The Stranger in My Home

by The Stranger in My Home- Facets of a Life (retail) (epub)

  But now you don’t need a city for these. Books, music, lectures, debates, all turn up in your study at the flick of a switch on a glowing screen. Books you download, music you can see and hear performed better than in an auditorium, and seminars and debates you can play and replay on your television. Yes, you miss the sense of immediacy, the excitement of being at arm’s length of a Nobel winning author, but in reality you see more, hear better and can retain what you like.

  I had also begun to notice that there are things beyond books and ideas. Quiet, that improbable thing, meant nothing to me earlier. I had lived happily in rowdy, raucous cities like Kolkata and Karachi. Now, suddenly, it seemed strangely refreshing to be in a silent space: to hear the rustle of leaves, a bird’s homing twitter, and late in the evening, absolutely nothing. Most absurdly, the two giant trees I see from my living room began to seem like old buddies, steady and majestic, with a message of perennial placidity. Now, in a mellow autumn, as the foliage around my deck changes to amber and gold, my heart turns unaccountably to a quiet tune I hadn’t known earlier.

  Perhaps I am not a city man any longer.

  56

  THE ISLANDER

  WHAT KEEPS ONE GOING

  EVEN MY SMALL BOAT couldn’t approach the island, so shallow was the water. I had to shout to fishermen to come and get me in their tiny boats, really hollowed mango tree trunks.

  I was investigating reports of human rights abuses in Haiti and had come to La Gonâve, a tiny island west of Haiti. Haiti, the poorest land in the American hemisphere, has La Gonâve as its poorest part. I stepped on to La Gonâve and thought I had landed on the moon.

  Hilly, barren and bare, as far as my eyes could see La Gonâve had nothing except a few miserable shacks made of straw, tin, plastic and cardboard. A few rickety children played naked on the beach. The fishermen and women wore little more. The roads were mud tracks. Further down, there were a few modest brick houses, all in imminent need of repair. Old people lay around, ill and emaciated, waiting patiently for the next day. Even in the worst slums of Mumbai and Manila I hadn’t seen anything quite like this. It was just another world, a lost one, about which the galaxy I came from had no clue.

  I stumbled through the sand to meet the only doctor in town, a soft-spoken Belgian paediatrician, who was examining the horribly swollen limbs of a child. An assortment of women waited outside in mute pain.

  I watched as she took time to check the child very carefully. She smiled as she whispered her questions in broken Creole. Then she made notes and finally wrote a prescription. The child bent, kissed her hand and then scampered away.

  I felt both impressed and confused. How does a qualified, experienced doctor bring herself to practise here? What makes an attractive woman choose to live in a place as primitive as this? I wondered as I talked business.

  When the time came to leave, I finally expressed, hesitantly, my private curiosity. What, I asked, made her toil on in that bare island. She looked up and signed for me to walk up to the window.

  Outside on the beach nearby a gentle sun was taking its last bow, radiating a tawny glow into every little shack and bathing the gaunt landscape in mellow, ineffable glory. Against this backdrop were the silhouettes of sickly children playing soccer with an old tennis ball.

  Did she mean the rude beauty of a dirt-poor islet? Or succour for the helpless who needed it most? I wondered as I returned to my boat.

  57

  FLYING SOLO

  ON YOUR OWN

  I LIVE ALONE. THIS is in sharp contrast to a much larger part of my life. I grew up living with two parents and two brothers. Two aunts played such key parts in my life as well, and influenced me so much, that they were virtually two additional parents. My parents had many friends and they entertained often. The result was that our house was constantly full of visitors and guests.

  I stayed in my parents’ home until I completed university. Then I immediately found a job in another town, and, for reasons of economy, shared a house with three noisy colleagues. They were a perennial source of both amusement and irritation, and, for the first time, I consciously entertained the dream of living alone.

  I briefly realized it when I switched to another job in another town and found a pleasant apartment of my own. But I soon met an alluring person and thought a single life wasn’t all that it was made out to be. We married. Soon enough I found married life wasn’t all that it was made out to be. The marriage ended.

  What followed was a period of confusion and connection. I threw myself into a lot of activities; my life became a whirl of friendships and relations. It was the least lonely of times, it was the most active, exciting, buoyant, variable and troublesome of times.

  It ended with a bang, when I met someone, married and moved to the US. For her work as well as mine, we moved from country to country for twenty-plus years. We saw two children grow to adulthood and leave nest. Our work entailed long periods of separation, and eventually the relationship tapered with an involuntary whimper.

  Now I live alone, eat alone, spend most of my time alone. I have felt the keen edge of being alone and wondered whether one can happily live alone in Walden or Washington. But I have also found the peace and wonder of flying solo, listening to the seductive music of silence, walking exactly as much or as little as my inclination guided me, and delighting in the sense of sheer freedom from the compulsions of adjustment. My mornings are mine, so are my evenings and nights and all the aches, pleasures and surprises they can bring.

  58

  ANOTHER ASPECT OF LIFE

  WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM LIFE?

  BRENDA WRIGHT WAS A well-known cardiac surgeon in Chicago. I met her only once and very briefly. What she said, however, remains seared in my memory.

  Three days earlier, a large avalanche had come down the Annapurna circuit of the Himalaya and killed an entire seven-person team of Japanese mountaineers. The story broke on Tokyo television and was quickly picked up and broadcast by networks in Europe and the US. It was the height of the tourist season in Kathmandu and there were hundreds of American tourists on the Everest and Annapurna tracks. Panicky Americans started calling the US embassy in Nepal, asking for news of friends and relations. As the consul it was my responsibility to help them.

  Quickly I packed a bag, hopped into a helicopter and rose 11,000 feet on to the Himalayan range. The sudden change of altitude gave me a painful headache, but there was time to do no more than swallow a few pills. There was a lot to be done.

  First, urge all the hikers at the height and the hikers coming down from greater heights to talk to their families, by now swamped by anxiety. For the American hikers, take down their names and those of their relatives so that the families could be reassured. If I already had a message of concern from the relatives, talk to them or arrange with the embassy to send them a reassuring word.

  Next, arrange with the police and other government authorities to make sure that hikers from the US receive assistance in coming down to safe areas and, if injured, get special help. Also, contact non-government organizations, mountaineering associations and medical groups, so that ailing hikers are quickly brought to safety.

  I went to the locations where helicopters were ferrying hikers from dangerous spots every hour and also all the inns and taverns where the incoming hikers were taking refuge. There were only small hotels and ordinary homes that did informal business and housed hikers. It was important to gather information on all American hikers and focus on the people reported missing by their families, trekking organizations or other hikers. Groups that had climbed together had become split in adverse weather and were anxious to know that individual members were alive and well.

  Days of unremitting work yielded the results we were looking for. I had traced all the missing persons except seventeeth hikers, and I had sufficient information about the movements of nearly a dozen of them to feel reasonably certain that they were safe. A group of five that had gone to 15,000 feet was expected to come down th
at evening, according to reports the police had received.

  I came back to my hotel, had some dinner and around midnight ventured out in the hope of meeting the returning group of five.

  It was around three at night that a watchman came to tell me that the group was tottering in. Yes, there were five in the group and three Sherpas. One mountaineer was sick and had delayed their reluctant descent. Four were relatively young, overly enthusiastic, and rued that adverse nature and cautious bureaucrats had ruined their adventure.

  The fifth member of the party – it took time to realize this as the member shed heavy mountain gear – was a woman in her late thirties, with metal-frame glasses and shoulder-length hair, wearing a well-worn blue-green sports outfit, who identified herself as Brenda Wright. She practised surgery in a well-known hospital group in Chicago and had visited Nepal six times, thrice as a tourist and then thrice more as a mountaineer.

  Her team had been very near where the avalanche struck and had been saved by the foresight of an old Sherpa guide who had correctly assessed the avalanche as a grave threat and suggested a swift evacuation.

  ‘Brenda, you realize, don’t you,’ I asked, in the hearing of her team-mates who seemed miffed at the sudden cancellation of their plan, ‘that you were in serious danger. It could have easily cost your life.’

  ‘Yes, I do realize,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘I know the danger was real and close. I am glad that we got out in time.’

  ‘Tell me, what makes you keep coming back to Nepal? To the mountains?’

  She smiled. ‘It is hard to explain,’ she said. ‘At first it was just a sense of fun and adventure. Then it became something different. It became an event – an event that tests me and, in a peculiar way, restores me. I long to come back here and go up the mountain.’

  I asked, ‘So you think you will come again, even after this brush with death?’

  Brenda looked straight at me, ‘Believe me, I work for eleven months at the hospital, always dreaming of the month I will spend on the mountain. It is constantly on my mind. I don’t know why, for I like my work. There is something in life beyond a comfortable existence and enjoyable work.’

  She gave a pause and added, ‘I don’t know what that something is. But when I am up there, slogging through ice and snow with a load on my back, with people I barely know and share little in common, I breathe thin air and feel my heart work differently. I seem to sense a different aspect of life I haven’t quite understood. I hope I understand it someday.’

  I held her now glove-less hand and said goodbye. As I trudged back to my hotel in bone-chilling air, I mulled over the aspects of life I had seen and the aspects I had missed.

  59

  A MAGICAL KINGDOM

  THE GATE THAT BOOKS OPEN

  ONE OF THE FIRST sketches I wrote for the college magazine – now, alas, irretrievably lost – was about an imaginary heroic character called Roy. Roy was soft-spoken but strong, mild mannered but determined, who spoke truth to power and championed lost causes. A rugged scholar, he was by profession a librarian.

  That confused my friends and readers. A librarian? It was clear to me nobody thought of the librarian as a heroic figure. A librarian was expected to be a namby-pamby clerk who kept an inventory of books and loaned them to scholars and students for short periods – and pestered them if the books were not returned in time. In the US, the image was that of a woman with moon glasses, grey hair in a bun, shuffling about noiselessly, shelving books and maintaining a place of sepulchral silence.

  This was vastly different from my mental picture. To me a library was a magical kingdom, where everything was possible. And everything happened. Every villain had his comeuppance at the hands of the just hero; every detective followed abstruse clues to the right murderer; and every prince found the impeccably beautiful, doe-eyed princess.

  There you discovered mysterious new worlds. How two brothers worked on an impossible dream and started flying. How Eskimos built houses of ice and raised families in them. How an arrogant boy from tiny Macedonia made huge empires prostrate at his feet. And how – trust the avid adolescent to look for that above all – men and women come together to have fun and produce babies.

  To be sure, the aura of books for me came partly from their sheer scarcity in the India of 1950s and 1960s. There were very few community libraries and their collections were pathetic. Schools and colleges had outdated inventories, and restrictive library practices seemed designed to keep students away from books. Open access was unthinkable, and you could get only one or two books on loan at a time. The US and British embassies created a sensation in my city, Kolkata, by opening large libraries where you could walk up to the shelves, browse to your heart’s content and sit and read as long as you liked. I became a member of as many libraries as I could, and then persuaded friends who worked for academic and professional organizations (and never used their large libraries) to let me use their membership cards.

  When I moved to the US, I was delighted by the easy availability of books in large stores and in libraries. The delight has shrunk over the years as libraries have reduced their staff, working hours and new acquisitions. Smaller budgets have gone mostly to popular magazines and bestselling potboilers, and the focus has moved to useful and how-to literature. Serving the community is a laudable goal, and librarians seem largely devoted to improving literacy, assisting seniors and children, helping the disabled and educating the computer Luddites.

  All are perfectly understandable and perhaps defensible. Yet I cling to my idea of the library as a magical kingdom, where impossible things can and do happen. Where your mind is blown by staggering new ideas, your imagination takes awesome leaps as you discover a new poem or play, your heart expands and sings as you read Murakami, Kundera or Rushdie, and you finally know what it is to be truly alive. A library above all is a haven where you discover yourself, joyfully and with abandon.

  Roy, the librarian I had imagined in my college days, was modelled on an elderly friend I had acquired, a man who after a successful career as a professor and senior administrator had decided he wanted to be a librarian. He served as a wonderful mentor in a professional organization to students and executives alike. He opened new doors for anybody who cared to walk through the doors of his library. He was a miracle worker and he introduced me to the miracle that a library can be.

  60

  A PERFECT DAY

  I HAD A LOT TO LEARN

  I HAD KNOWN HER for barely two weeks when a remarkable opportunity came up. A friendly colleague, who had to forego his reservation of a cottage on the beach to visit his sick mother, offered to let me use the cottage. I eagerly asked her, and, to my surprise and pleasure, she accepted. We would drive four hours to the beach the following Saturday. I dreamed of the weekend the entire week, planned every little detail and went to pick her up early on Saturday morning.

  I was in for a surprise. She hadn’t packed and she wasn’t dressed for the trip. Then she delivered the blow without a word of explanation: she didn’t feel like going. I was crushed. Her mother, an elegant tall woman, who stood in the kitchen a few feet away and heard the exchange, came over and said apologetically, ‘I’m sorry she stood you up.’

  She urged me not to be disheartened and offered a cup of tea. I was in no mood to tarry but decided to be polite and accept. As we talked, I realized what a thoughtful, charming person she was. By the second cup, I felt distinctly better. When I told her that I didn’t want to go to the beach alone, but hated to miss using the cottage, she astonished me and said she would be glad to come if I wanted.

  It proved to be an agreeable drive. She was easy-going and a great conversationalist. We arrived at the beautiful cottage, right at the edge of the sea, and she unpacked all the food she had brought. We had a light but superb lunch, and spent the entire afternoon on the beach, swimming a little and talking a lot. The cottage had a small but modern kitchen, and afterwards we drank as she cooked dinner and I helped. A
great candle-lit dinner in the backyard followed.

  The cottage had two main bedrooms, but the smaller one seemed under renovation. She said she didn’t mind sharing the master bedroom, as there were two large beds. It was wonderful that we could switch off the lights and continue sharing stories.

  We talked for a long time, and I said that it had been a perfect day for me. Then, she decided to make it more perfect still. Silently, she shuffled over and got under the blanket with me.

  61

  THE INDISCREET CHARM OF A COFFEEHOUSE

  TALK IS IMPORTANT

  I LIKE COFFEEHOUSES. I like, to be candid, places where people meet and talk for no other reason than that they like to talk.

  Practical people, proud of their practicality, think most talk a waste of good time. A friend, Woody, chose as his company motto: Be a doer, not a talker. I did not have the heart to tell him that talking is doing. It is putting our time to very good use.

  How is talking a kind of doing? Let me suggest two thoughts.

  Short of making love, I know of no better way to know a person than to talk. I suppose two people can look into each other’s eyes and share heart-felt messages – the way George Bush peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul – but usually we talk, and talk a lot, to know each other. True we often talk of trivial things, but at times we connect meaningfully and get a true glimpse of the other person. Then the miracle of a genuine relationship begins.

  The other point is less personal, but no less important. However superficially we talk, whether of politics or of office politics, however similar our interests or orientation, we always leave with the other a trace of our different point of view. That difference is like leaven: it has the potential to change the other’s view, a little or a lot. It is for many people the key recurrent source of daily exposure to a new idea. Maybe sometimes we reject the others’ view cavalierly, without giving it a further thought. Occasionally, however, the new idea stays, germinates and becomes the basis of a new way of thinking.