 "Anil Kumar, who was a senior partner as McKinsey")
In December 2006, Anil Kumar, a senior partner at the global consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, sent a two-word email to Raj Rajaratnam, the CEO of the Galleon Group, a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund based in New York. The email said, simply, "Manju Das."
The words were a reminder to Rajaratnam of where to send a payment of one million dollars to Kumar. He had given the Galleon CEO valuable insider information on an upcoming corporate deal: the acquisition of the Canadian semiconductor company ATI Technologies by the American firm Advanced Micro Devices. Tipped off by Kumar as negotiations proceeded, Galleon built up a strong position in ATI, then sold all its shares after the sale was publicly announced. It made a profit of more than $20 million on the deal.
From around 2003 to 2009, Rajaratnam paid Kumar for insider information on a number of McKinsey clients, for whom Kumar served as consultant - among them Advanced Micro Devices, Spansion, eBay and Business Objects. The Galleon CEO sent quarterly payments of $125,000 to an offshore company called Pecos Trading, in Switzerland. This money was rerouted and sent back to Galleon in the name of Kumar's domestic employee, Manju Das, and reinvested in Galleon's funds.
According to The Billionaire's Apprentice, a book by the journalist Anita Raghavan, the name "Manju Das" came to the notice of officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2007. The SEC, which regulates US stock exchanges, had been poring over stacks of Galleon's financial documents, trying to find evidence of insider trading against Rajaratnam. A key challenge was to identify possible sources of privileged information within companies whose stocks Rajaratnam had traded with spectacular success. Manju Das was listed as an investor in Galleon, with an "Anil Kumar" listed as her contact person. Das's name did not immediately attract the interest of the SEC investigators.
That changed in 2009. Rajaratnam was arrested on 16 October that year, along with Kumar and other conspirators, after extensive court-sanctioned wiretaps of his phone yielded a wealth of evidence against him, including recordings of Kumar giving him information on McKinsey clients. Following these damaging revelations, McKinsey cooperated fully with authorities, turning over Kumar's internal documents to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Investigators found that Kumar had been consulting outside of his role at McKinsey, in violation of company policy. They also threw up more damaging revelations: Kumar had perpetrated elaborate fraud to receive illegal payments from Rajaratnam, and then hide them from his employers and the government. To do this, he had hijacked Manju Das's identity while she lived with the Kumar family in California.
Galleon Group CEO Raj Rajaratnam
In the summer of 2011, after Rajaratnam's trial ended, I went searching for Manju Das during a visit to India.
A tall woman by Indian standards, she had a confident, straightbacked manner. As I got up to greet her and introduce myself, her first question was if I was a relative of Anil Kumar's wife, Malvika. I shook my head. "You could be her sister," she said. "You look like her."
I had come prepared with a Bengali translator, but Das spoke fluent Hindi. I told her I was interested in stories such as hers. "But how did you hear of me?" Das asked. "How did you find me here?" Then the only probable answer suggested itself to her: "Has Anil Kumar sent you?"
I didn't know him, I said, but had heard about her during the Rajaratnam trial and had tracked her down. It was immediately clear that she had no idea what I was talking about. Disconcerted by the gathered crowd, Das got up and guided me through a doorway at the back of the dhaba, which led to her bedroom. It was a large, dank room, where she kept the curtains closed. We sat down on her bed. "Now tell me," she said. "What trial?"
She had never heard of Raj Rajaratnam, and refused to believe her name had appeared in a New York court or in the American press. "Show me," she said, finally. "Show me my name and I'll believe you."
There were a few PDFs of stories related to the case on my laptop. The electricity supply in the village was erratic, and had already come and gone a few times, but I had enough backup power to turn on the machine. I showed Das a report I had saved, headlined: "Raj made me use my sick child's housekeeper to hide the money he made me take."
Das was riveted by the photograph that accompanied the story. "That's Anil Kumar," she said, pointing. "What does it say?" Then, she added, "Main aapke jaise padhi-likhi nahin hun" - I am not literate like you.
Didn't she know her employer was in trouble, I asked. Das said she knew there was some "lafda" - trouble - at his workplace. "The police came to the house and he had to go with them. But they didn't tell me anything. And a few weeks later they sent me back."
She asked me what Kumar had done. "Your employer made money in ways he shouldn't have," I said.
"Did he steal?"
"He gave information about companies he worked for to his friend Rajaratnam," I said. "And his friend made money from that information in ways that are illegal."
Das looked lost. "What does that have to do with me?" she said.
"Kumar didn't want McKinsey to know that he'd made that money," I said. "He didn't want to pay taxes on it, so he put it in your name."
Das stiffened. She denied this hotly. "Every single rupee I have, I worked for," she said. "And what I have is gone, finished. I put my last rupee into building this. When he sent me back, he said, 'Go home and build your house, Manju. Start a business. I will send you two years' salary as severance'"- kaam chhodne ke liye. "So I came back and started building. I thought we'll sell food downstairs and run a hotel upstairs, that's how we will live and eat. But he never sent me the money."
Das didn't complain to me of her working conditions under the Kumars. She said they were good to her, and mentioned particularly that they let her eat as much as she wanted. Her sole point of resentment was the unpaid severance - Rs 8.5 lakh by her calculations. "I called him again and again," she said. "They never picked up the phone. Each time it went to their machine, it cost me Rs 50. Finally, I stopped calling."
She did reach Kumar on the phone, she said, when he visited Delhi. Once, "his mother was very sick," Das said. "I managed to reach him there. I asked for the money he had promised me. He said, 'I have given you everything I owe you. I have no more money to give you.'"
Das told me she threatened to complain to the US embassy. Some time after she spoke to Kumar, a man arrived in the village to talk to her. He took pictures of the unfinished building and offered her Rs 2 lakh. "Why will I take two lakhs?'" Das had replied. "He promised me two years' salary. I am not a beggar. He must pay me all that he owes or nothing at all. I did not take the money."
Like the lives of millions of domestic workers in India, Manju Das's life was largely defined by a search for employment. From her home in rural West Bengal, she migrated to Kolkata in the early 1990s, and worked in several houses each day, sweeping, mopping and washing clothes and dishes. By the mid 1990s, she was a full-time, live-in domestic worker, earning Rs 700 a month. For most of the year she was away from her son, whom she sent to live and study in a Ramakrishna Mission centre in Barrackpore, to the north of the city. When the family she worked for moved to Mumbai, and then to Delhi, Das moved with them, and her salary rose to Rs 1,500 a month. She travelled home once a year, in the summer, to visit her son. Once, she said, when she overstayed her visit because of an illness, she returned to Delhi to find that the family had replaced her. Her search for work resumed, and led her to the Kumars in 1998. She recounted that an acquaintance told her of a wealthy family that was moving to the United States and was looking for a "good woman" to go with them.
"They tried me for six months in Delhi and were very happy," Das told me. "They liked my work. Then they got me a visa and took me with them to stay." Das's salary went from Rs 2,000 a month in Delhi to Rs 8,000 in the United States - then around $185 - a veritable windfall in her eyes.
For ten years, Das lived with the Kumars in the city of Saratoga, California, in their mansion situated atop a hill. "I worked all the time," Das told me. "I cleaned the house, I cooked Indian food. I washed their clothes. I washed their clothes by hand, otherwise their fine fabrics would have run. I washed their three cars as well." She was also a caregiver to Kumar's son, who had a disability.
Some years into her employment, thanks to a friend of the Kumar family, Das realised that she was being overworked and underpaid. She remembered this friend as "a very nice lady who often chatted with me," and who told her, "Manju, you have been working for them for so many years, they should get you a green card so you can bring your son across."
After this, Das confronted her employers about her salary. "When you were in India you had a separate cook, a separate cleaner and a driver who washed your cars," she recounted telling them. "I was just the aya, taking care of your son. Here, I do it all. I should get four-five salaries." She asked them to help her get a green card. She told me that she said: "That will make my son's future. If he can come here, do something, then my work will have a purpose." Though the Kumars didn't help her get a green card, Das said, they agreed to raise her wages by Rs 25,000 annually.
Das was brought into the country on an immigration provision extended to US citizens residing abroad, who were returning home temporarily and wanted to bring in a domestic employee. As per the law, Kumar was required to draw up an employment contract that specified her wages, the frequency of her pay, her hours of work and provisions of termination, and that also allowed her sick leave. Her salary would have had to match at least the minimum wage, as calculated for 40 hours a week. For work in excess of that, she would have had to be paid overtime, at one-and-a-half times her hourly wage. In addition, Kumar was legally obliged to provide Das with medical insurance, and free room and board, without deducting any money for these from her salary.
Das told me she never signed such a contract, and, further, that she had no idea about the labour laws governing her employment.
By Das's account, she worked upwards of 80 hours per week. The minimum wage in the state of California between 1998 and 2001 was $5.75 per hour. Calculated at this rate for 40 regular hours, plus 40 hours of overtime, Das, in her first few years in the United States, should have been paid at least $575 per week - $2,300 per month. But what she said she was paid each month in June 1999 - Rs 8,000 - was only around $185 at the prevailing exchange rate.
When I met Das in the summer of 2011, I asked her if Kumar ever made her sign any forms. "When they took me to America, they taught me how to write my name," she said. "They said everyone must know how to sign, it's important. I signed many forms. When they told me to sign, I signed."
I showed her a copy of a typed letter to Galleon in which she authorises the company to accept instructions from Anil Kumar for her account. "Memsahib, I told you I cannot read or write," she said. "I don't know what this is."
"When they asked you to sign something, didn't you ask what you were signing?"
"I asked," she replied. "He said I was signing that I had received my salary. Twice a year they sent my salary to Kolkata, to my account there. He said he was making me sign that I had received it."
Last year, I discussed Das's case with Dana Sussman, a New York attorney who, in 2013, represented the domestic worker Sangeeta Richard in her legal suit against Devyani Khobragade. She told me that Das could press civil charges against her ex-employer, even without being physically present in the United States, under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Were she to do so, Sussman said, her reparations could be considerable, given that US courts are known to be extremely generous in awarding back pay and damages.
On one of my early visits, witnessing Das's mounting poverty, I offered to try and find her a lawyer who would work pro bono on her behalf. Das refused. "My father taught me an important lesson," she said. "If someone wants to give you something, take it gladly. But if someone does not want to give you something, don't run after it. It will only bring trouble."
Today, Das says she doesn't have her passport. When Kumar sent her back to India, she told me, he arranged for her to be met at the Delhi airport by an assistant, who took away her passport and all the other documentation she was carrying. I told her it was a criminal offence for anyone to hold on to her passport. She replied that she had no further need for it. "Where in my old age will I go looking for a job in America?" she said.
This extract is reprinted with permission from the November 2015 issue of The Caravan,©Delhi Press
