The Stranger in My Home
Page 18
The money situation was getting acute. I spoke in two local churches and quickly raised a collection. This led a young businessman to organize a fundraising dinner at his hotel and help me with a sizable cheque.
After two months of painful treatment, Judy was in a condition to return home to the US for further therapy. I persuaded Lufthansa to give her the gift of a first-class seat. With permission from the airport authorities, I drove Judy, ensconced in her wheelchair, right next to the plane. Then an airlines official, an ex-wrestler and a mountain of a man, simply picked her up like a doll and took her up to her seat. Judy, partly recovered and still in pain, would at least be with her family. I wished she could walk again.
Eight months later I was in the US and in Colorado for a vacation. I said to my host I wondered how Judy, a Colorado girl, was progressing, since he was one of the persons who had contributed to the collection for Judy’s treatment. He said he would try to find out.
Early the next day I was sitting in the portico, sipping coffee and watching a glorious Colorado morning emerge, when a car drove in and the door flung open. A beautiful young woman came out, strode to where I sat, and said laughingly, ‘Watch!’ Then she jumped three times, to show that she could do it.
Judy looked splendid. She could now not just walk, but also jump.
If she hadn’t hugged me then, I would have been embarrassingly teary-eyed and tongue-tied.
AFTERWORD
THE WRITING LIFE
MY LIFE HAS A taken a curious turn. I am writing a lot now. Of course, I have written in the past, sometimes quite a bit. But those were mostly letters and memoranda as an executive, and reports and aides-memoire of diplomatic work. Now I write essays and belles-lettres. Occasionally stories and poems. A very different kettle of fish.
The other difference is that in my work the writing felt secondary. The real business was to get things done. Words were ancillary to that. The main thing was what you achieved. Now, what I achieve are words. Words, hundreds of them, are primary. I don’t have to think beyond them, of the effects they produce. I just have to produce the words.
This is a big change in my life. I was constantly doing things, calling people, giving instructions, driving to meetings, receiving faxes, sending cables, attending conferences. I was often on my feet, greeting people, shaking hands, aiming a pointer at a chart. Now all I seem to do is to sit at a computer and use my fingers. These days few use a heavy-weight tome, like a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopaedia; those are all electronically accessible in a second. I am slowly, very slowly, getting accustomed to sitting at a desk for hours.
Richard Nixon, the disgraced US president, who retrieved a modicum of his respectability in the last decade by writing several books, summed up the requirement of his latter life in the coarse but pithy phrase ‘an iron bottom’. I seem to be developing it very sluggishly indeed.
I barely write a paragraph before I long for a sip of coffee. Another two, and I long to look at the headlines. Two pages down, I have a seductive itch for the breaking news on television. An hour or so later, the urge for a lunch break seems irresistible. I have come to see these as short escapes from the onerous yoke to which I have condemned myself.
That is not the only temptation of a new writer. Sometimes I am eager to tell a story and the words tumble out quickly. At other times, the emerging words leave me with a gnawing sense of discomfort. Surely I could have said that better! Isn’t there a simpler, clearer way to express that idea? Then I have no option but to turn to some lexical help and muddy the stream of my thought. I am torn between keeping on writing, no matter what, and stepping back and tweaking what I have written.
That is not the only dilemma. I hate doing what teachers tell you to do in schools: make a blueprint of what I am going to write and follow its guideposts while writing. I find the procedure painfully constricting; it takes the joy out of writing. I feel like I am separating my thinking from my writing and placing them in discrete boxes, depreciating both. I prefer the blueprint in my head, mainly because it shifts, sidles and switches, and leaves me free to write by instinct and follow the flow in my mind.
In this respect, I trail D. H. Lawrence who chose to follow what he called his daimon, his guiding spirit, untrammelled by his reason. Beyond minor corrections, he refused to edit his manuscript. If he disliked the result of his effort, he simply started all over again, giving another chance to his daimon to recreate a better opus. Only rarely do I transpose paragraphs or make a significant change to what I have written. Let the substance get the approbation of the readers or their condemnation on its merit.
On the other hand, I am seldom fully content with what has emerged. I can never go back to what I have written a month or even a week back without pruning an adverb or tightening a phrase. I am certainly perfectible. I want to write better tomorrow than I write today.
What do I mean when I talk of better writing?
The first thing I am trying to achieve is precision. I want to say just what I intend to say, no more, no less. I haven’t found such exactness easy to accomplish, but it is still my goal. I feel I haven’t done anything worthwhile if I have not said precisely what I meant to express. At the same time, I want to say it clearly. Nothing in written work exasperates me more than the need to extract the sense of a passage that remains defiantly obscure. I want to make it easy, as supremely easy as possible, for my reader to get what I am driving at. A third concern that I am aware of is elegance. Surely, I want to write some limpid prose that is easy on the eyes and the tongue. I want one to read me comfortably and enjoy it. I am not sure that I am able to meet all the three standards at the same time. In fact, I am quite sure I fail quite often. But I try and the guidelines remain in place.
It is a remarkable pleasure when somebody reads something I have written and likes it. Perhaps he or she takes the trouble to tell me. It is joyful news. Nothing, however, compares with pleasure of completing something I have started writing. It is a miracle that, where there was nothing, not even a ghost of an idea, a piece of writing has sprung from within me. It is a miracle that never stops stupefying me. It keeps me writing.
INDEX
Abu Dhabi
adoption
Nepal’s law
ageing
aging mother, caring for
Ahuja, Prem Bhagwandas
Ali, Syed Mujtaba
Allen, Woody
Alzheimer’s patient
American hikers
Annapurna tracks
Aquino, President Corazon
Arab hospitality
Arabs
Asian traders
Auden, W. H.
Babu, Brojo
Banerjee, Nikhil
Barber, Keith
Begum, Shamsad
Biju
birthday party
blue scarf
Cairo
Caniza, Roel
Cathy
Chatterjee, Dr
Chinese restaurant
Chinese tea
chopsticks
Chowdhury, Dr Roy
Clara
class differentiation among employees
coffeehouses
country doctor
country of birth
Craig
dad
Dagar Brothers
Dan
Dana
dating
David
Deep, Uncle
Dilip
diplomatic cocktail party
Dubey
Dutt, Utpal
Dylan
Earl
Edilma
Esther
film theatre
Fraser, Sir Andrew Henderson Leith
friends/friendship
good students
Grace
Grasshopper
Grewal & Sons
Gupta, Dr
Haiti
Hesse, Hermann
Hoa community
Ho Chi Minh
<
br /> home, being at
honour killing
houses
parents’ home
house-warming party
Isabella, Catherine
Jane
Jaya
Jeeves
Joe
Johnson, Dick
Judy
jury system, abolishment of
Kamal
Kathmandu
Kaufmann, Edgar
Khadka
Khan, Ustad Vilayat
Kirby
Koestler, Arthur
Kolkata
Lawrence, D. H.
librarian
library
Lina
Linh
L.R.
Lynh
Majid, Uncle
Maureen
Maya
meditation
Mehta, Ratilal Bhaichand
Menon, Krishna
Mike
Mila
Mirza Ghalib Street (Free School Street)
missionary elementary school
Monica
mother, discovering
mother’s scar
Mukherjee, Hirendranath
Nanavati, Kawas Manekshaw
neighbour
Nepal
Nepali Chiya
Nepali omelette
Nixon, Richard
Nyima, Rinpoche Chokyi
Olga
Overtoun Hall, Calcutta
pain
Parsi community
Penisula Hotel
Peter
Philippines coup d’état
photographs
pilots and flight attendants
Piña
Prince
Pritish
project management
Punwani and Brothers
purchase officer
Rachel
rain
Ram
relationship
ending
Reston
Rinpoche
Roy
Sam
Sanku
school annual play
school inspection
Sen, Keshab Chandra
Serge
Seto Gumba
Shorty
siblings
Silva, Joao De
social media
Stan
swimming
Sylvia
Tagore, Rabindranath
Tagore, Soumyendranath
Tara, Aunt
tea
Teaching Hospital
Tibetan Buddhist lineage
tip
Trafalgar Square
United Arab Emirates
US consulate, Kathmandu
V
Verghese
Vietnam
wedding day
White, John Campbell
Wilhelm
Wright, Brenda
Wright, Frank Lloyd
writing instrument
YMCA building
About the Book
Rare must be the person who knows all about himself
In The Stranger in My Home, former US diplomat Manish Nandy offers a collection of personal stories through an extraordinary travelogue. He looks back at the unusual people he has met over the decades and explores how they have shaped him. The mother he took care of in her old age; the couple he helped adopt a girl in a foreign land by challenging the norms; the women he loved but could not be with; the man who befriended him only to shatter his illusions; the Arab whose integrity was unparalleled; a young Rajiv Gandhi who did not want to join politics; a war veteran whose love story deeply touched him – all of them appear in the book and leave their mark.
Nandy has worked with the World Bank and been an international development advisor, but he chooses to focus on the human aspects of his encounters. In this collection of uncommon reminiscences, we meet people that love, hurt, and intrigue him as he faces his own fears and foibles. These are stories that will remind the readers of what they have done or could have done in their own lives.
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First published in India in 2019 by
HarperCollins Publishers
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Copyright © Manish Nandy 2019
P-ISBN: 978-93-5302-693-6
Epub Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 978-93-5302-694-3
While the episodes recounted in this book are drawn from real life, names of people and places have been changed in some instances.
Several chapters of this book have appeared in the Indian newspaper, The Statesman. We thank them for allowing us to reproduce the articles.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
Manish Nandy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover design & illustration : Tanaya Vyas
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