WINTER’S that time of the year when Palaniappan Chidambaram turns up in his sartorial best. A crisp white veshthi, sparkling white shirt topped with a shawl draped in neat folds over his shoulders. Now, I am not the usual touchy-feely sorts who would get up close with Mr Chidambaram...too close for comfort...but from the looks of it, I can sense that Mr Chidambaram’s shawl is not the run-of-the-mill Ludhiana type. It must be pure soft pashmina that’s also known as cashmere in the west. Predictably, Mr Chidambaram should have an entire wardrobe full of pashminas. As do many of his peers across the political spectrum. Mr Chidambaram’s boss woman, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has many, many more, some coming through ancestral inheritance. In her politically-incorrect days, Ms Gandhi often appeared on TV draped in full-length shatoosh. That was when toosh wasn’t a dirty word. Now, if I have it right, Ms G still stacks a dozen-odd shatooshes in her closet, give or take a couple. She hasn’t quite lit a bonfire with them, yet. But nobody quite grudges her flaunting pashminas every winter...
Now, the thing about cashmere is that they come with a wide range of needlework and an equally impressive price range. You could get the cheapest no-frills unadulterated pashmina and shatoosh for close to Rs 40,000 and the dearest, in exquisite jamawar, for as much as Rs 6.5 lakh and more. You could even sell your toosh in high-society London for a good £20,000 or so if you know your customer well enough. And unlike the mill varieties from Ludhiana or the ‘semis’ from the Valley, their value appreciates with time — I’ve been picking up pashminas for over 20 years now and every couple of years or so, being offered a buyback deal at three to four times what I originally paid for. At that rate, the first one I bought two decades ago, should now fetch me 40 times the original value. That’s as good as it gets.
Now, why am I telling you of pashmina shawls? It’s not because it’s winter, but because, I want to tell you of pashmina (and shatoosh) trade. Connoisseurs who know their shawls from wrappers will tell how you can pick up your best stuff, not from five-star boutiques in the city — you can also pick them up there at a premium — but from the hordes of Kashmiri pheriwallas who descend on Delhi and across the great Indian plains every winter. And, like it or not, most of what trades ends up fuelling the black money economy that Mr Chidambaram says he’s trying to plug, but either doesn’t know how to or couldn’t care about as long as starry-eyed scatterbrains buy his story of digging up dirty cash from right under your pillow because mama once told them there’s no better sob story than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ha!
So, how does the black economy work with Kashmiri shawls? It’s simple. When the pheriwallah turns up at your doorstep with his ware, you either wash your dirty cash for the jamawars or you pay him all-white cash. I’ve always paid in easy instalments out of my tax-paid take-home wages, in case Mr Chidambaram’s setting his tax sleuths to raid me next. But the pheriwallah, who always ends up with a pile of cash by the time he gets back home — the one who visits me every winter and takes back a neat Rs 12 lakh in cash profit every summer — to the Valley, never really shells out a farthing by way of income-tax. This also makes the average Kashmiri the country’s highest per capita income earner.
It works the other way too. If you preserve your cashmere well, every two years or so, your shawlwallah will turn up with a buy-back offer that, as I said earlier, is always more than what you paid for. And should you fall for a deal, you’ll end up with plenty of cash on hand without even having to pay a capital gains tax. It happens every winter in Delhi and in the big and small towns of the plains, though I can swear by Sonia G that she and I are probably the only two people in town who haven’t traded our cashmere yet.
Now come to think of it, Mr Chidambaram’s tax dogs have been raiding high-end stores all over the country to dig out dirty cash spending habits on plasma TVs and Bvlgari watches when all that the finance minister needs to do is look over his shoulders at that three yards of cashmere. For, after all, this winter’s a season when plenty of shawls and dirty cash are tumbling out of the closets of people Mr Chidambaram will never dare to bare — his fellow parliamentarians and netas stung by cash(mere) for favours...
PS: This year, I swiped my credit card to splurge Rs 2.5 lakh on a high-end TV and a home theatre system. And when I found my credit card dues sucking deep into my wallet, I tapped the bank’s loan window to clean up my card. You’re welcome to send your sniffer dogs on my trail, Mr Chidambaram, and I’ll show them how it feels good to splurge...in all-white cash.
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