Self narration of Sunanda
Pushkar Tharoor
My first marriage was a very dark period in my life.
Everyone’s saying Sanjay Raina divorced
me, but that’s not true, I divorced him. It was a very painful relationship but
I don’t want to go into that. It’s over; he’s moved on, I’ve moved on. I was 19
when I met him and very innocent. My dad was in the army and I had a very
protected childhood. I was always sorry for the underdog. My family and friends
used to teasingly call me Mother Teresa. I was helping flood victims in Ambala
in grade six. When I was in Jesus and Mary Convent, I used to work with
abandoned and physically challenged children at an ashram. There was a blind
and spastic kid there who was particularly attached to me. No one wanted him
because he wasn’t very nice looking, but I used to bathe and feed him.
Curiously, many people spoke badly of Sanjay, saying he was strange. Maybe in
the beginning that is what drew me more to him.
But the marriage was a big mistake. I was totally
unprepared for the worst. ‘The media said, why should the Kochi team pick me?
As a woman am I not good enough?’ Soon after we got engaged I told my father I
wanted to break it off. I had realised Sanjay and I were very mismatched but my
father wouldn’t listen. For Kashmiri
Pandits, if you got engaged, you had to marry; we’d never had a broken
marriage in the family. Mine fell apart within days. I had a really tough time
getting a divorce in Delhi. It was a very lonely time. My parents didn’t want
me to divorce even though they knew what was going on. Looking back, I
understand them now, but I felt very abandoned then.
The truth is Sujit
rescued me. He gave me the strength, as a friend, to quit a very painful
marriage. But he was dating another woman; I was just a friend. I got my
divorce in 1988 and went off to Dubai in 1989. I married Sujit in 1991; my son
Shivy was born in November 1992. If I had left Sanjay over Sujit, why would I
have waited that long to marry him?
*
My husband died in an accident in Karol Bagh in
March 1997. Again, it was a very dark time. Sujit was a financial consultant
and he had run into some financial trouble. I disagreed with many of his
business decisions at the time and after his death I got several threatening
calls from his creditors. But that was less important to me than the fact that
after his death, Shivy suddenly stopped talking. It was very strange, he
probably got scared. He was barely four. There was so much to do — papers and
fresh visas to be sorted, debts to pay. So I left him with my sister-in-law
and, later, my parents for a few months. I keep asking them, someone tell me
what happened to him because when I went to pick up my son, he had stopped
talking. I took him to Dubai but in those days there was no concept of speech
therapy there. I began to look for the best affordable health care and that’s
how I hit upon Canada. I moved there to help my son. I had been doing pretty
well at work, but I didn’t have that much money to spare. I was supporting my
parents, supporting my brother through engineering college, trying to pay off
Sujit’s debts.
Yes, we were wealthy till the trouble began in
Kashmir in 1989. We had orchards and a lot of land. But after ‘89, my family
suffered like everyone else. Luckily, they were wealthy enough that they didn’t
have to go live in a tent. But I did help them financially to find their feet
again. They couldn’t afford to put their son through college — because of those
donations and capitation fees. I did all that.
When I came to Dubai for the first time I
worked in tourism. I had ideas about dhow cruises and dune dinners — much
before Emirates Holidays even
existed. Our accounts included Philippines airlines, Romanian airlines, Brazilian
airlines — so I had lots of corporate clients. After I married Sujit, I got
into events. Sujit and I did only one event together which went badly.
I started my own company called Expressions with four or
five people. We began to do many model shows for product launches. Everyone
does it now, but it was a complete trendsetter then. I did 13 shows with Hemant
Trivedi, shows with Rhea Pillai, Vikram Phadnis, Aishwarya Rai. When the Gulf War
started, we did big fund raisers for the ‘We love Kuwait’ campaign.
After a while I got a great offer from an ad
agency called Bozell Prime. I handled many big campaigns for them — Wella,
Hersheys, Chrysler cars. I did big multi-million dollar events for Modern
Pharmaceuticals. That was the most beautiful time of my life. But after Sujit
died, I gave up Bozell for Shivy. In Dubai before I went to Canada, I worked
with Ravissant.
*
In Canada, I had to start from scratch. I’d
literally gone there with a suitcase and my child. But you know, Shoma, I have
never taken my resume and looked for a job.I have always felt I can carve a
niche for myself on my own terms. I’ve always been an entrepreneur that way. So
for a while, I did many odds and ends. Then some friends in New York — two
doctors who are still among my closest family friends — suggested I get into
the IT sector which had just begun to boom. Everyone was looking for computer
engineers from India, so we tied up with companies like Compaq and head-hunted
in India for them. I’m proud of bringing up my son by myself. I am a great believer in Shiva and the
idea of karma.
Just as our IT business was booming, 9/11 happened. This hit us bad and we
had to shut shop. There was four months of anxiety and no work. We were cleaned
out financially. That’s when I got into Emotional Intelligence. It was the
latest thing in Canada those days. I did a course and joined a company called
Noble House International. We started something called Human Potential
Reengineering. [sighs] We did lots of programmes for banks like Royal Bank of
Canada and ABN Amro in Miami, Amsterdam and Geneva. It was fun but I was not
earning enough.
*
Then in 2004, Best Homes offered to send me to Dubai to set up their operations there
in real estate. If I think about it, real estate runs in my blood. More than
buying and selling, I love developing properties. I love the blueprint stage,
the planning and the zoning. So I came back to Dubai in August 2004 as general
manager of Best Homes and worked on a big project with them.
Dubai had changed completely. My friends had all become
rich and powerful; there was a completely different buzz. But Shivy was not
very happy and I was just planning to go back to Canada and start again, when I
was offered a job by Mohamad-bin-Ghalib of Tecom to work on an International
Media Production Free Zone. This was one of the most exciting projects I’ve
ever worked on. We had to plan publishing zones, convention centres, hotels,
schools and hospitals over 44 million square feet of land. Then I was offered a
position that the company usually only gives to locals — I had to sell land to Gulf nationals. Everyone thought I’d
fail because I didn’t know Arabic. But as one of my bosses said about me, “She
can sell sand to the Arabs and ice to the Eskimos!”
I think I’m pretty well to do. I drive a Range
Rover. My son has a driver and a Ford. I live in a decent apartment because I
don’t want to live in a villa and have the headache of a garden and stuff
because there’s just the two of us. I have a cook and a domestic help. I own
two 3-bedroom apartments in Jumeirah Palm. I also own a beachside apartment in
Jumeirah Beach Residence, and I have two apartments in Executive Towers. I only
live in this rented apartment because it’s close to Shivy’s school and his
friends live around here. I also have my house in Canada and some land in
Jammu. In my family, everyone calls me ‘Didi’ —
even my father — because I am the person everyone turns to for help. I was
always the ‘boy’ in the family. I never even had a doll as a child.
I don’t really want to talk about Shashi
because everything I say will have some repercussion for him. He is a public
figure, I am not. But I met him about two years ago through a friend called
Sunny Varkey, and we got along immediately. We are certainly close now, but
that closeness only developed less than five months ago. I am very proud to
know him because, most of all, he is a good and honest man.
There
were three people in politics that really created hope for millions of Indians
across the world that even clean men can join politics — Manmohan Singh, Rahul
Gandhi and Shashi Tharoor.
………….contd
