The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

The man said he’d never had trouble remembering Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas either, but he agreed that Gustav Svensson sounded pleasant. ‘Swedish, isn’t it?’ he asked.

Yes. Julius nodded again. Couldn’t get much more Swedish than that.

And there and then, his new business idea began to take root.

* * *

Julius Jonsson and Simran Something truly hit it off as the third glass of arak took hold. Before the night was over they had decided to meet again. Same place, same time, the next night. In addition, Julius had decided that the man with the impossible name would henceforth be called Gustav Svensson. Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas thought that was just as well. The name he’d had so far hadn’t brought him an overabundance of luck.

The old men went on in the same vein for several nights in a row. The Indian grew used to his new alias. He liked it.

He’d checked into the hotel under his previous name on the day the two had met, and he continued to stay there while he and Julius laid plans for their future partnership. When the hotel manager informed him, at increasing volume, that he wanted payment for the Indian guest’s stay, Gustav told Julius that he intended to depart from the place permanently. Without paying. And without announcing his intentions. The management would never understand, after all, that Gustav couldn’t be held responsible for Simran’s bill.

But Julius understood. When was Gustav planning to depart?

‘Preferably in the next fifteen minutes.’

Julius understood this too. But he didn’t want to lose his new friend, so he sent the man off with the phone Allan had given him. ‘Here’s something so you can be reached. I’ll call you from my room. Now go. Take the way through the kitchen. That’s what I would do.’

Gustav followed Julius’s advice and was gone. Later that evening, the hotel manager appeared after wandering around for at least an hour in pursuit of the now-vanished Indian guest.

Julius and Allan observed the sunset from the shore, each in a comfortable chair and with an accompanying drink. The manager apologized for the intrusion. But he had a question. ‘Mr Jonsson, is there any chance you have seen our guest Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas? I’ve noticed the two of you spending some time together here at our establishment in recent days.’

‘Simran who?’ said Julius.

* * *

Thenceforth, Gustav Svensson and Julius Jonsson had to meet somewhere other than the hotel when the time came to talk business. The manager couldn’t exactly lay the blame for his vanished guest at Jonsson’s feet, but that didn’t stop him aiming a slightly raised level of suspicion at the Swedish gentlemen. In their case, there was considerably more money at stake. Thus far they had always paid up, but currently the bill was larger than usual and it seemed advisable to proceed with caution.

Jonsson and Svensson’s meetings were instead held in a filthy bar in central Denpasar. Gustav turned out to be almost as much a petty thief as Julius. Back home in India, he had spent many years living large by renting cars, switching their engines and returning them. It often took the rental agency several months to discover that the vehicle in question had become seven years older, and by then it was impossible to say which of several hundred renters was the guilty party. Unless it was someone on the staff.

In those days, fancy cars had become part of Gustav’s daily life. As a result he noticed that the nicer the car, the greater the potential to attract a beautiful girl. This equation got him into trouble more than once. To such an extent, most recently, that he had found it best to leave the automotive industry, the girl and all of India behind, since the girl had become pregnant. Her father had turned out to be both a Member of Parliament and a military man, and when Gustav, for strategic reasons, had asked for the girl’s hand in marriage, the father responded by threatening to send the seventh infantry after him.

‘What a grumpy bastard,’ Julius said. ‘Couldn’t he think of what was best for his daughter?’

Gustav agreed. A complicating factor was that the father had just noticed that his six-cylinder BMW had become a four-cylinder while he was on a business trip to Singapore.

‘And he blamed you?’

‘Yes. With no evidence.’

‘Were you innocent?’

‘That’s beside the point.’

In conclusion, Gustav said it felt right that Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas was no more.

‘But it’s too bad he didn’t have time to settle up with the hotel. Cheers to you, my friend.’

* * *

Some time after their initial, cheerful meeting at the bar, Julius Jonsson and his new partner Gustav Svensson, with the help of a substantial amount of the money that remained in the suitcase, took over an asparagus farm in the mountains. Julius held the reins, Gustav was the site manager, and a great number of impoverished Balinese people bent their backs in the fields.

With the help of previous contacts in Sweden, Julius and his new partner now exported ‘Gustav Svensson’s locally grown asparagus’ in lovely bunches tied with blue-and-yellow ribbon. Nowhere did Julius or the man who had, until recently, been named something else claim that the asparagus was Swedish. The only thing Swedish about it was the price, and the name of the Indian grower. Unlike the Peru project, this wasn’t as illegal as Julius would have preferred, but you couldn’t have it all. Furthermore, he and Gustav succeeded in establishing a supplementary, and shadier, line of business. Swedish asparagus had such a good international reputation that Gustav’s Balinese variety could be shipped to Sweden, transferred into different boxes, and exported to a series of luxury hotels around the world. In Bali, for example. High-profile hotels there had their international reputations to consider, and it was worth every single extra rupiah it cost to avoid serving guests the bland, locally grown variety.

Allan was glad his friend Julius was back to his old self. And with that, life surely would have been a gas once more for both Julius and his hundred-year-old friend with the black tablet, except the money in the suitcase that never ran dry was starting to run dry. The income from the crop fields in the mountains was respectable, but life at the luxury hotel where the friends resided was anything but free. Even the imported Swedish asparagus in the restaurant cost half a fortune.

Julius had wanted to broach the topic of their finances with Allan for some time. He just hadn’t got round to it. At breakfast that morning, however, the time had come. Allan had brought his black tablet along as usual, and the day’s news was a story about the love between siblings. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had just had his brother poisoned to death at an airport in Malaysia. Allan said he wasn’t overly surprised: he’d had his own dealings with Kim Jong-un’s father. And grandfather.

‘Both father and grandfather did in fact intend to take my life,’ he recalled. ‘Now both of them are dead, but here I sit. Such is life.’

Julius had grown used to Allan popping up with such reflections on the past and was no longer surprised by them. He had probably heard that particular story before, but he didn’t quite recall. ‘You met the North Korean leader’s father? And grandfather? How old are you?’

‘A hundred, almost a hundred and one,’ said Allan. ‘In case that somehow escaped you. Their names were Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. The one was only a child, but he was very angry.’

Julius resisted the urge to enquire further. Instead he guided the conversation towards the topic he’d been planning to discuss from the start.

The problem was, as Julius had hinted earlier, that the suitcase of money was increasingly transforming into a suitcase without money. And it had been two and a half months since they’d last settled their debts with the hotel. Julius didn’t want to think about what the bill would say.

‘Then don’t,’ Allan suggested, taking a bite of his mildly seasoned nasi goreng.

More urgent was the issue with the boat-renter, who had been in touch to say that he had throttled their line of credit and intended to do the same to Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson unless their debt was settled within the week.

‘The boat-renter?’ Allan said. ‘Did we rent a boat?’

‘The luxury yacht.’

‘Oh, right. So that counts as a boat, does it?’

Then Julius confessed that he’d been planning to surprise Allan on his hundred-and-first birthday, but their financial situation was such that the celebration couldn’t be up to Harry Belafonte standards.

‘Well, we met him once before,’ Allan said. ‘And my birthday parties and I have never quite seen eye to eye, so don’t worry about that.’

But Julius did. He wanted Allan to know he had appreciated the Belafonte gesture. It had been above and beyond. Julius was no spring chicken himself, and at no time in history had anyone done anything as nice for him as Allan had.

‘Though I wasn’t the one singing,’ Allan said.

Julius went on to say that there would absolutely be a party: he’d already ordered a cake from the one bakery he’d been able to find that would make it on credit. Thereafter awaited a hot-air balloon ride over the beautiful green island, along with the balloon pilot and two bottles of champagne.

Allan thought a hot-air balloon ride sounded pleasant. But perhaps they could skip the cake, given that their finances were strained. Even the hundred and one candles might cost a fortune.

The state of the friends’ joint capital didn’t hinge on a hundred and one birthday candles, according to Julius. He had dug through the suitcase the night before and made a rough estimate of how much was left. Then he made another based on what he expected the hotel thought they owed. When it came to the yacht, he didn’t need to make an estimate, since the lessor had been kind enough to tell him the exact amount.

‘I’m afraid we’re at least a hundred thousand dollars in the red,’ said Julius.

‘Is that with or without the candles?’ Allan asked.

Indonesia (#u5d236ad8-bae1-5a79-ac64-be5af951ff22)