A remarkable story merits a thoughtful reflection. My reflections may be pedestrian, but the story is heart-warming. And the story is, unbelievably, true.
 
The Statesman recently reported that Jai Chandra and Julie Kumari married last May and lived together as a couple in the Kamasi Village of Sheikhpura District in Bihar. Two months later Julie received a call from a stranger and loved his voice. It is a fair inference that they continued to talk.
 
Clearly the stranger, Jitendra Kumar, liked her voice too. He eventually turned up on the scene, pretending to be Julie’s cousin. Of course, he was no cousin, and, when this came out, Julie said she was in love with Jitendra and wanted to be with him forever. At a village council, held to resolve the issue, Julie and Jitendra wanted to marry each other. Jai Chandra, the husband, consented readily. The new couple departed to live in the neighboring Nalanda District and the new husband returned to his work in a steel plant.
 
The first point to note is that this did not happen in the tony suburb of Reston in Virginia, USA, where I live. Nor in Las Vegas, Biarritz, Rio de Janeiro or one of the hot spots where you expect bizarre amorous events to unfold. This happened in the backwoods of Bihar, hardly one of India’s shining spots. Yet everything went smoothly. A marriage that had no future ended. A loving couple went to form a new nest. A husband who lost a wife acted promptly and graciously. The members of the village council showed more sense than our fallen hero, Commander Nanavati. The villagers took it in their stride. Peace reigned. Wisdom prevailed. Thanks, dear Statesman reporter, for an astonishing story.

​Everybody looks well in the story, but the first kudo must go to the first husband, Jai Chandra. Like any young man, he gets a bride no doubt with the hope of a happy and stable wedded life, only to lose his wife in five months. He is not at fault; only luck has dealt him a bad hand. He could have turned irate, even furious, and refused to give up his conjugal right. He could have said, like many a foolish husband, “I married her. She has to stay with me as my wife.” He realized he would then have, what many people have, a marriage only in name and a wife only in appearance. The alternative was to give Julie a chance for happiness. In the process, he also gave himself another chance for happiness, perhaps with another person.

Jitendra evidently is an adventurous person. He had only the slender basis of a voice and some conversation to fall in love with a woman unseen and unknown. Call him romantic or call him foolhardy, he has the temerity to act on his passion and arrive in an unfamiliar village with the flimsy cover that he is the cousin of a resident woman. If he didn’t know earlier, he certainly knew on arrival that the object of his passion was a married woman, but that deterred him no more than loyalty to a hostile clan deterred Romeo or Juliet. When the cover fell off, he pursued his goal and had no hesitation in telling the village elders that he wanted to marry Julie. In a land where virginity commands such a high and unrealistic premium, Jitendra demonstrates his allegiance to a more sensible norm: he just wants the woman he loves.

​Julie, for some, may not be a worthy example. A woman, just married, encourages another man? Surely, she is a woman of dubious virtue and pliant scruples. That would be not just a harsh but also a hypocritical judgment. Who has not ever been entranced by a charming stranger? Who among us has not engaged in a mild flirtation in a social circumstance? Who has not craved for a little romance or a tiny drama in our colorless, quotidian existence? Julie heard a stranger’s voice and it was redolent of all the suggestive dreams of her childhood, all the sensual liaisons that the silver screen has brought to the smallest hamlet, all the rainbow possibilities that Sheikhpura District shut out from her life. Julie declared candidly that she had fallen in love with the voice – and all that it meant in her limited life. I for one understand her, and not being sinless, must follow Jesus’ dictum and refrain from casting the first stone.
 
Perhaps the most amazing has been the role of the village elders in the local council. Bihar is seldom regarded among the advanced areas of India, and in a remote village one wonders how exposed the village elders are to new trends in the cities or in the world. Yet stunning was the way they resolved the provocative quandary the village had faced. They did not go by set rules or traditional guidelines, but applied the wisest principle of what best served the principals in the story. They freed Jai Chandra from a loveless marriage, they gave Jitendra the golden apple for which he had risked everything, and, most impressively, gave Julie as a bride to her beloved and set her on the quest for a happy married life. They carefully sought the approval of the previous husband and found a resolution that brought a measure of satisfaction to all.
 
Cynical as I am, I could entertain the possibility that the correspondent’s story did not cover all the details and perhaps the narrative was not as halcyon as it now looks. Still it is a little parable that enthralls me. In a beloved land where intolerance now reigns and is officially endorsed, where dissenting views are browbeaten, journalists are gunned down and solutions are forced down the throats of people, in a little village of Bihar people acted with generosity and kindness, a wise and happy solution emerged, and love won.

Steve was a friend of a friend and we clicked easily when we met in Minneapolis.
 
Steve was a tall, lanky guy, with keen eyes and longish hair about to turn gray at the fringes. He fancied denim jackets and blue jeans and drank a lot of Coca Cola. He had worked some years in a factory, but found the work dull and the discipline stifling. He bought a cab with all his savings and became a cab driver.

​It was a very different kind of life. He worked when he wanted to work and kept the hours that suited him. He told me he often worked the nights, partly because he was insomniac and partly because there was less competition and passengers tended to tip better. If the night had been good and he felt stimulated, not tired, he continued working and happily put in a 16-hour day. He didn’t even stop for a coffee, like other cabbies, and kept driving with an occasional swig of coke.
 
When she had introduced us, Ann had said that he was a bright person. He was, exceptionally so. I wondered why he hadn’t gone to college and carved a career for himself. Then I realized, from his description of the Catholic school his parents chose for him, that the school was no different from the factory that had so repulsed him later. A free spirit, the mindless discipline of the school had alienated him from academic pursuits. A loss for him, surely. But, also a loss for everybody else.
 
Yet he retained a curious spirit and sprightly interest in public affairs. He read newspapers avidly and I noticed he never missed the opinion pieces. Steve said that there something about taxis that prompted people to chat, and they often wanted to talk about things other than the weather. Reading the papers helped him respond well. He enjoyed the conversation. He also liked to surprise his passengers with well-informed, well-reasoned responses. Probably, he said, some people boarded a taxi with the assumption that the driver would be an ignoramus, and declaimed brashly about a new tax or a controversial law. He relished the dazed look on their face when he gently countered with a polite counter point.
 
Steve offered another very different reason for his reading habits. He had a short-lived relationship with a woman who enjoyed his company but could not bear to roll with his easy-going, free-floating life style. “How can you live forever without a plan, without any ambition,” he recalled her saying more than once. No, he didn’t have any ambition. Plans did not make any sense for him. So they parted company after four years, but now he has a son. The mother certainly has a plan for him, but he loves to run away from it periodically and come to spend a few days with his dad. That is the time Steve cherished. He wants to be able to speak intelligently and knowledgeably with his high-school son, and hopes to do so when he enters college next year. He even has a plan to do some online courses on the subjects his son will cope with as a freshman.

I asked him how his views match or differ from his son’s. Despite the generational difference, he was pleased that his son’s views did not differ greatly from his. They both thought, for example, that the use of marijuana should be legal, and gays and lesbians should have the same rights as everyone else. His son believed, as enthusiastically as him, that good education and quality healthcare should be accessible to all. It pleased Steve that his son did not think him old-fashioned or wedded to obsolete ideas. But didn’t their views differ at all, I wondered.
 
Steve admitted, clearly with a certain embarrassment, that they had very opposite views about immigration. His son felt the country should welcome immigrants because they work hard and contribute new ideas and energy; the residents ought to shed their prejudice and give them a chance. Steve felt a stream of new people from other countries dilutes the culture of the land and starts making the local people uncomfortable in their own country. He had misgivings about colored people who continue to speak their own language and do not assimilate.
 
He turned to me and said, emphatically but apologetically, “Don’t misunderstand me. You speak our language, you do an important job. You will easily become a part of the American society. You are not a problem. But the others are.”
 
I said, “Steve, in this country, everybody starts off as an immigrant or a member of an immigrant family. And everybody assimilates sooner or later. Is that the problem or our suspicion of people who seem different from us?”
 
We were having the discussion in his cab late in the evening. It was Easter night and he had mentioned that he expected a large number of passengers. I had offered to give him company and observe how his work life pans out on a busy night. Steve had enthusiastically welcomed me and said he would enjoy chatting with me while he did his work. It was about ten in the evening and we had already ferried seven clients.

We had just brought a passenger to the Radisson Hotel, and we chatted as we waited for the next passenger in front of the hotel. In a few minutes, a well-dressed middle-aged white man who looked like a businessman emerged and entered the taxi. He was about to tell Steve his destination, but he stopped when he noticed me sitting next to Steve.
 
“Who is that man sitting in the taxi?” he asked sharply.
 
Steve replied, “He is my friend. Traveling with me.”
 
The man grimaced and said, “I don’t want a colored man in the cab with me.”
 
I could see Steve’s face in the street light. He blanched visibly. Then his jaws hardened.
 
He turned to the man and said, “Then you can’t travel with me.”
 
It was late, and the man probably figured that he might not get another cab easily on a busy night. He persisted, “Why does that man have to be in the cab?”
 
Steve’s face now was a granite mask.
 
He said curtly, “Because, sir, he is my friend.”
 
The man left and we sat silently for a while in the taxi, waiting for the next passenger.
 
After a long pause, Steve said, “Maybe my son has a point.”

Some are perhaps born naïve. Others have naiveté thrust on them, perhaps by naïve parents and teachers. There are still others who continue to scale new heights of naiveté and guard their accomplishment to the last breath.
 
If you think that large and well-known organizations work well, you belong to the first category. If you believe they take care of their employees, you belong to the second. And if you imagine they serve society in any way, you are in the third category, hopelessly condemned to a diet of myths and fables. You are a mental midget, you will never grow up.
 
I started life by working for an European company in India, one of country’s largest corporations. Most seemed to think I had scratched the Aladdin’s lamp to have such a break, especially within a week of quitting the university. The common guess was that I had a godfather in the hallowed sanctum of the company. Or at least an uncle who might have split a scotch with a British bigwig in some elite club.
 
It wasn’t an unfair speculation. Most good ‘starter’ positions are preempted by people who have contacts. They have a cousin already working in the company who can pull strings. Or a business associate, say a supplier or a dealer, who can put the right word in someone’s ears. Or even a lowly clerk or secretary as a friend who will tenaciously pester a recruiter until an interview is granted to the favored job seeker. I was unusually lucky that the European company was hiring interns for the first time and the news of the golden portal hadn’t had time to get widely known. Even without a contact, I could edge in.

I had been hired as a management intern, which meant I was a mere trainee, but intended for a managerial position. It was the contrivance du jour of filling junior executive positions quickly, in a year or two, without having to drag a person up through lower ranks over many years. The company could have fresh blood, with some education, at a decent price. It also met the new corporate fashion of engaging presentable youth as the staff vanguard.
 
The bosses, however, had no idea what they needed or wanted, beyond ‘smart people.’ They had done no analysis, no homework; they had no profile of their ideal candidate. All they were ready to look for were some young people – all men, of course – who could write legibly, speak glibly and seem half-way plausible. I was a one-trick pony, who knew nothing of business, but could do those things. I passed easily.
 
I was lucky too that my first assignment was in a factory. A production shop, like a programming cell or a call center today, is a brutal place naked in its brutality, without the hypocrisy of a thin layer of courtesy and elegance that decks many main street offices. It lets you see the real nature of industry, the use of people like cogs in a machine. If a machine did not work well, the foreman would ask the worker to continue working until a repairman came, in spite of serious risks. The foreman did not want to lose production; the worker did not want to lose wages.

Cogs in a machine today is a dated metaphor, for cogs are connected durably with the machine. In much of industry now people are no more than disposable paper cups, to be acquired cheaply and discarded casually. They last only as long as a faceless bean counter decides they should. Companies routinely shed a few hundred employees if a quarter’s results are dismal, and two months down, if the signs are good, hire a few hundred more.
 
One interesting twist now is that chief executives are getting dumped almost as unceremoniously for flimsy reasons, though the blow is softened by golden parachutes amounting often to millions. The logic of dispensability has certainly gained a wider application.
 
My biggest lesson was also the most unexpected. I learned that, whatever else you might expect in industry, business just will not be businesslike. People take decisions not because they are the best decisions for business, most reasonable or most profitable. Rather, they take decisions that will please their boss. Or most impress their colleagues. Or seem good on the basis of some hunch, some half-baked projection or some fatuous notion imbibed from a half-witted superior or long-dead mentor. Business decisions are rooted in a hundred ridiculous things and rarely in objective, sustained analysis. Years ago, when I mentioned to a Finance Director that he could save a lot of time by delegating to a subordinate the chore of writing large checks, he innocently responded, “But I like writing those checks!” It gave him a gratifying sense of power.

​For me, the most gratifying was the discovery of a new world, that of the workers. Though their world was kept consciously separate from that of the managers, I had several glimpses and then consciously, defiantly tried to see more of it. I got to know some workers by name and slowly gained their trust. They began to talk candidly with me. I found soon that on key issues, such as absenteeism and quality problems, the workers had a very different view from the managers, and that hard evidence and good reasons often backed their view. I began to question the recurrent assumption of worker indolence and malfeasance behind every lapse.
 
Unnoticed by the managers, the workers had changed. When the factory had started, a vast number had joined as workers without completing high school. Now many of them were graduates. They were smarter, more self-confident, with a stronger self-image. They would not be cornered by a rude foreman or cowed by a conceited manager. They stood on their rights and made shrewder use of their union status. I struggled to change the air of confrontation, but it was an uphill battle to reconcile pigheaded managers mired in the past and blood-sensing union leaders flexing their new-found muscles.
 
I left the company after more than a decade of excitement and frustration, learning and discovery, sometimes unpleasant but always stimulating. It was forlorn news but no surprise when I learned a few years later that the company had folded.

In my mailbox there was a message from a stranger, asking for a call back. I get many such messages from vendors; I did not reply. There was a second message; I put it down to a persistent vendor and maintained my silence. The third time the caller called early and caught me at home. It was actually an old friend I had known in school. My memory can be less than perfect, but that was not why I didn’t recognize him.
 
He had changed his name. I didn’t even have to ask why. Dev, to call him by his new name, had joined our school and become a perennial butt of jokes the moment he said his name. His was a long, clumsy, antiquated, totally ridiculous name. Nobody should be made to bear the unreasonable weight of such a name. His father adored a religious guru, and this pretentious Holy Man had foisted the horrid name on his disciple’s child, claiming that it would bring the kid endless blessing. It had brought my friend endless ridicule. To his father’s mortification he had gone to a court of law, repudiated the guru’s christening and chosen a simple new name.
 
To change a name has huge consequences. You have to amend your birth certificate, seek new certificates from your school and university, pay for a new marriage certificate, buy a new passport, and solicit new identification papers for your job, car, home, gym and club. It takes time and it costs money. But Dev was prepared to do it all to disencumber his life of what he thought was an obnoxious name.
 
When my two daughters entered my life, I wanted their names to reflect the unlike traditions of their mother and father alike. I knew my parents would like the children to have Indian names, but I also knew that my parents-in-law would like them to have Scandinavian names. At the same time, they would grow up in the US, and I did not want them burdened by names that would seem bizarre to their friends. To meet all the criteria seemed a bit of a challenge.
 
Before they were born, I had drawn up four lists: first, names of girls that would work perfectly both in the east and the west; second, names of girls that would work well in the east or west, and work reasonably in the other hemisphere; third and fourth, names of boys, chosen on the same basis. When I knew I had girls, my wife and I focused primarily on the first list to the exclusion of the others.
 
Of the thirty names in the list, we excluded the ten we did not care for. Of the remaining twenty, we quickly chose Lina. In several western languages, it meant ‘the beautiful one,’ which seemed appropriate for our charming baby; in several Asian ones, as in Sanskrit, it meant ‘the committed one.’ The word even occurred in the Indian national anthem. The striking thing was the name was also the abbreviation for Magdalina, a hallowed Biblical name, and a popular Scandinavian appellation.
 
The spelling was a challenge. The current American usage dictated Lena, but in other countries it was likely to be mispronounced and taken as equivalent to a Japanese name. The Indian spelling of Leena would seem overly exotic in the US. We chose the European spelling of Lina, following my favorite Italian film director Lina Wertmüller or the Russian tennis star Lina Krasnoroutskaya.
 
For my second daughter, we returned to the list and picked Monica. The word may be of Phoenician origin, but, associated with the Latin word moneo, it means advisor or ‘the wise one.’ In Asian languages, it denotes ‘the little gem,’ which has a fortuitous but fortunate link with my own immodest name, which means, I am embarrassed to admit, the fairest gem.

​I am sorry if all this sounds a little didactic or even pretentious. I am just trying to explain that I did care how I named my treasured daughters. I wanted their beautiful faces to be associated with names just as beautiful. I am not sure I succeeded fully.
 
The day I was wheeling Jane out of the hospital after our first child, the receptionist stopped me.
 
“Wait a minute,” she said, “I have to give you the birth certificate.”
 
Since my wife and I both have the same last name, the computer had automatically entered the correct last name.
 
“Tell me the baby’s first name,” the receptionist asked.
 
When I did, she asked, since a middle name is common in the US, “And the middle name, please.”
 
Jane responded, “We had so much trouble finding the right first name! Don’t ask about a middle name.”
 
She gave me the birth certificate in an envelope and I took it home, unscrutinized.
 
Some years later when we admitted Lina in a school in Manila, we were asked to produce the birth certificate and we did. Several weeks later we received a report on her progress. I was amazed to find the name at the top: Lina NMN Nandy.
 
Presumably the computer at the hospital would not produce a certificate unless a middle name was provided, and the receptionist had simply written No Middle Name. Now my daughter will forever carry an official name that would suggest a father too lazy to bother about a middle name.
 
Monica has just had a baby, and she has averted that catastrophe and made sure that her daughter has both a first name and a middle name. The baby has a charming first name from Greek legends, the very loyal spouse of Ulysses, Penelope; but my tongue has trouble getting around a four-syllable name without faltering on the accent. Nor can I use the middle name, Jane, without confusing everyone whether I am calling out for my grandchild or my wife. I may truly take the lazy man’s way out and lovingly address the tot as a precious Penny.

I exercise every morning, with a coach.
 
It may surprise you to know that I hug and kiss my coach before we begin. It may surprise you a little more to know that she is ten.
 
Sarah is a competent gymnast and has been training for three years. Her ambition is to be a first-rate gymnast. To that end she practices regularly and takes lessons each week. Periodically she and her classmates give a public performance that is nothing short of amazing. She aspires to more and is always talking of Amy, who apparently can do more things than she can and with greater finesse. I am impressed enough with what Sarah can do.
 
I get even more impressed when I try to do what she does. What she gets me to do is supposed to be basic. To me it seems to be limb-shattering. It feels occasionally like I am putting my body through a medieval rack. My arms go in unruly directions, my bones creak audibly, my legs give way abjectly, and my tortured muscles crave to be somewhere else. But my soul wants to persist, in the ludicrous ambition to be less gauche and more nimble in whatever I do.
 
Truth be told, it has something to do with my coach. She is nothing if not enthusiastic. If I am forgetful or tardy, she turns up at my door. At the least, I receive a text message on my mobile phone. When I turn up, lights are on and there are mats ready on the floor. 

We start with simpler things, whirling our arms forward and backward, turning our torso leftward and rightward, doing easy bends forward and sideways. We lie on our back, lift our legs, spread them wide, and move them like scissors. Down on our chest, we do varied movements with our arms and legs, my thighs and shoulders already aching for relief. Then there are curious exercises with our feet, front and back and a combination of both. Often, we end with animal postures: we do cats, snarling ones with our heads down and backs up; we do dogs, yawning ones with our heads up; we imitate camels with notably imperfect humps; and at last we self-abnegate as snakes, grating on the mat with lowered chests and slithering back as if retreating from a failed sting.
 
All the time, my diminutive coach does the turns with ease and grace, going smoothly from one movement to another, while I struggle to keep up, spirited but breathless. She cheerfully demonstrates the right moves, smiles at my awkwardness and helps if I fail to achieve the right posture. She is patient and good-natured, and, I guess, somewhat resigned to a pupil whose gymnastic potential is limited and whose tenacity barely keeps up with his target.
 
Limited as I am in performing the routine she wants me to learn, I admire her gentle persistence and unfailing humor. She hops from one exercise to another effortlessly, her little frame lithe and pliant, her face usually sunny but sometimes serious with focus, her short braid undulating from side to side, her little arms and legs spelling the correct configuration.

​Occasionally my mind goes back to the time when I was her age and I took gym lessons from Monotosh Roy, later to become Mr. Universe. My father had formed a friendship with Bishnu Ghosh, a renowned trainer, and the latter had asked his favorite student, Roy, to instruct me. I was fortunate that I became, not just his pupil, but also his confidant. He would attend a body building competition in London or Amsterdam, and come back to tell his anecdotes while we did yogic asanas or lifted weights. Compared to soccer or tennis, I found the gym chores a bit of a bore, but Roy made it all worthwhile with his stories of a nasty competitor in Tokyo or the pretty flight attendant who poured tea on his best jacket.
 
In Washington I became a member of an exclusive gym and pumped iron for some years, but I never found it interesting and my heart was not in it. Roy had raised my expectations and I wanted exercises to be enlivening as well as energetic. In the gym, despite the proddings of the trainer, they were not. I found myself doing the very minimal and supplementing exercises with long, agreeable walks around the lake near my home.

And now again I am doing some exercises, thanks to a persuasive coach, that are fun to do and easy to continue. I struggle to follow my young tutor as best as I can, as she initiates new routines to stretch my aging limbs.
 
As we finish, she brings me a steaming cup of tea. Quite the angel.
 
I think I can keep doing this for a while yet.

​A poor boss is an unparalleled curse. Sadly, such bosses turn up with unparalleled regularity.
 
The large European company where I started life had two layers of incompetence. The top English bosses understood nothing of India, neither its markets nor its direction, and did not care to. Their underlings, the top Indian bosses, were picked up, usually at elite clubs, from other large organizations, on criteria that had little to do with competence. The ability to drink, to wear smart clothes, to play golf or tennis, and to have known other bosses were what mattered most. To think, to analyze, to articulate a vision was of no concern. No surprise, duds as executives were a common hazard. If you had one as your boss, you could only pray for him to burst a blood vessel.
 
One memorable one I got was Apte. He could collect his four officers the first day and honestly say: I know nothing of this company and this job, please help me do it. We would have told him a few things, so that he could go to his bosses and tell them a few things and look good; and we would have kept the wheels running as before. No, he had to pretend he knew and understood everything, ask a myriad irrelevant questions, suggest ridiculous alternatives, and show us who was the boss. Now we had to do our work and carry the additional burden of a silly pretentious boss.
 
Apte had the cunning of an ignoramus and knew just how to cover up his ignorance. If there was a major problem, he would call me or another subordinate to his office and ask, with a great show of affability, “What do you think of this?” After picking our brain, he would write it up in a memo and take it triumphantly to his boss. Periodically, he cut his work short and asked us to write him a memo charting our ideas to solve the problem. We found out from his secretary that he would then get her to retype the memo, inserting his name for ours, and send it to the director.

We soon developed counter strategies. I would say, “Hmm. This is a complex issue. Let me get back to you,” and then never get back to him, in spite of reminders. If forced to produce a paper, I would write a mediocre note, leaving out key points that I knew the director would expect from Apte. Or insert carefully crafted double entendres that Apte would be too dumb to notice but would set off a bomb with the much-smarter director. These stratagems were hard to conceive and harder to execute, and of course one could not repeat them endlessly without making Apte once-bitten twice-cautious. We were delighted that he could not just misappropriate our handiwork without periodically paying a price for it.
 
Apte loved not only displaying his position and power, but also diminishing the status of his subordinates. The moment he saw me negotiating with the President of a Japanese trading company or the Vice President of an American manufacturer, he had to barge in and say, “Let us meet for a couple of minutes before you leave.” The real purpose of those minutes would be to alert the person that he was the big boss and the subordinate really did not matter. When I now read management texts that pontificate that the superior’s mission is to ‘empower’ his subordinates, I remember the reality that Apte represented: most bosses labor valiantly to emasculate their juniors.
 
Apte ran into problems with other departments, when they found that the information or analysis he supplied them was dubious. His confidence in his judgment, he found, was no more shared by other executives than by his subordinates. They would refuse to consult him and barred him from their departmental powwows. The supreme example was the training program the human resources people ran for junior officers. I had spoken in the program a number of times, but Apte insisted with the organizers that, as a senior executive, he should be invited to take a crack. The new generation, however, had less patience with the trite homilies that Apte had culled from some book, and pointedly asked if he had ever discussed with millenials their problems and expectations. When the next cycle of the program came along, I again received an invitation and Apte’s interest was rebuffed.
 
I never found out with whom Apte got along, but I knew several business associates who were peeved by his abruptness and exasperated by his egotism. They complained he was eager to lecture and not to listen, and wanted his way at the expense of long-term mutual interest. In the months we worked together he never called the staff together to discuss how we could work better as a team. Certainly, I never heard him say to me or any colleague, “That is an excellent idea” or “Your suggestion is imaginative and I commend your ingenuity.”

​I thought of him as an inept manager, lacking in both vision and empathy, but I had no reason to question his integrity. That supposition went south the day he came to the office with a large bundle of invitation cards and started handing them over to every company representative who depended on our organization for business. His wife was to have an exhibition of her paintings in an elite hotel rather than in a respectable gallery. I understood the choice the moment I arrived: the paintings were pathetically amateurish, quite unfit for public viewing, and no decent gallery would have agreed to display them. But the purpose had nothing to do with art; the company’s business associates bought practically all the paintings at ridiculously high prices. A journalist Apte plied with drinks through the evening even wrote a fawning review comparing Apte’s wife to Pissaro. Neither Apte nor his wife had ever heard of Pissaro, and I still wonder if the journalist had ever seen even a reproduction of Pissaro.
 
I left the company eventually and joined a larger corporation as a senior executive.
 
In a few years, the company that had been one of the largest and most prosperous of companies, commanding half the national market, steadily lost its market and reputation over a decade. It fell on its face from sheer waste and incompetence, and unbelievably went into liquidation. Tragically, ten thousand people lost their jobs. The only silver lining I could see was that Apte lost the well-paid job he should not have had in the first place.

​The morning cable said my next assignment was in Kathmandu. From the heat and turbulence of Haiti to the cool tranquility of Nepal, it seemed a refreshing change.
 
The next cable brought less welcome news. I was to continue my current work in Port au Prince four months more before a successor could take over. This meant that I would be allowed no more than a month to learn a new language, Nepali, in the diplomats’ school in Washington before I proceeded to Kathmandu. One month to learn a ‘hard’ language! An impossible endeavor, I mulled sullenly.
 
I took two quick steps.
 
First, I called the librarian in the State Department, a charming woman who shared my love of books. Could she send me a couple of books on the Nepali language and any tapes she might have? She could and she would.
 
Next, I drove over to the camp of the UN Multinational Force, of which I was a coordinator. I went to the tent of the commandant of the Nepalese contingent and explained that I would shortly go to his country to work and wanted to learn the language. In ten minutes he had his orderly round up all the army officers of Nepal in his tent.

“Mr. Nandy is our friend,” said General Rana. “He has even gotten us the best rice and lentils you could find in this miserable place. Now he is going to our country to work and he wants to learn Nepali. It is our patriotic duty to help.

“Thanks to the UN, we get a huge number of books, magazines and posters from Nepal. Starting this week, you will collect by Sunday all the stuff you have read, and deliver it to Mr. Nandy’s office on Monday. I want him to learn our wonderful language.”

​The next Monday my office staff was terrified when a Humvee appeared at our entrance and six well-armed soldiers emerged with their officer. They carried three massive cartons to my third-floor chamber, saluted me smartly and indicated that all the “Nepali stuff” was at my disposal. While I thanked them profusely, two soldiers went to the back of my desk while a third brought along a stool, a hammer and some nails. As I stood confused and silent, they unfurled a gigantic poster and nailed it to the wall. 

I​t was the poster of a woman, in fact, a pretty woman. I did not want such a large poster on my wall, but it was probably the Queen of Nepal and it would be graceless to interfere with their friendly gesture. I half expected them to nail a second poster of the King too, but was mystified but relieved that they did not do so. The officer just pointed to the poster and succinctly remarked, “Beautiful picture.” They saluted me a second time, without any further explanation, and left. I thanked them again.
 
In the following weeks the cartons kept coming, and I progressed haltingly with the language, with the occasional assistance from the Nepalese officers. There was an unexpected development in the office. The Haitians, brought up in the French tradition, tend to be formal and polite, and every Haitian visitor I had invariably paused to take a good look at the poster and proceeded to compliment me on the beauty of my wife. I did not contradict them for fear of seeming disloyal, but it made me take another look at the poster. The woman was indeed beautiful.
 
But she was certainly not the Queen. I found in the literature the General had provided some pictures of the royal family, and the woman in the portrait had not the slightest resemblance to the Queen. Who then was she? I had no idea. I hesitated to ask General Rana or any of his officers for fear of seeming tactless. Sitting in Haiti, I had limited resources to research the image, and I never found the answer. I left Haiti without the mystery resolved.
 
Eight months later I was settled in Kathmandu, busy with my new assignment as a political and economic officer. The US Embassy sponsored, along with some companies, a technology expo, and on the opening day I came to make sure it was going well. As I walked an aisle with an assistant, inspecting the wares, two of the organizers crossed me alongside a woman.
 
I passed her and only a minute or two later something stirred within me. I retraced my steps and glanced at her as she stopped at a booth. I felt certain: she was the woman in the poster. She was spectacularly beautiful.
 
I walked up to her. Briefly I told her my experience. She listened patiently and smiled when I said that, after an eight-month quest, I deserved to know who she was – in the view of so many Haitians, “my wife.”

She was a well-known actress in Nepal, star of the film version of a classic novel. She was in the expo because the organizers had invited her to be the mascot of the show and its spokesperson. She said demurely that she was happy to solve the mystery.

​I was fortunate. The organizers invited us both for dinner and I got to sit next to her and know her better.
 
I owed the Nepalese soldiers another debt. I easily passed the language test in the diplomats’ school. In fact, I received a medal for outstanding performance.