The Stranger in My Home
Page 1
The Stranger in
My Home
Facets of a Life
MANISH NANDY
For Pritish Nandy
Admired author
Peerless person
Beloved brother
CONTENTS
Preface
Foreword
Events: Happenings That Do Not Fade
1. She Is Beautiful
2. Scar
3. The Doctor and the Outlaw
4. A Tip I Earned
5. A Hall of Ricochet
6. A Remarkable Grifter
7. Please Go to Hell
8. Get Him Back
9. Love in the Time of War
10. An Inspector Called
11. An Ideal Couple
12. Winning an Order
13. Loving a Murder
14. A Majestic Fall
Enigmas: What Continues to Mystify
15. An Exchange in an Emirate
16. Blue Scarf
17. Parallel Paths That Meet
18. He Loved the Sea
19. Making Friends
20. An Incomplete Novel
21. You Did Not Tell Me
22. Somebody Waited
23. The Outlier
24. What Is Fair?
25. House of Dreams
26. Let Us Play
27. A Stone through the Window
28. A Nurturing Eye
Encounters: People You Do Not Forget
29. Looking after Mother
30. Just a Friend
31. The Prince
32. The Encounter
33. A Keepsake
34. Three Is Company
35. When the End Came
36. A Man on the Run
37. A Stigma, a Pen, a Friend
38. A Doctor to Remember
39. Two Persons, Three Days
40. Gifts That Sparkle
Experiences: Memories to Last a Lifetime
41. A Bullet through the Window
42. Sing of Human Unsuccess
43. The Fence
44. Wayward Minds
45. Reaching Home
46. Living on the Edge
47. Smile, Please!
48. A Story of Love and Pastries
49. An Unruly Horse
50. He Loved to Fly
51. A Jewel in Kathmandu
52. The Golden One
53. Tea and Me
Epiphanies: What Had to be Found Out
54. The Abbott and the Sceptic
55. Confession of a City Man
56. The Islander
57. Flying Solo
58. Another Aspect of Life
59. A Magical Kingdom
60. A Perfect Day
61. The Indiscreet Charm of a Coffeehouse
62. Water, a Friend
63. Coming Home
64. Believer
65. Getting Home
66. Discovering Mother
67. Pain
Engagements: Exchanges Unforgettable
68. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns
69. Sit With Me
70. After Forty Years
71. Mother of All Feasts
72. The Little Girl
73. The Lost Companion
74. The Bad-Boy Lark
75. Chopsticks
76. Tale of My Two Cities
77. A Recalcitrant Rower
78. Rain! Rain!
79. Moving In – and Out
80. She Could Jump
Afterword
Index
About the Book
Copyright
PREFACE
I WAS IN HAITI during a brutal military rule, investigating human rights violations in a remote village. I was to meet an activist in a designated area, when a soldier, with no apparent reason, stopped me.
‘You can’t go that way,’ he yelled in Creole.
‘I have authorization to go there. I intend to go.’
In a flash he whipped out a revolver and the barrel touched my temple.
I have always thought of myself as a reasonably cautious man, not at all courageous. I also knew that the low-level soldier was likely to be of limited education and discipline. The risk was high. Yet I suddenly found a new force surging in me.
With the revolver still pressed against my temple, I said, ‘I am a foreign diplomat. If you press that trigger, I don’t know what will happen to me, but I know your life will be over.’
The shock of those unexpected words, more than my calm belligerence, made him lower the revolver.
‘I am going where I have to go,’ I said and proceeded. Nothing happened.
Probably I had surprised that young, ill-trained Haitian soldier. But I had surprised myself even more. How did I find in myself that wellspring of bravado and daring? I didn’t know. I still don’t know.
Rare must be the person who knows all about himself. Most of us know very little about ourselves, our fears and foibles, our strengths and secret dreams. We rarely face them squarely, if ever, unless something unusual happens to open our eyes.
My life has been varied, because I have travelled, met different kinds of people and kept myself open to different experiences. In the process, I flatter myself that I have uncovered a fraction of the person that lives within me.
The following stories tell you a little of that stranger who lives in my home.
FOREWORD
HOSTING ONE’S ANTI-SELF
Ashis Nandy
THIS IS A COLLECTION of playful reminiscences, some sweet, some bitter, some bitter-sweet. They are recounted in a non-judgemental, relaxed, benign, life-affirming tone that I find very refreshing. Having known the author for more than seventy-five years, I only wish that the stance he has taken in these reminiscences can find space within a larger philosophy of life.
Everyone has his or her own idea of playfulness. Seriousness observes discipline and respects organization and reason. Playfulness does not. The urban-industrial civilization that dominates the world and within which we live, loves play but in homeopathic doses. For it loves play not so much for what it is—as a crucial part of a rich, rounded life—but as mainly spectator sports, as another component of the passive entertainment that television and virtual reality now has turned into a global enterprise.
As a result, the sports and games that the modern world promotes and celebrates are all gradually losing the element of play and becoming parts of the entertainment industry. And this industry, once a small part of the traditional domain of playfulness, is gradually becoming a multi-billion dollar venture that measures playfulness by standards set by the ‘box office’. We no longer live in the age of homo ludens that Johan Huizinga wrote about in the 1930s; we live in the age of the organization man.
Take the instance of cricket, a sport that I have elsewhere subjected to a detailed cultural-psychological analysis. And also a sport that happens to be India’s national game. It is not surprising that test cricket—the one game that by its scope, style and origin was a village game and a critique of the urban-industrial vision—has now become a respectable part of the entertainment industry. It has lost much of its attraction as a critique of the urban-industrial vision and as a temporary break from the standardized protocols associated with that vision. Test cricket can perhaps still be called a slice of life and a Rorschach test of the health of a civic culture, but it has become terribly professional and a serious business venture—less leisurely, stylized and playful.
In 2018, when the Australian cricket team was caught after an instance of ball tampering and Cricket Australia had to banish three members of the team, including its captain, fo
r a year, an official enquiry was told to identify the root causes of the problem. It concluded that it was the overconcern with victory and defeat that led to the ethical lapse. Many Indians must be shocked by this development. To them all sports are now only a matter of victim and defeat, national honour and national shame.
This long digression was necessary because the author of this book, though for much of his life a corporate honcho and identifies himself as such, has taken in this book a playful leap into another world that follows a different set of protocols. In these protocols, there is no celebration of unalloyed reason, no identifiable presence of conventional and instrumental rationality masquerading as the key to a humane future of humankind, and no overconcern with victory and defeat or with national glory and national humiliation. There may be other domains where such concerns have a play, but not in sports.
In this book there is an openness to the inner contradictions in the human condition, and a quiet acceptance of human frailties, and a touching, low-key admiration for the resilience of the cornered and the disposable. Is the author trying to reconfigure his worldview and his self-definition? Or is he learning to live without cringing with pointless play, transient or meaningless relationships, and the uneven algorithm of everyday life? Play is natural to not only all human beings but also to many species of the animal world. Playing is in our genes; not playing is unnatural.
It is my belief that today playing, on the one hand, and rationalizing or organizing play as a full-time business venture, on the other, have become two vectors vying for dominance in the human self. The wise recognize this and try to strike a balance. Creativity, which neither comes from wisdom nor from intelligence and, instead, sees disorder in order and order in disorder, cannot but give primacy to play even when the process of creativity may itself involve hard work and discipline. The play of creativity comes from playing with the certitudes of life to, paradoxically, subvert or transcend the certitudes themselves.
I have enjoyed reading this playful book, even the surfeit of attractive women who always seem to come out of nowhere to populate its pages and the author’s life. I have identified with even the Vietnamese war victim who has made a new life in the United States. I hope this encounter with playfulness will not be a brief interlude in the life of the author and he will continue to allow it to infect his future writings.
Events
Happenings That Do Not Fade
She Is Beautiful
Scar
The Doctor and the Outlaw
A Tip I Earned
A Hall of Ricochet
A Remarkable Grifter
Please Go to Hell
Get Him Back
Love in the Time of War
An Inspector Called
An Ideal Couple
Winning an Order
Loving a Murder
A Majestic Fall
1
SHE IS BEAUTIFUL
ONLY ONE CHANCE
I was working late in the US consulate in Kathmandu one day in the early 1990s when the telephone rang. As the secretary had left, I answered, and when the caller said, ‘Namaskar,’ I responded with the same word. The caller continued in Nepali and explained his problem. I listened and suggested a solution, also in Nepali. He thanked me and said he would call the American officer the next day. I told him that he was indeed talking with an American officer: I was the consul.
Surprised, the caller said, ‘But you are speaking Nepali!’
I laughed and said, ‘You don’t have a law that foreigners cannot speak your language.’ I explained that I had learned the language when I was in Haiti and was the US contact person for the Nepalese contingent in a UN multinational force.
The man then introduced himself and said, ‘I work at the home ministry. Why don’t you drop in some day for a cup of tea? Please let me know if I can be of help any time. My name is Khadka.’
I might have forgotten about the exchange, except for what happened three weeks later. I was scrutinizing visa applications, when my secretary reported that a young couple was waiting in the hall for me and the wife was visibly distraught and in tears. I asked the couple in.
Their story was intriguing. Craig, from an affluent Kansas family, had joined a private voluntary organization in Chicago that sent him to work on a water project in southern Nepal. While he went to work in different locations, his wife, Clara, taught basic English and mathematics to some children in the village. As she did so on the front porch of her home, she would notice a girl, possibly of five or six, skeletal and filthy, clearly a waif, playing on the street.
Passing her one day, Clara gave her a candy. The next day, the girl, possibly trying to get Clara’s attention, was playing right in front of her home. She got another candy.
Then on she got a candy or cookie each day. A week later, Clara was in a local bazaar and bought a girl’s dress. She was about to replace the girl’s tattered frock the next day, when she realized how dirty she was, having lived on the street. She gave her a bath and put the dress on. The girl was pleased and surprised in equal measure, wearing the only new dress she had ever worn. Then on the girl – her name was Maya – imperceptibly became a part of Clara and Craig’s village life.
Two years later, when the project ended and the time came for them to return to the US, they realized to their surprise that they could not leave without Maya. They came to Kathmandu, went to the home ministry and applied for adoption. They expected no glitches since she was an orphan, with no relations to claim her. Then they came up against a legal wall. Craig could not adopt, for under Nepal’s law a person had to be at least thirty to adopt a child, and Craig was nine months short. Clara was even younger. They were despondent and had turned to me as a last recourse.
I had no reassuring answer for them. I could not contend against a well-intentioned law designed to protect children. Then I thought of Khadka, who, I had found out, was the deputy minister. I called and said that I would indeed like to join him for tea. He was gracious and said I could come right away.
I took Craig and Clara with me but left them in the waiting room. Khadka was a sun-tanned, heavy-browed man, squat but nimble. He greeted me warmly, but he knew I had come with a purpose. I chose to be candid.
‘I want to show you a photo,’ I said, and pulled out a picture of Maya.
‘I see it is a very young girl,’ he responded, with a questioning look.
‘You will also notice that it is an ordinary girl. She isn’t pretty at all.’ I added bluntly.
‘Now I want you to take a look at her medical file.’ I pushed a file toward him, ‘You will find she has a large number of health problems: of eyes, ears, skin, stomach and general health.’
I continued, ‘That isn’t surprising. She is an orphan and has lived most of her life on the street, eating scraps and spoiled food neighbours have thrown out. Nobody has cared for her, nobody wanted her.’
Khadka listened intently.
‘Now a miracle has happened. Somebody loves her and wants to adopt her. It is the first and possibly the only break in her miserable life. But the couple who want to take her are less than thirty years of age, and the law stands in the way. I have no way to solve that problem. So, I am asking for your help.
I added, ‘Because the couple is American, I am pleading their case. But, believe me, I am pleading even more for a little girl who has this one chance for a better life. Your and my life will go on as before if the adoption doesn’t go through; even this couple will eventually reconcile to their loss. It is only Maya who would lose her one chance to not be just another waif on the street.’
The secretary had brought the tea, and Khadka asked him for Maya’s adoption file. He signalled me to drink the tea while he studied the file. He quickly reached the last page and started writing.
When he finished, he gave me the file to read. Invoking the appropriate section and subsection of the law, Khadka had written that he was granting a humanitarian exception to the law and
the adoption would be allowed to proceed.
I thanked Khadka, saying that Nepalese tea had never tasted better, and left. In the waiting room, when I had explained the outcome, Craig hugged me and Clara wept some more.
I know I had said something wrong to the Nepalese minister. Every Christmas Craig and Clara send me a family photo, and this year I looked carefully at their adolescent daughter. I had told Khadka that Maya was an ordinary girl, not pretty at all. I was wrong. She is beautiful.
2
SCAR
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MARK
IT WAS MY SEVENTH birthday and we were going to have a party.
In the kitchen, my mother feverishly cooked my favourite food and pastries. I dropped in from time to time to see the progress. Beads of perspiration lined her face on that warm day, but she smiled every time I came in. She wanted it to be a special event for me.
As I came in the fourth time, I tried to look at the just finished corn pudding and, in an awkward gesture, overturned a large jar of brown sugar. It fell with a loud crash near my feet, but I was unhurt. I yelped, more in chagrin than in pain, but my mother misunderstood the cry.
She turned sharply to help me and overturned a pot of hot oil on herself. Her left arm was instantly covered with boiling oil. As blisters started appearing, I rushed to get her some ice and petroleum jelly. Her entire arm was soon red and splotchy. She was clearly in great pain, and I begged her to stop cooking and lie down. She insisted that she had to finish the cooking before the guests came and kept cooking, though I could see from her face how hard it was for her.
The party was a great success. My friends enjoyed themselves; I had a great time and felt proud of my mother’s achievement. However, Mother had to go to the doctor the next day. I heard her telling my father, that the nurse reprimanded her for ignoring such a severe burn for several hours.
There was an unsightly scar on her arm for several months. The ointment the doctor recommended seemed to work very slowly.
Decades have passed since then. I have never been able to forget the accident or to forgive myself for inadvertently causing so much pain to my dear mother. I knew she had deferred going to a doctor because she wanted to make sure that my birthday party was impeccable.