and Dubai. I am reasonably paid. There is much goodwill and trust in me from the managers and fellow workers. I love my work and the interactions with my co-workers and managers.
I start at seven and, if I am lucky, will finish by three; usually, it is between four and five when I finish, depending on the work volume; nothing can be held until the next day. It takes an hour to commute by multimode transport, short walks in sandy pathways, abra over the Dubai creek and shared taxi rides.
From mid-day, messages, written on yellow notepads, signed by two or three officers, and approved by the accountant, come in slowly. My job is to type them on the teleprinter and transmit them asap using a private message network exclusive to the bank’s worldwide network. Payment messages to the bank’s head office in London and its global centres in New York, Singapore, and Bahrain make up the bulk of messages. Then there are messages to the bank’s branches in Britain and Europe. About 30% of messages are for foreign trade transactions containing trading lingo.
The workflow of outgoing messages is a step-by-step process requiring many sign-offs. First, a clerk prepares the message on a yellow pre-printed form, an officer signs it after checking, and then it is sent to the accountant for final sign-off. After the accountant signs off, the message goes to my manager for authentication from whom I pick them — more about what authentication means later. Uniformed office assistants carry the yellow forms from desk to desk. They are the carriers of this manual paper-based workflow until messages reach me.
Authentication is a complicated process where a formula is used to interpret test codes that are only known between the two financial institutions exchanging the message. A test code may contain an account number, the transaction amount, and a number indicating the day and week of the month. As an additional precaution, many test codes have a sequence number based on the number of messages exchanged. Fraud is the risk if these keys are stolen, which regularly occurs in Africa. To handle test codes, one must be a covenanted officer in the bank; in other words, usually, a British officer posted from England. Barclay Butler, my manager, the covenanted one is one of those covenanted ones.
To sidetrack, I thought covenanted ones were like the prophets, like Moses and those characters in the Bible. But the bank had its own covenanted officers who have vowed compliance o a set of business ethics in its head office in London.
The workforce is primarily Indian clerks, a smattering of Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. The assistant officers are Asians, in the main Indians. The officers number about eight and are British principally, Barclay and others. The hierarchy in the bank is led by the manager, the accountant, the assistant accountant, officers, assistant officers, clerks and office assistants, also called peons, aka farashs in Arabic, who are tasked with errands and act as messengers in that order. I am just a bank clerk, two levels below an officer.
Hierarchy apart, Barclay and I are friends. I back him up, ensuring that he is covered. Barclay is more or less my age. We have a vast trust bank and a fraternity going on between the two of us, something only a youth could understand.
Barclay is a happy-go-lucky, carefree fellow. He does not take work seriously. Young Barclay is enjoying his time in Dubai; We come from different places. Me from the thick of South Asia, Sri Lanka; he is a young Brit, the son of a banker, a general manager of a bank in Oman. He drives a sports car. I have none. Barclay comes from a privileged background while I am still trying to make my mark in the Chartered bank. Barclay does not care for protocols and lives for the moment. Officially, he is my manager; Mr Butler, but privately we are on a first-name basis. Barclay and Denzil are just two lads figuring out the way of the world.
Our friendship and trust go a step up. Barclay delegated the task of authenticating messages to me. This was done hush-hush because a bank clerk with access to test keys was a no-no. It was against the bank’s rules. I guess the rules are there to be broken by the young.
David Gardiner is the assistant accountant. David has class, and he writes with a black fountain pen. I am fascinated by his beautiful handwriting. I chat with Mr Gardiner regularly. David dresses elegantly. I borrow magazines and newspapers from him when he is done with them. David is in his thirties, with two kids, a girl and a little boy. Some days, they turn up in the office mid-day. Kids fascinate me; I talk to his little kids.
The inner story
Let us get back to the day of the story: I want to leave early to play table tennis.
I am anxious that I will be late for the game. I am desperate to finish my work. Will I be able to beat the rest of the boys at the club? I am hungry, but my hunger can wait. So let me finish my work.
That is the very day when everyone decides to go slow.
From my office at the back, I watch the flow of messages I need to process, looking for bottlenecks as these yellow notepad bundles are passed from desk to desk. I observe the office assistants moving them. I call out Dutta, in a khaki-coloured uniform, my favourite office assistant, to move faster.
Messages pile up in David’s in-tray for his final approval. Every message must have his signature, his insignia, and DG. Yet, David is not at his desk. David has become the bottleneck. He stands between me and my table tennis game.
I look for David. He is in the foreign trade department, talking to officers. He is helping to resolve a problem that has been escalated to him.
There is no sign of him coming back to his desk. I am getting anxious. Will I miss my game today?
I wait and wait. Today is going to be another late day. My stomach is hurting. How do I get David to stop what he is doing and instead focus on his in-tray? Sign those piles of messages; so I can beat the hell out of my rivals.
I wait yet, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. My dream of being a table tennis champ this afternoon is slipping away. I become impatient.
I walk up to David’s desk and go through his in-tray. I browse the messages and try to take a mental view of the amount of work I must process if I have any chance of rushing to the club. I am trying to estimate the task at hand.
David sees me going through his in-tray. He rushes back to his desk. He is angry and roars, “Denzil, leave my desk alone”. Do not look at my stuff”.
I am taken aback. I am shocked and feel humiliated. I walk back to my office and close the door. I feel sad. I feel horrible. Tears come pouring out. My eyelids cannot hold the tears swelling. I cry not only for my missed game but also for my disgrace. The fact that I was wrong and crossed the line by looking at a manager’s in-tray does not strike me. My tears do not stop. In my anxiety about getting to the game, I lost the sanity of my actions. I feel helpless, like a little boy, lost in the woods, lost in this big bank. I thought of my mother and father, who are thousands of miles away, not here to hold me.
I do not hear a thing. I am beyond redemption; I had worked up so much about my table tennis game that I am out of my mind. I am crying alone. The glass particle and the walls around me seem to be moving, coming apart.
From a distance, Barclay sees what just happened. He rushes into my office, closing the door.
“David did not mean what he just said. I will get him to sign the messages”.
“What time is your game?” Barclay is consoling me.
Barclay pulls out a white handkerchief and gives it to me. As I wipe my tears, I see the calming smile of my neighbour in the next room, Neelam, the accountant’s secretary. I feel embarrassed with my tears.
Barclays stays with me in the room, helping me to settle down and finish my day’s work. I do not complete the pile of messages until late that afternoon. I cannot make it to the club in time. Rohit will understand why I could not turn up.
I learned a life lesson from David, however harsh I felt that day about my youthful stupidity.
A few months pass by.
It is time for David to leave Dubai for another of the bank’s outposts in Asia. I am at his desk on his last day to wish him farewell.
“Denzil, you are a brilliant young man; you will have a bright future in the bank.”
It is beyond me to grasp what David means.
Twenty years later, in Hong Kong
A long time goes by. Twenty years. It is 1998. I am in Hong Kong. Now I work for the same bank, rebranded as Standard Chartered in Sydney, Australia. So I am in Hong Kong, the bank’s head office, for a few days.
I am busy with my work on the 42nd floor. A man in a black business suit taps on my shoulder. Startled, I look at him, who this stranger is, confidently tapping on my back as if he knows me well.
Oh! my God, it is David M Gardiner, the one with the fountain pen, blue ink and his insignia, DG.
I cannot believe what I see, this crazy lad who cried twenty years earlier. David never knew that I called. Kind of nostalgia as I matured.
Many pleasantries and news of what happened in the intervening years since our early days in Dubai followed.
David is now an executive director at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong. (in 1998)
I remind David of what he predicted on his last day twenty years ago. I am overjoyed that his prediction has now come true.
That is the story of two good men in Dubai, Barclay, a kind, fearless young man and budding banker and David, a seasoned and disciplined banker with a vision.
Where are my characters today?
I am on the lookout for Barclay Butler. I want to thank him for his trust in me (even to the extent of breaking with protocol) and for that consolation at my vulnerable moment.
Following a tip from one of my readers, I have located David and am in touch with him.
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