Page 37 of One Indian Girl
‘That going down thing you did. Can you do it a bit more?’ I said.
‘Sure, baby.’
Good. I guess that didn’t make me the shy and coy girl all Indian girls should be. Maybe it even made me seem like a slut. However, I would rather be a spent and finished slut than a good but frustrated Indian girl.
Five minutes later, I moaned out loud too. Wow. I pressed his head hard between my legs. My legs shook, and then my whole body.Okay, so this is what an orgasm feels like.
‘How are you?’ he said.
I hid my face in embarrassment.
‘What? I said, “How are you”.’ He laughed.
‘Spent. And finished.’
9
Two months later
‘We are stuck in this MegaBowl deal,’ said Jonathan Husky, vice president and my boss in the Distressed Debt Group.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I checked the time. It was 7 in the evening. I had to meet Debu in an hour. It seemed undoable.
We sat in the meeting room of the Goldman Sachs Distressed Debt Group. From the Goldman side, there was Jonathan, Clark Smith, who was another associate in the group, and me. We also had a representative from each of the seven banks that had lent to MegaBowl, a Boston-based builder of bowling alleys. While people who played in their bowling alleys had fun, their creditors had a different story. MegaBowl had defaulted on fifty million dollars’ worth of loans.
‘There are no assets,’ Jonathan continued. ‘The company has nothing apart from lots of bowling pins and bowling balls.’
Recovering fifty million dollars would require a lot of bowling balls, I thought. The bankers looked at each other in silence, sympathizing with each other for their collective stupidity in lending so much money to MegaBowl.
‘Tell us what to do,’ one of the bankers said. ‘We just want out. I can’t deal with their stupid CEO.’
My hand went into my handbag and grabbed my phone.
‘Radhika.’ Jonathan saying my name startled me. ‘Please share the plan.’
Damn, I needed a minute to tell Debu I couldn’t make it tonight. I released my phone and brought my hand out of my bag.
‘Eh, sure, Jonathan,’ I said. I shared the special booklets I had prepared for the meeting.
‘Our basic premise,’ I said, opening the first page, ‘is to keep MegaBowl as a going concern. There is little value in liquidation, just about six cents on the dollar. However, it is fifty cents if we allow the CEO to continue.’
‘Fire him,’ Dirk Grigly, a fat and bald banker from Bank of America, said. ‘He has caused all the mess.’
‘He has, yes,’ I said, ‘but we need him to stabilize operations for now. We also have to retrench people and cut salaries. Let’s use him to do the dirty work.’
I walked them through the plan. It would enable the company to reduce its size and reduce costs.
The bankers pored over the booklets. I thought of an excuse I could use to take out my phone. I didn’t want Debu to leave for the restaurant.
The bankers cared little about my boyfriend.
‘What’s the guarantee it is going to work?’ one of the lenders said.
‘There isn’t,’ I said, ‘but now that we have finally valued the business, twenty-five million is maximum recovery. Or fifty cents on the dollar.’
‘We can offer thirty cents,’ Jonathan said, ‘and you can be out of this.’
That’s how we worked. Bid at thirty cents, hoped to recover fifty.
