Christopher Schilling was a dedicated agronomist, who joined the Foreign Agricultural Service and served twelve countries in Asia and Latin America. He loved the technical nature of his work, but he did not care for working with the people he called “natives,” whom he found indolent and unintelligent. He often described his role derisively as spoon-feeding the uninitiated.

Vaughan Powell, scion of a distinguished east coast family, joined Foreign Service after graduating from Yale, worked as a Political Officer and steadily climbed the ladder until he retired as a Chargé d’Affaires, denied ambassadorship, he thought, only because his family’s known allegiance was with the wrong political party. He liked living abroad, though with few links to the local people, for he preferred to be a recluse.
​
I knew neither Christopher nor Vaughan, but gathered their stories in some detail from their sons, Steve and Hank, both of whom were my colleagues and, later, friends. They both had a childhood in the US, and then spent their adolescence in different countries with their itinerant father. Their experiences were quite different and yet they both came to the same conclusion: the way they had seen their father – and their mother – live abroad was not the way life should be lived in another country.

That life was interesting but artificial. It was ersatz and false. It is like drinking latte, but tasting only the top fringe where the cream has made a pattern. It was also self-defeating, for you can achieve little in a country where you have scant connection with the people. You file reports of great success, but the results are worse than ephemeral. The sons sensed this and wanted to live and act differently.
​
Steve and Hank too ended up living a large part of their life overseas. Steve was a professor in sociology whose interest in institution building led to several long stints abroad. Hank worked for a consulting group in Chicago and long-term projects in Asia and Africa gave him close intimacy with poorer countries. Both avoided four-star hotels and elite clubs, and spent all their time with villagers and city youth rather than wizened bureaucrats and businessmen.

None of them found it easy. Language was always an issue. Even when they spoke the local language, the idiom was different. Even with trust, people had different ideas of candor and far from forthright with foreigners. People said what they thought was polite to say and told you what they thought you wanted to hear.

The legacy of their predecessors, people like their fathers, was another hurdle. Local people, accustomed to playing second fiddle to expatriate advisors, were loath to risk their necks and venture a dissenting opinion. To make them feel equal, at least equal enough to express a divergent view, took some doing and several months.
​
Cultures, Steve and Hank found, took a long time to budge. Governments or local authorities that presided over large projects were eager to take foreign funds and – what they took as a chaser to the whisky – foreign advice, no matter how good they thought the second was. In turn, donor groups long inured to having their way without question, were resistant to spending money or time on discussing alternatives suggested by local individuals, let alone trying to implement them.

Unlike Steve and Hank, I was not only born in a developing country, I had lived and worked there half my life and was attuned to the culture. Yet, working for large groups like the World Bank or the US and Commonwealth foreign aid programs, I had quickly come up against the barriers that had fought and frustrated them.
​
No, going native was not the answer. Nor could one stay the resolute expatriate and expect people and results to fall in line. It is a tough business trying to build trust, evoke genuine participation, and work, slowly but steadily, toward developing a genuine partnership.

​“17th floor, please,” I said.
 
The elevator cage rose with a mild jolt and sped upward.
 
I entered the large office of the American aid mission. It was midday and the bright Manila sun filtered through the large windows.
 
“Hello, Mr. Nandy,” said Joanna at the front desk.
 
“Hello, Joanna,” I replied, “I have some work to do in the library. But, first, I need to talk briefly with my friend, Richard Wright.”
 
“I am sorry, Mr. Wright is running a seminar in Baguio today. He will back tomorrow afternoon. You can see him tomorrow, I suppose.”
 
Baguio was another town in the Philippines, in the mountains.
 
I went to get a cup of coffee before settling down in the library. As I turned on the machine, something unusual happened.
 
The stream of hot coffee, instead of entering the cup, landed on my hand. Before I could react to my burning hand, the machine itself toppled and started falling from its stand. As I stepped back, surprised, cups and plates started falling from the shelves and crashing on the floor.  In a moment all the chair and tables in the room started wildly zigzagging across the room. The floor shook violently, bringing down two large cabinets.

​It was an earthquake, I finally recognized. It took me time, because I had never seen or heard of an earthquake this severe.
 
I ran to the threshold and held its frame, for I had heard thresholds provide some safety. It seemed a dubious advice, for the entire floor was undulating wildly and the threshold frame seemed a puny toy about to be crumpled.
 
It took all my effort to hold on to the door while waves after waves shook the entire tall building left to right and, it seemed, up and down. Huge shelves were coming down, one by one, and even the large desks slid in different directions. The noise of heavy objects falling from shelves, desks and cupboards filled my ears, while screams of people from every corner of the floor rose above the din.

​I knew the others felt what I was feeling: quite helpless, like a child being flung around by a pitiless monster every which way. I could see the panicky faces of people holding on desperately to desks, door knobs, window sills.
​
After what seemed an eternity the earthquake stopped. There were two or three mild aftershocks. Then the building stood still.
 
People stood with bated breath. Some had evidently been crying in panic. The librarian, a large man who was earlier a marine officer, stood nearest to me and had a large wet patch on his trousers. He had clearly soiled his pants. Joanna, the receptionist, appeared deathly pale and seemed to have fainted.
 
We were lucky. The building – I doubted it was constructed to withstand such a strong tremor – still stood. I walked down the stairs all the seventeen floors and emerged on the sunny, busy street I had left an hour earlier.

​It took two hours for the news of Richard Wright to come through from Baguio. He was leading a seminar when the roof of the conference room started caving in. A piece of debris hit his secretary, Nora, and she doubled on the floor in pain. To protect her, Richard bent over her and the entire beam collapsed on his neck. The secretary survived. Richard did not.

​What language do I dream in, my friend Vanessa asked.
 
Which really was the language closest to my heart?
 
The few dreams I remember in the morning have few words. When I try to recall the words, I remember only the anxiety or longing behind them, not the actual words. If I have to guess, I use two languages. Maybe even three. At a stretch, four.

Let me explain. I grew up in eastern India and spoke Bengali, spoken by a quarter billion people in the world. I loved its vast and powerful literature, its lilt and cadence, its myriad, mysterious accents, and the magical clouds orators seemed to weave with its haunting, sinuous words. I set about learning it well. When I debated or wrote in the school magazine, adults began to notice I was somewhat adept with words.

​I wanted to do better. I wanted to know the roots of words, how they were created or modified. I took lessons in Sanskrit and Pali, languages from which Bengali evolved, read all I could lay hand on, and gained proficiency in both. Now I could split every word in its components and tell you the meaning of each.

The skill meant nothing when I went to college, where the instruction was in English. My father, always supportive, said, “If you have learned a language well, you can learn another.” I set about learning English well. It helped that both my parents knew English and several of their friends and colleagues did not know Bengali. I learned to read English newspapers and to carry on a conversation, but I knew real mastery lay far ahead.
 
I began to read more and more, and started paying greater attention to style. Addison and Chesterton impressed me with their elegance. But my eyes opened wider when I delved into Conrad and Nabokov. Their effortless mastery of words, the capacity to commandeer unexpected phrases for unusual impact, made me interested in handling language with their wizardry. I realized I had used language like the cleaver of a butcher; now I decided to use it like the scalpel of a surgeon. Of course I wanted elegance, but I also wanted precision – and everything else. I wanted my own idiom.
 
My dreams might have turned bilingual at that point. An accident intervened. I was traveling in a train that broke down, and the passengers were stranded in a small station for hours. I finished the books I was reading and turned to another passenger who was carrying two books. We swapped and I had my first encounter with Camus. That heady experience led to Sartre and Malraux, and the determination to learn French.

​A similar chance encounter with Jorge Luis Borges, the blind author from Argentina, turned me on to Spanish and I learned to speak Spanish.
 
The languages were certainly a help later in my diplomatic work and my ceaseless travels with a UN group.  But the biggest difference it made was not that windfall. Friends who note the convenience of traveling abroad and working smoothly with foreigners miss the point.
 
Languages do more than confer a convenience. They change your life, if you will let them. They simply add an edge to your experience.
 
I explained to Vanessa the fact most important to me: A language is a different way of looking. More, a different way of thinking and feeling.
 
When you learn a new language, you walk into a new universe. A world, with a different culture, awaits you. If you want, you can be a different, more multi-dimensional person.
 
None of the two great masters of the English language I mentioned, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, spoke English as their mother tongue. Conrad, originally Konrad, was Polish and did not speak a word of English until he was in his twenties. Nabokov wrote nine novels in Russian before he ventured into writing an English novel.
 
This is no accident. Speaking and writing a language from you childhood gives you an intimacy with the language no foreigner can match. That is an advantage so blatant that it blinds us to its disadvantage: once you are so wrapped up in a language, it is hard to escape its traditional byways or avoid its typical metaphors, phrases and expressions. Like a persistent paramour, the intimacy it offers is both easy and comfortable – and tenacious and choking.
 
An affair with another strange language can be difficult but liberating.
 
I told Vanessa I would keep dreaming in more than one language.

​When I left the US Foreign Service, I locked up my house in Washington and went to India, the country of my birth, to spend some time with my brother, Pritish. I was to assist with his large movie production company and provide companionship to my aging mother, then ninety.
 
Pritish had a magnificent penthouse apartment with a sea-side view, and I surprised him by asking to stay in the same room as mother. Partly it was to help her if she had to get up at night. More, I wanted to be near her and stay as close to her as I was fifty years earlier.
 
Mother and I had always been close. I adored her gentle, affectionate ways, her soft-spoken style, her unfailing concern for people she knew. I also admired her ability to look at situations calmly, not judge too quickly, see both sides and be fair. These made her a good teacher and, later, an exceptional administrator. Her students loved her and her associates worshipped her, even when she took unwelcome decisions.

​Fifty years had passed. Things were not the same. Mother was ninety and frail, a shadow of what she was earlier. She forgot so many things doctors thought she verged on dementia. I wanted to look after her. I wanted to be the dutiful son and take care of her. So, with her permission, I moved into her room.
 
I told her the first day, “Ma, I know you like to be independent. But, please, while I am here, do let me do a few things for you.”
 
She readily assented and said that “it would be a pleasure.”
 
But, when I returned from work that evening, I found that she had taken out my shirts and vests from the suitcase and neatly arranged them in the cupboard. When I remonstrated, she explained that since I had just arrived and possibly didn’t know where to place things, she was initially helping me out.
 
The next morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, she turned up with a cup of tea. I protested again.
 
“Ma, it is I who should be bringing you the tea.”
 
“But I have already had my tea. Since I wasn’t doing anything, I thought I might make some tea for you.”
 
This wasn’t going the way I had planned.
 
That evening as we lay in bed, read magazines and chatted desultorily, I felt we had achieved some accord. She would stop doing things for me, and would let me do a few things for her, like making the occasional tea for her.
 
Before she went to sleep, she told me that I looked tired and should go to sleep early. I kept reading and, the moment she went to sleep, I turned out the lights and tiptoed out of the room. I went to the study and started the computer to work on a project.
 
Two hours later I was startled when a hand was gently placed on my shoulder as I worked.
 
“You are working too hard,” said my mother. “You should now come to bed.”
 
I had a blinding flash of epiphany.
 
I was wrong to imagine that I could look after my mother or that she would let me do that. Fifty years made no difference at all. She was still my mother and she was still going to look after me, no matter how big, strong and independent I imagined myself.

​Dilip was a cash-strapped student. He had no relations, no money, no resources. All he had was an idea.

​Somebody had referred him to my father who allowed him to stay rent-free in an outhouse we were not using. A gaunt young man, Dilip had unkempt hair and large, shining eyes. When I met him, he did not display any special deference because I was the son of his benefactor. It took me a while to realize that such worldly tact was utterly alien to his nature. Instead he told me to come and see him another time, more convenient to him, when he could tell me of an important project.
 
That project, when we got to talk about it, was a novel he was writing that was to change the concept of a modern novel. He had no doubt that he had conceived an idea that was so unique that it would radically alter the notion of a novel. He had been, he said, slogging in poorly paid jobs, tutoring students for long hours, eating bread and soup and skipping meals all together sometimes, to focus on the novel, the major work of his life.

​After we had talked a couple of times, he finally let me read the initial chapters of his novel. I was shocked. I found it very pedestrian fiction, structurally loose and, contrary to my expectation, run of the mill in its content. It was a mediocre, unimpressive piece of work that, in my judgment, would be iredeemable by later chapters. I could not bring myself to tell Dilip this; nor did I believe that, if I did, he would pay the slightest heed to my opinion. With a sinking heart, I realized that he was half-starving and killing himself for an effort that would not bring him the breakthrough he was hoping for.
 
I avoided him for a while, for I feared a conversation would entail some discussion of his novel and I might not be able to disguise my true reaction. When I met him again, he looked even more gaunt than before and, without mincing words, he said he didn’t have money enough for food and needed a loan of a hundred bucks. I truthfully told him that I didn’t have that kind of money to spare and gave him the thirty bucks I was carrying. That was the last time I saw him.

​Five days later a neighbor called an ambulance when he saw Dilip collapsing on the street. He needed an emergency surgery and, reportedly because of his poor state, died on the operation table.
 
When the outhouse he lived in was cleared, somebody found and brought to my father the manuscript of his novel. He passed it on to me, asking if I had any suggestion about what to do with it. It was still an incomplete novel.
 
I wished I could have given him more than the thirty bucks I gave him.

​My uncle worked for an elite club and moved into a large house in an elite area that he felt better matched his social status. Like other houses in the area, a tall fence ran all around his home.
 
Since his son was my closest school buddy, I goaded my parents to arrive early at the house warming party. I loved the immaculate backyard lawn and played with my friend there while the adults chatted inside. But I soon tired of the confined space, as our home had no fence of the kind. I wanted to venture out; it took all my cousin’s persuasive power to keep me inside. He had been warned not to step out of the fence, as traffic on the road beyond posed a hazard.

​My uncle was proud of his new mansion and took his guests on a detailed tour. Over dinner everybody spoke of its spacious atrium, elegant design, chic furniture and opulent drapes. My parents politely added to the discussion and spoke of the well-lit rooms upstairs and the attractive view.
 
The last was an unfortunate trigger for my nagging thought from earlier. I turned to my uncle and said I loved his lawn, but it did not have the view our house had. In fact, I added, it had no view at all because of the unsightly high fence.
 
All conversation stopped. My uncle, who had looked pleased with the trend of discussion so far, suddenly had a crestfallen look. My parents were deeply embarrassed by my gaffe.
 
They told me a month later, however, that my uncle had had the fence taken down.

​My parents were educators in India; they were far from affluent. I never went without clothes, but I did not have fancy clothes. I could see what some of my classmates in school were wearing. I wanted to wear starchy white shirts and spotless white trousers. I also wanted colorful shirts, stylish dark trousers and shoes with shiny straps. I did not have them.
 
I was lucky to get a lucrative job when I came out of the university. I could not believe the amount of money I made at the end of each month. I could buy all the clothes I wanted and I did. I filled my wardrobe with all kinds of clothes that had caught my fancy.

​It was at that time that I met Dev, an engineer who also worked for the same company. He was only a few years older than me, but appeared, more for his demeanor than for his looks, much older. He was a quiet person, who spoke selectively, apparently on occasions that aroused him for some reason, and on those occasions he was precise and forthright.
 
Dev drew my attention in a meeting, where he was the last to speak but immediately got everybody to agree to a solution he proposed. He drew my attention later for a reason of another sort: he always wore white at work, and at other times invariably wore black, without exception. I asked him about this when I came to know him better.

​“I realized some time back,” he said, “that I could not pay attention to the few things I cared for – music, my health, watching and photographing birds, reading and understanding modern history – unless I withheld attention from dozens of other things in my life. I try to live simply, eat simply and dress simply. It was a part of the last that I chose to simplify my choice of clothes by selecting just two colors, black and white. I like these colors, but I also greatly like how simply I can now choose my clothes.”
 
I was tempted to ask if it wouldn’t be simpler to widen the range of colors and buy from a wider selection of clothes, but I held my breath. As the days passed, my instinctive opposition, even a little of resentment, slowly dissolved, and I began to ponder over his essential point that, to focus on what one considers important, one may have to place a couple of other things on a back burner.
 
I could never go back to my earlier interest in adding to my wardrobe. 

The day had finally arrived. My daughter’s wedding, for which we had been getting ready for months, was now taking place.

The guests had come. The flowers were in place. The chapel looked imposing yet cozy.

My daughter, in her chosen dress, carefully coiffed, looked pretty. She took my arm, we walked without missing a step. I passed her arm to the groom and the ceremony continued. The pastor gave a short, sensible homily.

Then we moved to the celebratory dinner. I said a toast; the witticisms went down well. The food was good. People seemed pleased. Even the weather was congenial.
​
It was a perfect wedding.

​I came back home and wondered what was gnawing in my heart.
 
Then I realized that – though I had long known of my daughter’s budding romance, though I had met her boyfriend several times and liked him, though I had known about the impending wedding and the new town she would be living in far from my home – I hadn’t quite gotten ready for the truth that she was never again coming back to stay with me.
 
The little girl was gone.

​When the new class teacher wanted us to write an essay on the monsoon season, I was pleased. The school was in Kolkata, India, and two months earlier I had experienced first-hand the vagaries of the monsoon in the waterlogged streets of the city. The teacher had a reputation for being demanding – students called him The Stickler – but I guessed I could please him.
 
My classmates wrote the standard essay, describing flora and fauna of the season and explaining its scientific impact. Mine was entirely different: it unfolded like an adventure story, of a boy who braves the monsoon gales, wades through rain-soaked streets, meets playful street urchins and has a glorious set of experiences that he can muse over and cherish.
 
When I took the essay to the class, a friend read it avidly, and then it passed from hand to hand until every classmate had read it, excitedly discussed it and told me how it had regaled him. 

​The following day, however, the Stickler had a very different reaction. He publicly called it bizarre, read a few passages from it, ending each time with a derisive remark. He scoffed at the entire effort, citing it as the ravings of a puerile mind that lacked any notion of how to write a decent essay.
 
It was demeaning and I could not bear it in silence. I stood up and said he was free to grade my essay any way he liked, but he was not entitled to scorn my effort to write something original and creative. I could see that I had the silent support of my classmates. So I went on to add that, disparage it as he might, he needed to know what I knew: that all his students had read my essay, liked it and had rated it far above the routine essays they had themselves produced.
 
Stickler was suddenly without words. Perhaps he knew he had said more than he should have. He looked at the class and realized that he had lost the round. He gathered his papers and walked slowly out of the room. Just then the bell mercifully rang.
 
I found it hard to forget his unkindness. But I also wondered if I too had spoken too much and taken the wind out of an earnest, spirited teacher.