Curry Man Enterprises

 

There is an unwritten rule that you should never get into business deals with your friends. The logic behind this is simple – it’s easier to make your friends believe in your crazy idea through blind faith than it would be with a complete stranger.

And like most lessons in life, this is one that you never quite appreciate as much as you should until you get your fingers burnt.

Friend of a Friend’s

Optimus Prime was a friend of my childhood friend, Mr Magpie. I had known Mr Magpie ever since 7^th Std in school. He was one of the rare friends one could always rely on when in trouble. We had always managed to maintain our friendship even after he changed schools in 10^th and even after he had moved to the UK for a few years.

Optimus became friends with Mr Magpie in the other school and I had met him years later when we all went for a movie at Sree Padmanabha Theatre in Trivandrum. Me and Mr Magpie would catch up every now and then – maybe once a month. And Optimus would often come along as well.

Optimus seemed like a decent person initially. But that’s the problem with first impressions. Our brains make those impressions based on incomplete data. You could meet me on a bad day and think I’m a purely hateful person. And you could meet Optimus on a few occasions and conclude him to be a perfectly upstanding citizen.

But there were always a few red flags about Optimus that would show up eventually. After a few months, it dawned on me that Optimus rarely paid for anything. Every time we’d hang out, we always had to pay for his meals. And even for his bike’s petrol. He literally never paid for anything. Being a person who would try to find the good in others, I would often attribute this to him possibly having financial troubles that he didn’t feel comfortable sharing about rather than him trying to take advantage of our kindness.

Some of Optimus’ stories also never made sense. One day, he’d tell me a story of how he was the shiest kid in his school and hardly spoke a word to anyone. Another day, he’d be telling me about how he was the number one gangster at his school and how even the Principal was scared shitless by his aura. These stories simply didn’t seem to match up.

Of course, these things ultimately didn’t seem to matter much at the time for me. We would hang out maybe 1-2 times per month. Such things are much more tolerable if you are not having to deal with it at a regular basis. Besides, my basic nature was to be polite, keep to myself and avoid confrontations as far as possible. Unfortunately, this was something that Optimus would use against me after a couple of years.

The Birth of Curry Man

Optimus Prime studied to become a chef. Not soon after he passed out and completed his internship, he seemed set out to start his own small business. So, while I was still in final year MBBS, I got a call from him about investing in his new restaurant.

Optimus said he had everything thought out. He had managed to secure a house not far from his own place near Peroorkada which would become the new restaurant. He was teaming with a much older chef – who liked to be called Captain (I can’t recall what his real name was). There was a guy for serving – Jim Been, who would also help with any odd tasks that can come up. And another guy called Saleem who would look after finances as well as arrange daily supplies.

“Everything is all set you see,” said Prime to me and Mr Magpie. “All that’s needed is a Rs 60,000 investment from both of you.” He then went on to explain how he had already invested lakhs and just needed this little amount to get them over the line and make his dream come true. Plus, he promised that this “investment” would prove to be quite profitable for us with time.

Now for someone was still a medical student, Rs 30,000 was a huge investment. And with the hindsight of all the money problems I would end up having in the coming years, it is embarrassing to admit that I even considered doing this, let alone actually give in to the idea.

But at the time, I considered Optimus a friend. And he had helped out another friend of mine with a difficult task when I asked him to, so I felt I owed him one. Plus, if it was his life dream, I felt it should be given a chance. So, after much deliberation, I decided to give him the money.

Yes, I am an idiot.

Getting to Know Optimus

Starting this ill-fated business adventure meant that I would end up spending more time with Optimus Prime and unfortunately the more I learnt about him, the more disturbed I became. While he had initially seemed to be a bit of a bullshitter, what lied underneath was so much worse.

Optimus and women – the less said the better. He was basically the type of guy who would easily get into the Hema Committee report if he had been anywhere close to the film industry.

The only “relationship” that he seemed to actually, truly be in was with someone who was problematically younger than him. And this person was also supposedly his distant cousin of sorts. And of course, this didn’t prevent him from trying to flirt with anyone in the same vicinity as him, including a mutual friend’s mother at one point of time.

This crazy situation would continue until Optimus told me and Mr Magpie one day that he and the girl he was seeing had finally eloped. Apparently, he had taken a selfie with her in front of a temple and in his head, that meant they were practically married.

“Well, my part is done,” he exclaimed. “The rest is up to her parents.” Possibly the proudest anyone has been after taking a selfie.

Now if me and Mr Magpie had understood what kind of person Optimus truly was, we would have kept a good deal of distance between ourselves and him. But like I said earlier, we rarely get to know all the facts about a person from the start. By the time we would finally learn all of these things about Optimus, Curry Man would be long gone.

Opening Day

 

“I have the perfect name for the place,” claimed Optimus. “Curry Man!”

Typical Optimus tried to claim that this was a stroke of genius to me while I had my suspicions that he basically stole the name from a similar sounding small restaurant in another part of the city.

The opening day for Curry Man was finally upon us. It was a Sunday, and we had managed to put in a decent amount of promotion for the place. A good number of my friends showed up for the event and it saw a rare appearance from Optimus’s dad as well. It was a full house.

At the last moment, Optimus managed to ask for an extra 2k for some expenses and I obliged. This was basically sunk cost fallacy. There was no real going back.

And as unlikely as it seemed, the day went perfect. The chicken biriyani they made that day was one of the best I’d ever tasted. Everyone gave rave reviews. It seemed that despite the odds, the place had a chance to become a halfway decent takeaway restaurant.

The only abnormal part of the day came when Optimus tried to claim to two ladies that Asianet News and Surya TV were coming to do a story on their new restaurant. They would later tell me that Optimus’ claims were so huge that they could make the whole world shake.

Everyone went home at the end of that day optimistic. Everyone except one man.

The Death of Curry Man

The very next evening, me and Mr Magpie went to the Prime residence to meet Optimus. Little did we know just how shocked we would be by what he would have to say.

“You know what guys? I’m kinda fed up with Curry Man,” said Optimus. “My real dream is to start my own personal restaurant on the third floor of my own house.”

“Your what?”

“Yes, and I just know with you two by my side to help, nothing will stop us!”

 Optimus, the chef, never cooked again at Curry Man. Apparently his idea was that he would take care of all the important things in Curry Man – like handling the money. The cooking could be handled by Captain. When it became clear this wasn’t feasible, Optimus stopped showing up 95% of the time.

This of course lead to an almighty cold war inside Curry Man. Captain decided the responsible way to respond to this situation was to drink as much as alcohol as possible during working hours. Needless to say, this did not result in the best working environment.

There was a horrible use of resources as well. From the very first week, Saleem would get far more supplies than necessary, and the day would end with there being a large excess of food. Captain would then try to solve this problem by giving away food at extraordinary rates – if you’d order chicken curry for Rs 100, you’d 10 large pieces of chicken in it. And there would still be so much surplus that much of it would be thrown away for the cats and dogs.

The final nail in the coffin came in less than 2 months. Captain got a bad a case of dengue and had to move back to his home district in Alappuzha to recuperate. And so, without any chef left, Curry Man Enterprises came to an abrupt end.

Or so it seemed.

Curry Man – The Resurrection

I was very cross with Optimus Prime for months after Curry Man ended. It would have been understandable if the restaurant eventually failed. That happens. It’s not an easy business to survive in. But Optimus never even tried after that opening day. And he definitely owed me the money I gave him for Curry Man.

A few months later, I got a call from Optimus saying the band was getting back together with Curry Man now set to become a small catering service rather than an actual restaurant. Jim Been and Saleem were in and apparently, they ended another guy on board to help with serving.

As angry as I was, I felt this was a good opportunity to at least get some of my money back. So, I decided to tag along.

We were supposed to serve lunch for a small housewarming function. This seemed fairly straightforward and overall, the lunch went off fine. But there was something that seemed just a little off about the main man of the function, Mickey. Something about his demeanour. He was hyper and not in a good way, kind of like Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas.

“What’s up with Mickey?” I asked Optimus.

“Oh, he’s always like that,” explained Optimus. “He just recently got out of jail after he tried to stab someone to death. His parents got him this new house to settle down with his wife.”

I was speechless.

Now, by this point I really didn’t want to get into the story behind why Optimus had close ties with someone who tried to kill someone with a knife. The less I knew, the better.

That was the last day I was ever involved with Curry Man Enterprises.

The End Has No End

Months after the last embers of Curry Man vanished, me and Mr Magpie were having a conversation about how everything went wrong with another mutual friend, Bahubali.

“You guys don’t listen,” Bahu said. “I told Mr Magpie from the start that Optimus was no good.”

“You did?” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, you see I’m a grade A scumbag too. And I know one when I see one.”

“Well, that’s good to know Bahu.”

He did have a point. Me and Mr Magpie tried to see the good in Optimus, even if it was never really there. Optimus just saw a good opportunity to scam in the both of us.

After much convincing, Optimus did eventually give some of the money I invested back to me. Even if it did take my father’s stroke to motivate him to do so. I suspect he was never as poor as he always claimed to be.

One of the last interactions I ever had with him directly was during my father’s funeral 5 years back.

“Who is that guy Mehul?” an uncle of mine asked pointing to Optimus after he left.

“Friend of a friend’s.”

“Oh okay. He was trying to convince me to invest some money into his business out of the blue. Something called Curry Man.”

Optimus will never change, will he?