The suggestion is preposterous, and I can see Komal Chhabria Wazir wrinkling her nose. We are sitting in the Belvedere Club of The Oberoi. The mercury outside is soaring and we decide to combat it with a tall, cool drink. Wazir chooses coconut water. I say I will try a beer from the Shaw Wallace stables, not wanting to offend my lunch partner. Haywards 5000? Castle? None of these is stocked in the hotel and, worse, the waiter offers to serve me Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher instead.
The suggestion is a dead fly at the end of a swat even as it is made. Before I can decide, Wazir dismisses the offer with a wave of her hand.
Finally, she lets me have Budweiser "" neutral terrain. "Make sure his mug is never empty," she tells the waiter, who is still trying to figure out why Mallya's hugely popular beer has been so emphatically rejected.
The stamp of authority is unmistakable. In corporate circles, Wazir is seen as running the $ 1.8 billion Jumbo Group's India operations "" covering Shaw Wallace, Dunlop, Mather & Platt, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver and Falcon Tyres "" with an iron fist.
Although only in her early-thirties, she is already a veteran of corporate skirmishes, be it the unending slugfest with Mallya, the cold war with uncle Kishore Chhabria or the run-ins with her elder sister, Bhavika Godhwani, who has demanded a third of the Jumbo empire as her legitimate share.
None of that seems to weigh her down today. Wazir is stylish. She wears Armani to office and Versace in the evenings. Today, it's a deep grey suit, a Bvlgari gold watch with a black dial and an oversized Bvlgari ring with earrings to match.
She looks like her mother, Vidya Manohar Chhabria, and lacks the piercing gaze of her father, the late Manu Chhabria. But I discover that, like her father, she is a straight talker and makes no attempts to dodge uncomfortable questions. She remembers Business Standard headlines about her and admits reading to the last word a lunch with Mallya for the same column a year ago for what he had to say about Shaw Wallace.
My beer is great, but Wazir finds her coconut water too cold, so she orders a fresh lime soda instead. "Mix Equal in the nimbu first and then add soda to it," she instructs the attendant as she turns to answer my question about her childhood.
Wazir is a Shikarpuri Sindhi (from Shikarpur in Sind), a community known for its financial acumen. Manu Chhabria, in fact, took great pride in his genes. He would call his first grandchild athanni (eight annas) because the boy was only half a Chhabria.
Wazir, the second child of Vidya and Manu Chhabria, was born in Mumbai in 1972, a year before her father relocated to Dubai to try his luck in what was then a barren stretch of sand.
Manu took his wife along, leaving his two daughters, Kanchan (she changed her name to Bhavika after she married) and Wazir, with his parents at Bombay's Peddar Road. (The family owned a shop called Raja Radio on Lamington Road.)
In 1980, Manu took all his three daughters (Kiran was born in 1979) to Dubai, having struck gold in the consumer electronics business. In 1980, Wazir was back in Mumbai because there were no good under-graduate schools in Dubai.
She wanted to study in the US but her protective father wouldn't let her go. By then, he had bought a house in London and wanted Wazir to study there. Instead, she decided to come to Mumbai, graduating from Sydenham College in 1993.
Anybody who has known Manu Chhabria will tell you that he was a street fighter at heart, choosing to live by his own rules. The conservative bent to his personality is news to me. I am in for more surprises.
According to Wazir, he never wanted his daughters to get into business "" instead, he wanted all three of them to "settle down" (get married) early and visit him on weekends with their children. So how did Wazir end up in business?
It all, Wazir says, began in 1992 when Manu's younger brother, Kishore, walked out of Shaw Wallace to join hands with Mallya, taking BDA Distilleries and its hugely-popular Officer's Choice brand with him. Manu was shocked.
Wazir says he suffered a mild stroke around the time and the family was deeply worried about his health. That is when Manu decided to induct his daughters into his business empire.
Wazir was thus summoned to Dubai and made a part of the Jumbo strategic planning cell. It was her first exposure to the world of business. Two years later, she was back in Mumbai, having decided to marry Rajiv Wazir, a Kashmiri Pandit.
She became more deeply involved in the business in 1997 when the government's investigating agencies turned the heat on Manu Chhabria and he decided to stay put in Dubai. She first joined the Dunlop board, which led to a revolt in the ranks of the company. Yet the board supported her and soon she was on the board of all group companies.
Try hard as we may, our discussion invariably reverts to Manu Chhabria. Businessmen, it is an open secret, make babies till a son is born to them. Did Manu Chhabria never aspire for a son, I enquire.
According to Wazir, Manu always wanted a boy and when Kiran was born in 1979, he was convinced he would have a male heir. "He was in Tirupati when she was born. But Sindhis, you know, are money-minded. He prayed for Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth). So when he came back he found he had a third daughter."
It is time to place our orders. While I settle for grilled bhekti, Wazir orders salmon. She has inherited a love for food from her father. Manu's secretary would keep a dossier of the most fashionable restaurants all over the world.
The first thing he would do after checking into a hotel was ask the concierge about the best eating joints in the city. Annual vacations at the family penthouse at Montreaux near Geneva, too, had food high on the agenda, although Manu would wonder why the two sons-in-law had to join the party, Wazir recalls wryly.
As she cuts into the fish, I ask her about Mallya. Do they meet for business or at social gatherings? Wazir says she hasn't met Mallya after Manu died in April 2002.
Although Mallya came to see Manu during his last days and called after his death, he struck within six months when McDowell filed a suit in the Mumbai High Court pleading for a rollback of the Shaw Wallace restructuring. It had bought some Shaw Wallace shares and alleged the restructuring was not in the interests of the company's non-promoter shareholders.
Is there an end in sight to the family spat with Bhavika? Wazir indicates there could be a settlement soon.
How did she forge the alliance with SABMiller? Even before Manu died, Wazir tells me, McKinsey had convinced him that there is space for not more than two players in any beer market. With western markets reaching saturation, the big players in the business would come to India in droves.
Hope for Shaw Wallace lay in tying up with a global major. Once word got out, Shaw Wallace was inundated with offers. Finally, it tied up with SABMiller last year.
After nibbling at the salmon for about half an hour, Wazir returns the rest of it. I order a caramel custard, though Wazir decides to give dessert a miss. No sooner have I scooped up the last of my custard that Wazir asked the waiter to get a second helping for me. "I could have finished three of these," she says.
As I dive into the second serving, Wazir tell me that she is still discovering her father's interests in India. It was only when a family friend enquired that she got to know that he owned the title of a publication in India.
Another associate of Manu told her that he had put in place plans to acquire a utilities major years ago, although it did not work out. Without our knowing it, Manu Chhabria is once again in the midst of our conversation.
