The plane was full of tourists flying from Delhi to Jaipur, a popular vacation spot in India.

​My eyes were riveted on one passenger in particular: demure smile, twinkling eyes, auburn hair, bright blue scarf. When the plane landed, she walked from one end of the tiny airport to the other, as if searching for someone. When she passed me, I asked, “Is anything wrong?”

A car was supposed to pick her up, she said, but it wasn’t there, and she couldn’t remember the name of her hotel. She was clearly disconcerted. I told her she could come to my hotel and make some calls: there were only three main hotels in town. It turned out we were staying in the same one, and we had dinner that night. I found out she was from Germany and would return there after her vacation.
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Eight months later I was in Frankfurt for a conference and had a free evening, so I called her. She picked me up from my hotel, and we had dinner at her place. I ended up staying the night. After I returned home to India, we phoned and wrote each other often. Her photograph had the pride of place on my desk: the smile, the auburn hair, the scarf. But over time the distance and demands of work took their toll, and the relationship languished.

Five years later I missed a connection at a London airport and ordered an espresso while I waited. I looked up from the first sip to see a pair of twinkling eyes and auburn hair. It was her. We embraced, and she told me she worked in England now. I abandoned my flight and took her to my favorite Westminster restaurant.

Over dessert, I asked, “Do you ever wear scarves anymore?” She searched in her bag, found a scarf, and placed it around her neck. The same bright blue scarf.

​                                                         I could have wept.

“We will see you then on Friday morning,” and the call ended. A management consultant, temporarily in Delhi, I seldom received a call in which both father and son expressed a keen desire to have my counsel. Though I had known the son in college and met the father twice over cordial dinners, the urgency in their tone hinted brewing tension.

Rahul Sharma had worked twelve years in a large chemical corporation in India before he left and started a modest polymer company of his own. He started with two employees, a chemist and an assistant, and ended with twenty before the year was out. His technical knowledge was sound but short, his business knowledge swift and swelling. He was good in turning out ingenious products industry needed; he was even better garnering business from skeptical clients. In ten years Sharma’s company was medium in size and large in profit.
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He dreamed, not unlike other entrepreneurs, to turn over the executive functions to his son, who had emerged with laurels from an engineering college, and focus on what he liked most: develop new products and new business. Raj, his son, however, had his own preferences. He wanted to go for higher studies to the US and begged his father to spare him for three years. Rahul couldn’t say No to his only child, whose ambition had a business angle to boot. Raj went abroad and kept his word. He completed his studies at Caltech on time with distinction and bought a plane ticket for Delhi. He bought, however, two tickets, to keep his word with his coed, Sandra, whom he had been dating for two years.

​Following a lavish wedding in Defense Colony and a honeymoon in a palace hotel in Rajasthan, the young couple – yes, both – started work in Rahul’s plant. Problems started almost immediately. Raj found most of his father’s ideas quaint and old-fashioned. He felt current practices needed quick change. Though Sandra maintained a discreet silence in discussions, it was clear to Rahul that his son had developed his critique with Sandra’s help. More humiliating, they expressed their reservations often in front of Rahul’s old employees, saying they wanted greater employee participation.
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That is when they agreed to ask my help. Raj, the son, needed support and sought it in an old acquaintance. Rahul, the father, unaccountably trusted me and doubtless saw me as a way to reach his apparently estranged son. I set non-negotiable ground rules: no disputes or debates, certainly not in public view, and the business had to run on agreed lines until differences were resolved.

In the first phase I listened long to Rahul, made notes and then conveyed them to Raj. I repeated the process until I was sure Raj realized Rahul’s concerns. Then I had many solo sessions with Raj and conveyed his ideas to Rahul after each. When I felt both had been prepped, I brought them together for a guided discussion. I would select only one item for discussion, naturally choosing them in reverse order of their flammability, and firmly exclude all digressions. Both were practical people and they readily ceded to my push for a resolution. In six weeks we had an agreed agenda and in ten the relationship seemed to work.

All this time, Sandra had been on vacation in the Periyar Lake, readily subscribing to my suggestion that the key father-son relationship had to be straightened before her role could be clarified. The tension between her and her father-in-law was evident, and I suggested to their surprise that Sandra work with Rahul on innovations rather than with Raj on operations. This reflected my assessment of Sandra as a remarkably sharp-witted engineer who might be better with new products than with old operations, involving traditional Indian clients.

I left the assignment after a year, to mutual recognition that fair results had been achieved. I heard from all three periodically and the news was good.

My diplomatic work and travel then interrupted my links with them, as with many other friends.

Seven years later I was on a short visit to India and had dinner with Raj. He said the company was doing well and now exporting to Malaysia and seeking collaboration in California. He was the President, but his father, Rahul, continued as a part-time Technical Advisor.
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When I asked about Sandra, he hesitated briefly, then said, “We divorced four years ago. She went back to her home in Sacramento. I don’t hear from her.” After a long pause, he added, “But Dad can tell you all about her. You know, he is a widower. He goes to California each year and, in fact, he stays with her. Yes, he can tell you all her news.”

Dale, a distant cousin and a city cop, was a notably friendly guy. He was chatty and high-spirited, always ready to take us out for a drink. It took me time to notice a kink: he never talked about something the rest of us were eager to talk about, women. He would quickly change the subject or leave the room if the conversation went in that direction.

He went much further the day I introduced him to my new fiancée and joyously told him of my wedding plans. He sat me down the next day to tell me about the mistake I was about to make. He virtually interrogated me about my future bride and advised me to probe deeper. Women couldn’t be trusted, he told me point-blank, and I needed to be careful.

I mentioned his paranoia to an aunt who smiled knowingly and decided to unravel a page of family history. Dale, she told me, had to keep long work hours because of his city beat, even when he got married. His new bride pleaded, argued, remonstrated. Dale, proud of his responsibilities, said it couldn’t be helped. Six months later, he came back home in the middle of the day to pick up a dossier he had studied the night before and had left behind by mistake. His wife was in bed with another man. He got divorced. He never dated again. And he hated women, the aunt said, with intense and consistent passion.

He came to my wedding anyway. He played his social role deftly, as usual, and was genial with all. He talked, a lot it seemed to me, to the bride’s young and pretty cousin, Toni. Toni seemed to find his joviality pleasant and his cop stories hilarious.

Two months later, Toni radiantly announced her decision to marry Dale. Dale was twenty-two years older than her, she was told, and not keen on marriage, but Toni wouldn’t be dissuaded. Her persistence paid off. Twelve weeks later they were married.
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Dale remains a very friendly guy, ever ready to take us out for a drink. But, everybody concurs, he has become an incurable bore on a subject from which it seems nearly impossible to wean him. Women, he tells us at every conceivable opportunity, are very caring, totally trustworthy, simply wonderful. 

​My friend, Sajjan, grew up in a remote village in Nepal and walked four miles to school every day. The school was a mud hut with thatched roof, where the teacher wrote lessons on an old blackboard and all the students copied in silence. They spoke only when asked to speak, and an eager rod greeted any infraction. Sajjan wanted to understand a few things he read, but the teacher, Shresthaji, wanted him to memorize them instead. Twice he had asked a question, and Shresthaji had frowned and told him to keep quiet and do what he was told to do.

Then a miracle happened. Sajjan’s father and family gained a US visa through the diversity lottery. Sajjan came to Maryland, stayed, like the rest of his family, with an uncle who had immigrated earlier, and went to the local school. It was very different. The pupils spoke out all the time. If Sajjan didn’t speak – he felt uncomfortable speaking in English for a long time – the teacher asked him to speak. If he asked a question, the teacher seemed happy and answered at length.
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Six years later, the family went for a visit to Nepal. They took a bus from the capital, Kathmandu, and then rented a ramshackle cab to take them to their old village near Nalang. The last few miles they had to walk. They spent the whole day with relatives and old neighbors and regaled them with stories of their new life in a strange world. Sajjan took his father’s permission and walked to his old school.

The school hadn’t changed at all, except that Shresthaji looked much older. He still seemed to wear his old weather-beaten glasses and peered for long at Sajjan’s face without recognition. Sajjan persisted and mentioned several of his classmates’ names, with no good result. Then Sajjan mentioned key events, such as the time a visiting school inspector had an accident and two mountaineers had died in a climbing mishap. Shresthaji still scratched his neck.

Then Sajjan hesitantly mentioned the occasions he had asked a question. Shresthaji’s face lit up with recognition. “So you are the boy who always asked questions?” he said with finality.
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Sajjan could have said that he had asked a question only twice. He didn't dare to venture a third time. He chose, however, to remain modestly silent. Then he walked back all the four miles to his family’s home, quite satisfied.

I drove six hours, knocked on the door and a young girl opened the door. Behind her stood a middle-aged woman with short hair and a smiling face. I would not have recognized her on the street, for I was seeing her after forty years. But I knew she was Cathy. Cathy was unforgettable.
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Forty years earlier, I was a sophomore student in Kolkata, India, when Dick Johnson, my father’s new colleague from New York, moved into the apartment next door. With him came his wife Esther and daughter, Catherine Isabella. Cathy could not bear the burden of her polysyllabic name and promptly reduced it to a short, spiffy Cathy. It fitted her better, for she was lively, brisk and direct. Meeting me for the first time, she smiled shyly, but then quickly took my hand and said, “I’ll be your friend.”

​I was her friend if only because I was the only one around of her age who spoke English. She did not speak a word of the local language and needed someone to explain the strange new world around her. I felt important showing her around, walking crowded streets and narrow lanes through throngs who marveled at the odd pair of a gangly youth and a pretty foreigner with flowing tresses. She wore Madras shirts and denim pants and explored with me noisy bazaars, smelly fish markets, decaying old palaces and, when our joint resources permitted, cheap roadside tea shops. We took long walks in the dusk on the crumbling boardwalk on the Hooghly River, and flouted, with unspeakable joy, our parents’ firm instruction not to go anywhere near unhygienic street snacks.

We had our parents’ liberal permission to go to the libraries – they believed it would broaden our mind – ​and we took full advantage of it, sitting for hours with open books, our fingers discreetly interwoven under the desk, conveying messages our intermittent whispers could not. On rare occasions, we were permitted the other mind-broadening luxury of going to selected plays in local theaters. We dressed specially, which meant I wore cologne and a decent pair of trousers, while Cathy looked resplendent in a cardigan and her mother’s lipstick. We could stay out later than usual, and on the way back we huddled close on the backseat of a taxi.

I left town when I graduated, and Cathy went about the same time to a boarding school far away. A few years later the Johnsons returned to the US.

Forty years later I moved to Washington with a UN job, and, in a remarkable coincidence, had lunch with a colleague who had known the Johnsons when they were alive and living in New York. He found Cathy’s address for me: married and divorced, she now lived with her daughter in Maryland and worked as a teacher.
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As Cathy came forward and kissed me, I whispered the words I had always wanted to tell her but never dared to articulate, “You look beautiful!”

If you have a dog or a cat as a pet, I could tell you of my friend Deba who lovingly maintained a python, fed it live mice and inscrutably called it Brutus. Or I could trump you easily by talking of the time I had two tiger cubs.

It was a short but exciting period.

Batra was a humdrum contractor who made his money by employing a bunch of scruffy young men and taking orders from small companies to repair windows and paint houses. But on weekends he was a different man: he went regularly on hunting expeditions in the dense forests twelve miles from the central Indian city where he lived.

He was my aunt’s neighbor and regularly gifted her the fruits of his expeditions, such as venison and wild boar meat. But that summer he did something quite different.

It was my summer vacation and, since I was ten, I had won permission from my parents to visit my aunt alone and stay with her for three weeks. That Saturday I saw Batra packing his truck with his tent and guns early in the morning and ran out to ask if I could join him. As always, he declined my company, but did so gently, offering the persuasive argument that the forest was dangerous for unarmed persons. He added that he doubted my aunt would endorse my venture. I returned deflated but still hopeful that perhaps the next time I could induce my aunt to agree and Batra would condescend to take me along.

Batra would normally return Sunday evening, but this time his truck came roaring in Sunday morning. My aunt had gone to see a friend and I was sitting in the porch reading Arthur Conan Doyle. I jumped up and went to see what the hunter had come home with. Batra raised my curiosity by asking me to be careful, then opened the back of his truck.

At first I thought he had brought back two puppies. Then I looked closer: they were splendidly beautiful tiger cubs.

Batra explained apologetically that he was looking for boars, when he suddenly found himself face to face with a tiger. He had no option but to shoot. He was sure it was about to pounce, but he was not sure why. His experience so far had been that wild animals tended to walk away rather than to attack. He was lucky; he had struck the creature right between the eyes.

He was wondering what to do about the dead animal when he heard a curious sound inside the cave nearby.  He went in with a flashlight and found the two tiger cubs. That explained the ferocious protectiveness of the mother tiger. Batra felt sorry and picked up the cubs. Now, he said, he had to decide what to do about them.

I had a simple solution. We had a small corner room in our house which nobody used; I alone occasionally sat there and read books. That would be a perfect room for the cubs. I wanted them. I would take the best care of them, I told Batra.

Batra hesitated. He had no place for the cubs, and he had to find one quickly. I had offered a ready solution, though he had doubts it was a good one. But I was so earnest, even so importunate, that he eventually ceded. He agreed I could keep them for the moment. I was thrilled.

Together we carried the cubs in a box into the corner room and released them. Then we went to fetch some milk from the kitchen and try to spoonfeed the cubs.  It worked. I got them a small ball and discarded pieces of wool to play with, but they did not seem greatly interested. They kept going all over the room, apparently smelling and searching, probably for their mother.

When my aunt returned hours later, she was aghast. She was amazed at my enthusiasm, but questioned my notion of having tigers as pets. She was more adept at feeding the cubs however. Clearly they preferred protein.

​I had a glorious time with the cubs. Feeding them was an exercise in itself. Offering them odds and ends to play with. Cleaning them, without getting scratched by their claws. Just watching them gambol and roughhouse with each other. I could barely leave them for a moment.

Two days later Batra had a long conference with my aunt and told me that he had been in touch with the government specialists at the Maharajbagh zoo in Nagpur city, several miles away. The specialists had insisted that the cubs needed special diet and medical attention, which could be provided only by veterinarians at the zoo.

The next morning Batra came in his truck and took the cubs to Nagpur, to my complete mortification. I had thought of beautiful names for them, but nobody cared and the christening never took place.

Jean Paul Renaud, a tall, gaunt Haitian, fidgeted uneasily in his chair and looked sideways out of the window rather than at me. I couldn’t help feeling there was something else behind his story.

It was quite a story.

In 1994 a military junta was running Haiti and hunting its enemies, the activist supporters of President Aristide whom it had ousted in a coup. The US offered to grant asylum to potential victims and accept them as refugees. I came to Haiti to run the program.

In summer Renaud had applied for refuge, telling our interviewer in Port au Prince that he had been a peasant activist and received death threats from the junta’s local thugs called Attachés. He feared for his life and that of his wife.

When he came for the interview from his native place, Les Cayes, he was accompanied by his friend Michel Beauviel, who too had applied and was interviewed. Beauviel turned up two weeks later to know the outcome and was told that his application was not approved, as the story of his activism in the villages did not tally with the known facts.

He then produced a note from his fellow resident in Les Cayes, Renaud, requesting that any letter for Renaud should be handed over to Beauviel to be carried to him, as Renaud’s work would not let him travel to the capital for weeks. He got the letter for Renaud.

Four months later Renaud was now sitting in my office telling me a strange story. Beauviel had opened the letter meant for Renaud and found that Renaud had been approved for refugee status and needed to get his passport and medical clearance immediately. He acted quickly. He erased his name from the rejection letter he had received, inserted Renaud’s name and delivered it to Renaud with great commiseration for his misfortune. He added that he had to go to another town, Mirebalais, for some work and would not be back in Les Cayes for several days.

He did not of course go to Mirebalais. He went to a good source for false identification papers, obtained a passport in the name of Renaud and the requisite medical certificate. On the fifth day he was on a plane for Chicago as an international refugee.

When Beauviel hadn’t returned to Les Cayes for months, and Renaud heard a rumor that he may have gone abroad, he was curious and came to check. I told him that, according to our records, a man of his name had left for the US. From the official photos, Renaud easily identified the impersonator as Beauviel.

I would naturally have to act on the fraud and revoke the impersonator’s status. But I felt there was still some angle I had missed.

“Tell me,” I asked, “why did you trust Renaud so much? After all, you authorized him to collect your official papers.”

“He was a close friend. We helped each other. He did the major part in concocting the detailed stories about our activism and political action in the villages.”

So even his own story, which received approval, was a concoction! I was dumfounded even before came the remarkable non-sequitur, “Poor chap, I even married his girl friend.”