The Stranger in My Home

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  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

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  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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