by The Stranger in My Home- Facets of a Life (retail) (epub)
Roel had realized by now that I was interested in him. He seemed to lower his guard and spoke with unwonted candour. He said he did not like living alone, but he was hoping to get used to it. He missed his siblings; he couldn’t be in touch with them because his parents did not want it. His work earned him a living, but it was undemanding and meant little to him. He would like to have friends, but he didn’t have any. I told Roel that I would like to stay in touch with him and that he was welcome any time the students came to my home.
The next week Roel was not in the class. I asked two of the students, but they did not know why he hadn’t come.
The following week the students came to my house for another after-class party. Where was Roel? When I asked the students, one took me aside and told me that Roel had hung himself in his apartment the previous night.
Did he say anything to anybody? Did he leave behind a note?
Characteristically, Roel had left a two-sentence letter thanking his friends and well-wishers. He gave no reason for his decision.
24
WHAT IS FAIR?
BUSINESS IS NOT JUST BUSINESS FOR SOME
I HAD HEARD LEGENDS of Arab hospitality before I lived in the United Arab Emirates. Still the Arab concept of fairness sometimes eluded me.
I had driven to Dubai across the desert to meet a friend. The Arab preference for fresh fruit juice means that street-side shops, with large collection of fruits and industrial-strength juicers, are common. I walked into one and ordered a glass of pomegranate juice.
I sat down and was soon served an oversize glass of pomegranate juice, three-fourths full. It was much more than I expected and I slowly sipped the fresh juice with pleasure. Then I walked over to the counter to pay.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘You owe me?’ The store owner said with a noticeable frown. ‘I should be paying you!’ I was confused.
‘I tell this stupid assistant of mine,’ he added, ‘to make sure that we have a large stock of fruits every morning. I don’t want to lose face with customers who come in for fresh juice. So what does he do? When you asked for a glass of pomegranate juice, I found he didn’t get enough pomegranates for even one full glass of juice! I am ashamed that I had to give you only a half-glass of juice. It is outrageous.’
I tried my best to explain to the irate Arab that I had more than my fill of pomegranate juice and I was quite satisfied with the service. I would be honoured, I said, if he would accept some payment for the juice I had. He refused to accept a cent. He insisted he had badly failed a guest.
A couple of weeks later, I felt my Abu Dhabi apartment was a little too quiet and needed some music. The feeling was provoked when I opened the Khaleej Times one morning in my eighteenth floor office on Hamdan Street and noticed a full-page ad of Bang & Olufsen music systems in a store just opposite my office building. It advertised three models: basic, high-end, and one medium-level model with several attractive features. The last interested me, especially as the price seemed reasonable. I called the store, and a clerk identified himself as Khan and confirmed that the medium-level system was available for a price of $650.
I was about to leave for lunch and took the elevator to the ground level and walked across Hamdan Street to the store. I asked for Khan but a man in a flowing galabiya told me that Khan had stepped out for lunch, but that he, the store owner, would be glad to help me. I mentioned the middle-level music system I had noticed in the papers and my conversation with Khan, and expressed my intention to buy the model. He went to look for the model.
He returned several minutes later with a red face.
‘I am sorry we don’t have that model. Possibly it is sold out.’
‘But I just spoke to Khan a few minutes back and he confirmed that the model would be available,’ I remonstrated.
The owner listened and thought.
‘Khan told you the model would be available?’ he asked.
‘Yes, very clearly.’
‘And you walked over, on this hot summer day, just to get the music system?’ I nodded. I had walked less than five minutes.
‘I don’t have that music system. Maybe Khan made a mistake, or maybe the ad was a mistake. But I don’t want you to go back empty-handed. Please take the high-end model, and just pay the price of the medium model.’
‘But that is a difference of $300? I don’t want you to suffer a loss.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It will be a shame if you have to go back from my store without a music system.’
He refused all negotiation on the price and insisted that I take the high-end model at the price of the lower model. All I could do was to thank him and leave a trifle embarrassed.
25
HOUSE OF DREAMS
SOME DREAMS BETTER REMAIN DREAMS
I HAVE TWO STRONG and disparate feelings about houses.
First, I don’t like to own houses. Houses are for living in, and I am perfectly content to live in rented houses. I would pay the dues every month and let the landlord look after such prosaic things as fixing the plumbing and painting the deck. Some fusspot may say, ‘You can’t then have just the kind of house you like.’ Nobody can. Practically everybody buys a house some building company has designed, and such designs invariably reflect what the average buyer wants. Rent or buy, your choice is always limited by what the market offers.
Second, I don’t like to change houses. That is putting it mildly. I hate the idea of moving. Imagine having to put all your things in boxes, taking them somewhere else, breaking some of them in the process or at least mixing them all, then rearranging them in a new place, and having to remember where you placed them when you need them. It is the closest thing to a nightmare. What avails all this pain? A larger house, a modern kitchen or a fancier bathroom? You compromise the quality of your life for a mess of pottage.
I realize these ideas are sacrilegious. Buying a home is the great middle-class dream. It is the asset you must acquire after you have bought a car. It is like buying a book you will not read or acquiring a piano you never intend to play. If a home is to live in, the quality of living is what matters, and the idea of ownership is not just secondary, but irrelevant.
The idea of moving up, from a smaller house to a large one, from one neighbourhood to a more elite one, is sacrosanct. Everybody does it. Many believe that not to do so is to give up on the finer things of life. In truth, you have only given up on an immensely painful transition for a reasonably tranquil and comfortable existence.
Think for a second of the ultimate dream. Imagine you have the time and money to acquire the land, hire an architect and build a house that exactly matches your notion of an ideal home. I had occasionally entertained the idea that it might be a superlative thing to create a house of one’s dream and live in it. The idea promptly hit the dust when I visited what many consider the most beautiful home ever built, by one of the greatest architects who ever lived.
Edgar Kaufmann, who owned the most prominent department store in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, owned and visited a cabin in the Laurel Highlands region of the Allegheny Mountains, in rural southwestern Pennsylvania forty miles from the city. What he liked most about the cabin was that he had a view of a picturesque waterfall in the Bear Run area. He thought of building a summer home there, whence he could see the waterfall daily. He engaged an architect he had heard about from his son studying architecture. He was simply the greatest living architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
The charmingly named Fallingwater mansion in Pennsylvania, built in 1935, is stunningly beautiful. It is a National Landmark and Smithsonian lists it as ‘a place to visit before you die’. I almost felt my heart stop when I had my first look. It is simply the loveliest home one could have. It was imaginative, breath-taking, truly a house to dream about. But the Kaufmanns don’t live there and haven’t for a long while.
I wouldn’t either. It is a house to dream about, not to live in. As I walked into each room, I asked myself if I could live there, and I in
stantly knew the answer. No. I realized for the first time that, while we don’t want to live, eat, work or sleep in an ugly room, we don’t necessarily want to do any of those things in the most beautiful of rooms.
Kaufmann wanted to see the waterfall from his home; Wright had his own idea and built a house right on top of the waterfall. The thousands who visit the house in the Steward Township of the Fayette county have a great view of the house and the waterfall. But I doubt Edgar Kaufmann felt he had the view he wanted in the first place.
26
LET US PLAY
THE ONE I MUST LISTEN TO
IN A DISTANT CITY – it seems unbearably distant to me – in the south of United States, lives the world’s most charming woman.
I don’t think Monica has any idea what she means to me. I fear I don’t have any words for it either.
She arrived on a bright March afternoon and, tiny as she was, seemed to fill our large Manila home. As a baby she didn’t cry much, but when she did it was loud and strong. She wanted her sustenance, and she wanted it quick. As a child, she wanted to explore every nook and cranny, touch and feel every shining object, ask a thousand questions about anything we used in the bathroom or the kitchen.
Round face, sparkling eyes. Her little but sturdy limbs could barely contain her gushing energy, as she rushed from one room to another; one floor to another. Jane, her mother, was writing a letter to a friend and had left it unfinished on her desk; Monica climbed on the chair and finished it with large abstract sketches of the pen also left conveniently on the desk. I had just bought a magnum bottle of expensive cologne that Monica had seen me splash on my chin after shower; she somehow managed to reach the bottle and then had a shower of the cologne.
As Jane and I both worked full time, we had engaged a young live-in babysitter, Piña, whom Monica ran ragged, insisting on going to the park next door at all hours. At the park, Piña told me, Monica ran up and down the slide, swinging higher and higher on the swing. Our cook, Rose, was happy with Monica, for she ate with gusto anything that was placed in front of her, told Rose it was good and asked for more.
Her closest friend was Peter, the shy son of my Filipina colleague and her German husband, who called Monica pronouncing the first syllable exactly the way they would in my hometown of Kolkata. They played ‘doctor and nurse’ and I was struck by the constancy with which Monica took the doctor’s role. With a serious, almost stern mien, she would ask the nurse, Peter, to examine the patient, me.
Once when Peter wasn’t available, she came to the study, where I was toiling at a knotty report, and announced her presence with a firm, demanding, ‘Daddy!’ Intoned that way, the word meant, ‘You have wasted enough time doing what you are doing. Don’t you think you should now come and play with me?’
‘Darling, Daddy would love to play with you, but he has to first complete this report. Could we please play after another half-hour?’
Monica withdrew but in barely five minutes turned up again, ‘Daddy, are you done?’
If I turned her away with another explanation, she would leave, but return in another five minutes, ‘Daddy, are you done?’
By now Daddy’s focus was lost, his report-centred heart had melted. ‘All right, Monica. Let us play.’
The smile of triumph on her face told me that the game did not matter as long as I succumbed meekly to her wiles.
That voice, that smile. I succumb just as readily today.
Monica started school in Nepal, where I was once a guest speaker. Her tiny braid shook with excitement as the principal introduced me as ‘Monica’s dad’. When Monica finished school in Egypt, I could not attend her graduation ceremony, but the picture of her sun-drenched face as her cap flew high against a backdrop of pyramids remains seared in my memory.
Unlike her dad, Monica likes to move, be it New Orleans, Savannah, or Pittsburgh. She takes a technology job and switches to Charleston. Monica decides to marry, buy a house and settle down. Characteristically, she chooses to marry in the Hispanic splendour of the Dominican Republic, where she and I flew kites in a park when she was six and I had taken her to Santo Domingo for a vacation.
‘Dad, I have some news for you.’
‘Darling, tell me.’
‘I am going to have a baby.’
‘What! You are a baby. How can you have a baby?’
‘Dad, you forget – I am thirty.’
‘You are right, Monica. I forgot. It is wonderful news.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I hope it looks like you.’
I realize moments later that is a very rash hope. If the kid looks anything like Monica, speaks like Monica, he or she will be just as hopelessly irresistible and sweep through our home like a whirlwind.
If the kid stands at the door and asks, ‘Are you done?’ Whatever I am working on, I must capitulate, ‘All right. Let us play.’
27
A STONE THROUGH THE WINDOW
TO AVOID THE COMPANY OF MISERY
MY FATHER’S FRIEND, DR Roy Chowdhury, a well-known scholar and writer, was travelling in a train and reading a book. A young boy, standing on the bridge in a railway station, playfully threw a stone as the train moved out. The stone went through the window, crashed his glasses and struck his left eye along with glass splinters. He went to a hospital.
When he came to our home several weeks later, my parents were aghast to see his face, an eyepatch under his new glasses. My mother nearly spilt the tea she was bringing for him.
My father, greatly pained, exclaimed, ‘How could the boy do this to you?’
Dr Roy Chowdhury was remarkably calm and reconciled. He said, ‘The boy did what he did. Now I have to keep doing what I have always done.’
He simply took the tea from my mother’s hand and sat in the corner chair he preferred. When he saw me standing mutely next to his chair, clearly distressed, he just spread out his hand and took mine.
This happened decades earlier, but I can still see the scene vividly in my mind. A middle-sized light-boned man, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Dr Roy Chowdhury moved spryly and spoke in a quiet, deliberate voice. He wrote solemn books on literary figures, analysing their social context and message. Mildness was his style; he did not speak a bellicose word or even laugh boisterously. When he placed his tea cup on the saucer, you would not hear a sound.
His wife had passed away six years ago, leaving Dr Roy Chowdhury feeling as helpless as a child. Though much younger than him – she had been his student – she ran his home for him, leaving him free for his esoteric quest. She died shortly after their two sons had left home to study engineering. They cared little for literature or their father’s abstruse studies.
Dr Roy Chowdhury had reorganized his life, minimized his possessions and placed all non-academic chores in the hands of a trusted domestic. He was, in short, quite alone.
If he felt lonely, he didn’t say it. He devoted himself more energetically to his work. Years later I went back to his books and tried to read them as a key to him rather than his subjects. They were clearly the result of hard work, precisely written and meticulously documented. Singularly lacking in stirring insights, they carefully analysed the material and offered carefully worded conclusions. I was not impressed but I understood.
He was telling us, in effect, that he had found somebody worthy and delved into his or her books to find what they were worth. He was doing no more than leaving landmarks for others to explore and come to their own conclusions. He went through a number of surgeries to try to restore vision to his left eye. Those were long and painful, but Dr Roy Chowdhury went through those quietly and patiently.
When at the end, he lost all vision in the left eye, he taught himself to work only with his right eye and determinedly went on with his work. The next time I remember him visiting our home was when he presented his new book to my mother, ‘in poor exchange,’ he said, ‘for the superb meals’ she had served him. I knew the meals to have been modest, and there really had been only
a few of them, but his gracious exaggeration pleased me and mother’s face was radiant.
There was no encore, for Dr Roy Chowdhury passed away eight months later. He had, however, managed to complete his last book, except the end notes and indices he loved to painstakingly check and re-check, to avert the slightest lapse from accuracy. There was even a handwritten memorandum of the points he wanted the publisher to observe while printing, proofing and binding the book.
The last point was that a certain employee, whose competence Dr Roy Chowdhury trusted, should be asked to proof the manuscript. He explained that, unlike on previous occasions, he could not proof it himself as his eye, quite singular, was feeling some fatigue. That was the only reference to his accident anyone could recall.
28
A NURTURING EYE
TRIGGER FOR A HUMANE TOUCH
TALL, WELL-COIFFED, ELEGANTLY DRESSED, she looked what she was: the senior vice president of Washington’s second largest and most powerful industrial association. I had been referred to her by a university dean who had read my writings and liked my speech in a conference.
It was my first month in the US and I was trying to jump-start my career in a new land. I had been to several interviews, but the moment the interviewers realized that I was a newcomer to the country and had no US experience, I was politely shown the door.
Esther was very correct but very different. She asked hard questions, followed up with harder ones, but they were all substantive, to check my professional timbre not my personal tint. I also felt, though I was not certain, a quiet geniality behind the cultivated impersonality, as if she didn’t want her kindness to show. I felt comfortable with her.