Nice

Chapter One

As the huge airplane forced its way up from the tarmac at JFK, insistently pushing itself into the dingy air, there was nothing that disgusted me more than the pestering Niceness of Minnesota: the place I hoped I was leaving behind.

 

Minnesota.

 

According to the rest of America: a soft and welcoming place where people strove to be Nice. Where they thought Being Pleasant was important.

 

No snarling. No screaming. No snark.

 

Just earnest people - living in a place famous for being very cold, immigrants (mostly) from countries that get very cold - earnestly trying to bring some warmth to the world.

 

Placidly trying to do the right thing. Happily letting people cut in line. Always giving others the Benefit of the Doubt. Keeping other people in their thoughts.

 

The entire Upper Midwest has that reputation, as a matter of fact. We don’t break down the doors at Black Friday sales. We stop for people in crosswalks. Almost nobody ever gets thrown out of anywhere.

 

Nice People ... in a Nice Place.

 

Now my big ambition - with 12 hours to ponder my future, sitting in business class - was to brush that all off. Like so much dust off the scrapbooks of my very happy childhood.

 

Then I discovered how hard it is for old habits to die: even when you’re not all that old. I assured the flight attendant that I was Fine, even though I was in a part of the plane where I could have asked for just about anything.

 

I realized that I should have asked for something I knew they didn’t have ... and then sulked when I didn’t get it.

 

I must have snorted out loud at the thought of missed opportunity, because the guy in the hooded sweatshirt sitting across the aisle gave me a startled look.

 

Snorting. That was more the image I wanted to project.

 

Swearing more.

 

Scowling more.

 

Leaning my seat back from its Full and Upright Position, I was confident that I could eventually learn to be an a*****e.

 

I held up my wine glass with a skeptical expression - impatiently waiting for the attendant to fill it. And not only did I inconvenience her. I intentionally did not say “thank you": violating every mandate of my painfully pleasant extended family.

 

Yes, I thought, that’s more like it.

 

I was on my way to be the company’s Chief Auditor for Asia and Africa. I would be the Cop of the Cops: swinging spreadsheets around like meat cleavers, watching other people count beans, and recommending that people be arrested, occasionally, if I thought they had taken something that didn’t belong to them.

 

Because my life had basically fallen apart, and because I was so f*****g tired of being Nice, I was taking this Big Job in India: in a big town called Jaipur - which I didn’t even know existed until I saw the name on the job description.

 

I was unfamiliar with the town - and not particularly excited about the job, at first. It seemed like overkill. Too drastic. A very big job. In a place I knew nothing about. And knew no one at all. I didn’t even know anyone who’d been to India.

 

But, as I lay awake in my barely furnished “divorced guy” studio apartment, I remembered that - after he was rudely thrown up on shore - Robinson Crusoe worked to make a new life for himself, in a new place.

 

And, a hundred years before I was born, my people had come over from Sweden: possibly because they were sick of Sweden in the same way I was sick of where, and the way, I was living.

 

The next morning after seeing the job listing, I not only filled out the online form indicating my interest.

 

I printed out the description and paid a visit to my buddy, Mason, in Human Resources to see what I could do about “greasing the skids” to make me the only possible candidate for that job. And that was basically what I told him: that I was the only possible candidate for that job.

 

He seemed to think I was clutching at straws.

 

“You know where that is, right?”

 

“I went to the same school you did. I know where it is as much as you know where it is.”

 

“Look - considering everything that’s happened - I understand your feelings"”

 

I cut him right off.

 

“Everything that’s happened? You don’t even know everything that’s happened....”

 

“Sure. There’s probably stuff you haven’t told me. But I still think I understand. And I would probably feel the same way".

 

“Don’t play the Empathy Card. I don’t need that card. Nobody knows how I feel. Including you....”

 

“But nobody wants to hire someone who’s running away from something. Nobody wants a refugee. And Jesus: to uproot yourself like this ... all the way to godforsaken India....”

 

“You think the Indians call it ‘godforsaken India’?”

 

“I bet they tell jokes that start out ‘How hot is it?’. You’re Minnesota, born and bred. Talk about a fish out of water. You’d be fish in a clothes dryer.”

 

“Somebody from here, or from Zurich, is going to get this job. Since the Indian guy we had in there was a crook. They’re looking for a hired gun. And the only hired guns in Accounting are in Zurich ... and here.”

 

“Here ... meaning you....”

 

“You’re saying I’m not qualified?”

 

“You’re perfectly qualified.”

 

“You’re saying: you’ll miss me when I’m gone?”

 

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

 

“You think I can’t handle the food? I eat Indian all the time"”

 

“That’s not real Indian. That’s Midwest Indian"”

 

“But it’s very similar. Maybe you think I can’t handle the heat, after scraping the ice off my windshield with a credit card more times than I can count. You think I won’t appreciate being warm for once in my life?”

 

“India? It’s not just warm"”

 

“Or maybe you think I can’t cope with brown-skinned people.”

 

“Jesus, Eli!”

 

He located the plastic straw poking out of his barrel-sized Big Gulp, and gave serious suck. Giving him time to sort through his remaining arguments. Then he was ready to resume.

 

“I am just patiently - and practically - and generously - pointing out that a job so far away won’t make you feel any different about how things have worked out....”

 

“I won’t be seeing her ... or them ... or that"”

 

“What’s ‘that’?”

 

“The house we all used to live in. I’m interested in it all being out of sight, out of mind. That’ll be different for me. I won’t be freezing my a*s off. That’ll be different for me. And very welcome. And look at the listing. Grade 4"”

 

“Sure. It’s a serious job. They’re looking for a swinging dick. Are you a swinging dick?”

 

“I can swing a dick as good as anyone.”

 

“No you can’t! You’re Minnesota Nice!”

 

“That’s a character flaw. And I’m working on it....”

 

“That’s good. Because it’s bad over there. If we’ve heard about it over here, then you know it’s bad over there. Look at the perks they’ve attached. Not just the salary....”

 

“I know, it’s like Christmas morning. Housing allowance. A car, and a driver. My own budget. Everything different than here. Which is perfect. Because I’m motivated, Mason. I’m heavily motivated. I will do to this job what Dorothy’s tornado did to Kansas.”

 

“And the hazard pay.”

 

“The job description didn’t say anything about that.”

 

“It’ll be just our little secret. Bringing me back to my main point. There’s hazard pay because it’s considered to be hazard-ous. As in: ‘Who are these guys, and why am I in the trunk of this car?’”

 

“That could happen in Chicago!” (Mason happened to be from Chicago, originally).

 

This earned me just a brittle smile from the other side of the desk.

 

“So how much is it? This hazard pay?”

 

“Negotiated after the offer is made. But you don’t want to be doing something like this. You don’t want to be running away....”

 

“Seems to me that I’m just chasing opportunity. Seeing the world.”

 

“Letting the blues get the better of you. Then, when the blues are behind you, you’ll feel different.”

 

“I think I would prefer to feel different now...”

 

“So sue me. My HR instinct says that you shouldn’t go. It would be a bad idea.”

 

“HR instinct? Is that anything like using a pig to find truffles?”

 

The level in the rain barrel Big Gulp went down an inch. Then he leaned across the desk, in my direction. Now, we were finally going to get serious.

 

“OK. In terms of overseas assignments: there are those who Stay ... and those who Go....”

 

I waited for the rest of it.

 

“And"”

 

“And there are those who Stay. And those who Go. And those who go tend to be gone forever: because they find something. Something that might have been missing in the place where they were. Or they go to keep their distance from something back here.”

 

He went silent.

 

“And that’s it? That’s the HR instinct?”

 

“People who go, voluntarily, are not Normal. And I would want Normal for you.”

 

“I appreciate you wanting to push me to the center of the curve.”

 

“But I haven’t convinced you?”

 

“Not even close. Say: can this be the screening interview? What we’ve just been talking about here? Can I get a transfer recommend from this?”

 

“We’d have to talk more formally. But sure, you’d clear the first hurdle: no problem. I think you’d be perfect for the job. If it was anywhere but India....”

 

“Then that’s all I need to know. Thanks for the peek into the mysteries of HR....”

 

“This is not something you want to do, Eli. You should listen to me, for once....”

 

I had listened. But I knew that Mason had a serious lack of imagination - and I also knew that he would fill out the forms in a way that would make me look like a Serious Candidate.

 

The successive interviews - two live, one Skype - went very, very well. And the final offer did include generous Hazard Pay.

 

From the way I walked, the way I talked, the way I answered their questions, and my heavily documented personnel file, they knew that I was a Good Cop. Someone who would straighten out the mess left by the Bad Cop in India who had preceded me.

 

Which brought me back to the 747, roaring above the carpet of clouds that covered Europe: non-stop, JFK - DEL.

 

There was strong coffee on the plane - even though it was the middle of the night. This put me in the mood to take out a legal pad to map out my re-invention. Various phrases went on the pad: phrases that I hoped would end up referring just to the distant past.

 

“Defer ... defer ... defer”. I would need to stop doing that.

 

“The feelings of others....” Always more important than my own. I probably started hearing that in my crib.

 

“Not what you want that counts....” Another classic.

 

And then “Happily Ever After”. And then “Disney”.

 

Because, to put it bluntly, what I was leaving behind was Disney.

 

Like most of us, I was never explicitly promised Happily Ever After. But it was part of everything I knew - all the assumptions that had seemed to guide my life.

 

That was supposed to be the Story of My Life: to be paired up in a cocoon of material well-being with a tolerant, wisecracking wife ... cute, wisecracking kids ... and crises in life that never rose much above the level of the comic and heartwarming, because everyone knew that things would work out beautifully in the end.

 

Fade to black. Fade to credits.

 

Wasn’t that a cute story?

 

Another thing I wrote on the pad: “Bernie Madoff”

 

All of us Good Little Midwest Kids: we all bought in to an emotional ponzi scheme. We wrote emotional checks for everything we had: anticipating happy, predictable returns. But some of us (maybe most of us) would never get back what we had invested. Far from cashing out bigger and better than before: we would never see any benefit at all.

 

I wasn't going to be cheated again. From everything I read: I would find India a hard, and bustling, and brutal place: without time for princesses, and mice that grew into horses. Where I would forget about Romance, and Romance would forget about me.

 

There would be no love story for me. All the expatriate women would be on their way some place else. I would not be allowed to talk to Indian women outside of work.

 

It was prudish, and puritanical, tradition bound: ready to offer fluffy confections about young infatuation in their movie theatres (I’d watched a couple of DVDs). But, in the end, really much more interested in making money than in making love.

 

Somewhere over the Balkans, I decided that I would be safe from Disney in Jaipur.

 

But the plane I was on had departed from JFK because - even though I had a “date certain” to meet with Mr Bhatnagar, from Corporate HR in Jaipur - I took the opportunity to layover in New York City for a few days. I had to pass through JFK, anyway, and I had wanted to return to New York for a long time.

 

Someone else said about London: “To be weary of London, is to be weary of life....”

 

I felt the same about New York City. But there was also work that I needed to do, in the evenings - in my hotel sitting room - since, after pastrami and sightseeing, I took the opportunity to chat with Mr Bhatnagar, the HR guy in India, who was already at his desk in Jaipur.

 

At my request, and in the interest of saving some time, he sent me the CVs of some candidates for the auditing team.

 

The e-mails started coming in: but all the profiles I received over the next hour, or so, were young men.

 

It wasn’t my intention to establish a sausage factory of white shirts and ties - and I had always found women to be much more meticulous and honest.

 

In my return message, I reminded Bhatnagar that our company was promoting a progressive hiring policy, and I would be building a team that was evenly split: 2 men, 2 women.

 

I also asked him to stop sending photographs. I didn’t care what people looked like. I wasn’t opening a modeling agency.

 

A mild protest came back, along with apologies that - if I was truly considered female candidates - it would take a little longer to round some up. Did I also not want to see photographs of female candidates? Indian women were famously very beautiful.

 

It took several e-mails before we got it all straightened out.

 

Then - as the night crept on - I switched over to my online course in conversational Hindi: blessing the idea of electronic language courses, since I wouldn’t have the time to go into the classroom learn one of the official languages of my new assignment.

 

I certainly felt at home in NYC.

 

I imagined that most people in Minnesota would guess that I would feel overwhelmed visiting such a crowded, noisy, and unpredictable place. So different from the soft amiability of the Midwest.

 

Back where I came from, I had heard these sentiments expressed many times. Even though I frequently explained that I had always found New Yorkers to be unfailingly approachable ... and even helpful.

 

I actually didn’t discover a place outside what I thought of as Civilization until I left the gleaming new airport outside New Delhi, and plunged into the cruel, stinking, Darwinian streets of the Indian capital: an environment as close to Absolute Psychotic Chaos as I had ever known.

 

My first experience of it was as a place of choking dust (some of it cow manure, I was sure), choking smoke, unbelievable noise, and debilitating heat.

 

Filled with people urgently following their own scent trails, like so many ants, amid filth so routine that no one even seemed to notice, and alarming accumulations of electrical wire that looked like giant nests up on high poles.

 

In one of the world’s oldest civilizations everything seemed temporary ... ad hoc ... stitched together for just the moment ... half-assed ... just getting by. Nothing seemed organized, put together, or safe.

 

And People. People. People.

 

I wondered how I would ever get used to it.

 

People everywhere. People milling around. People hurrying. People doing business. People doing nothing. People waiting. People watching. People waiting to join a group of people to watch something else: to pass the time.

 

Under the circumstances - stuck in an auto rickshaw - my decision to meet the experiences of India at “ground level” seemed less like creative inspiration ... and more like a strange error in judgment: watching the taxi driver stoically smoking some foul-smelling stick, negotiating one near-miss after another.

 

If he makes it as far as the hotel it will be some kind of miracle, kept going through my mind.

 

And, of course, there was the weird paradox of flying halfway around the world to take a job that I would never perform, because I would be killed before I could receive my first check.

 

Then he made the final turn, came up under an awning, and I was delivered to the front door of the hotel safe and sound.

 

Where a doorman in the uniform of an ancient Indian warrior gave me a gave me a bow, and a smile: to suggest that there were no dogs eating dogs in the streets of New Delhi.

 

India being a place where a lot of people do jobs that no one does in America anymore - uniformed young men immediately appeared to help me with my bags.

 

Then there was someone else, in suit and tie, to lead me to my room: where he was eager to demonstrate how to open and close the blinds.

 

Because the hotel had a long business relationship with my company, one of the assistant managers later arrived at the room - with a fruit basket - and went through the opening and closing of the blinds (just in case I hadn’t mastered it the first time).

 

Before I collapsed on the bed, there was someone else who wanted to talk to me, and show me how to work the blinds, but I forget who that was.

 

I tipped all these people generously, as an overseas representative of my company - and only then I did find myself alone: facing the brittle sense of disruption that travelers feel when they land in a place that seems beyond their spiritual ability to “cope”.

 

Isolation and intimidation were the faces looking back at me as I looked out of the window at streets and buildings that seemed quite decorative, once the noise and odors had been removed.

 

I felt sensations of anxiety and distaste I hadn’t felt in New York. In Geneva. In Hong Kong. In Pretoria.

 

Normally, the first thing I would want to do in any unfamiliar city would be to walk around. But I didn’t want to go back out there: and get another lungful of manure dust. I didn’t feel like a stroll. I didn’t feel like an “authentic” meal at a tiny restaurant - or a roll of the digestive dice at a sidewalk stall.

 

I didn’t feel like doing any of the things I would normally do in a new place.

 

So I took the easy way out, and let dinner happen at the hotel restaurant.

 

I tried to engage the waiter in Hindi: to gauge how far I had gotten with that vowel-heavy language. But all I got was an awkward moment: with a weak smile in response to my effort.

 

When I asked him, in English, what I had said, he worked so hard to avoid telling me that I ended up just letting the whole topic go away. My Hindi was pretty bad, it seemed.

 

I went to bed facing the possibility that India might defeat me. Might be more than I could handle.

 

It was hard to sleep: thinking it about it all. That I might never be able to push my emotions so far back that I would be able to control my reactions to the Pure Chaos of that place: how it was that the fittest would survive, while “less fit” on every side would be eaten, or starved, or destroyed.

 

Comfortable in India? That seemed impossible.

 

But the alternative was much worse. That option would be to bury myself as one of the carefully insulated expats that I had read about: traveling in a paranoid kind of cage.

 

Gated apartment, to armored car, to secure office complex, and back again. Spending each day ... each week ... each year pretending not to live in the heat generated by a billion striving, chattering, laughing, begging people.

 

Those living the zero-contact expatriate lifestyle pretended that they were “anywhere” ... and “nowhere”. Speaking only English. Fridays at American-style barbecues. Saturdays at European-style cocktail parties. Dating other expat executives. Shopping at American-style malls.

 

If that’s the way things worked out, then Mason - my buddy in HR - would be right. India wasn’t right for me: and I was crazy for volunteering to go.

 

I wanted that prediction to be wrong.

 

I wanted to be brave. I didn’t want to live life like a man on the run.

 

All the same, I felt a little like a man on the run: profoundly uncomfortable as one of the uniformed drivers from the hotel navigated to the train station, in preparation for giving me another sharp, honest taste of Indian life the way that Indians lived it.

 

Another one of my bright ideas to have an “authentic” Indian experience was to go by train.

 

Instead of a short hop through the air, I was booked into an AC Chair car on one of the “fast trains” - Delhi to Jaipur - where I would spend about 4 hours watching rural Rajasthan slide by.

 

The highest class of train travel in India felt very familiar: essentially an “executive” car for the very prosperous, or those on expense account - and everyone in it looked like they belonged.

 

But the path to that sanctuary was littered with so many beggars, and people selling something they were sure that I would want, that it was like running a steeplechase while keeping a death grip on my luggage: assuming that, if anything was ripped out of my hands, I would never see it again.

 

Pushing through the noise, and smell, and friction of so many people gave me an almost unbearable feeling of trapped - and it wasn’t until I was in the climate-controlled car - with my bags safely stowed in the overhead rack - that I started to feel any sense of that I might get out of New Delhi in one piece.

 

Resting my head on the window, I looked out at the passing scene, with what must have been a very forlorn expression. The Sikh gentleman, positioned in the aisle seat next to me, read my feelings without any trouble.

 

In appearance, he was exotic and intimidating. A dark complexion: fully-bearded, with a turban covering his head. But his accent was pure BBC.

 

“Your first time in India, I believe?”

 

I made a kind of hopeless gesture. It was a situation where I could have been more diplomatic. But I wasn’t in the mood.

 

“There doesn’t seem to be any way that a person can prepare for this. So random. So careless. Like a slow motion riot....”

 

“The dynamics are the same as any other city. It is just a collection of human beings"”

 

“But a few more than I’m used to.”

 

“Yes. And more desperate. ‘Living on the edge’ as you might say.”

 

“Right. It’s a hard edge. And hard to watch all of this happen.”

 

“You do not have to confront it, certainly, if you choose not to. Our British colonial rulers kept us at arm’s length for over a hundred years. Rulers can be very comfortable when they do not have to mix with the ruled.”

 

“But I’m not one of the rulers. I’m one of the worker bees. Having what was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime. I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of my life if I miss out what this place has to offer. Assuming that it does have anything to offer. That could be a matter of debate.”

 

“I fully approve of your ambition. I, myself, tried to meet America on its own terms.”

 

“And England, I would guess.”

 

“And England. And Singapore. You always begin with the simple resolution of just taking risks, and then learning from your mistakes. But everything takes time, and you will not adjust to the intensity of this environment overnight. A question of adaptation. In six months time, all of this will look very different to you. I can almost guarantee that it will.”

 

My Sikh companion, who turned out to be a physician, exchanged business cards with me at the Jaipur station.

 

I never did see him again, but his educated sympathy must have helped, because my first impression of Jaipur - with its elegant, royal buildings and somewhat simplified layout - was that it might be a place where I could have a fighting chance of living and working, shoulder to shoulder, with ordinary Indians.

 

At least the hotel was beautiful - and everyone there seemed to assume that I could figure out how to work the window blinds by myself.

 

All my contacts in Jaipur had been informed about my progress across the planet, and I was soon introduced to the care of corporate people: beginning with Mr Kapoor, who was holding a sign with my name (correctly spelled) in the concourse of the train station, near the exits.

 

Dr Singh - and Mr Kapoor - were the first Indians to contradict the stereotype I had in my head when I left Minnesota. The staff at the hotel in Delhi had been like dogs panting for approval: working hard for a nod, or a kind word, treasuring satisfaction, hands extended for tips.

 

I had assumed that this kind of self-abasement would continue everywhere. With everyone. Especially when someone was working for me over a long term.

 

But, as I closed the space between us, Mr Kapoor kept his hands by his side: not making the namaste gesture. Not even offering to shake hands.

 

He looked me right in the eye with majestic neutrality, and I discovered that his English was much better than my Hindi.

 

“The car is in the waiting area. Through those doors. Are these all your bags?”

 

When he decided to make a gesture, it was to point off to our right.

 

In a subtle kind of way, both bags went from my hands to his hands, and I walked, unencumbered, to an anonymous-looking black sedan with a Tata nameplate. There was room for everything, since I was the only passenger: in the backseat, waiting for what I feared would be the inescapable small talk.

 

First time in India? How was your trip? Are you tired? Would you like some female companionship? Why did you take the train when it is so much faster to fly?

 

Traffic was heavy, with motor scooters, cows, rickshaws, and heavy trucks mixed all together - as if the street was a live demonstration of what a mess a street could be when everybody had their own ideas about how to use it.

 

The drive continued ... in silence.

 

I started to suspect that Kapoor had no questions for me - nor did he seem to think that he needed to play the role of tour guide - and progress through the ocean of endless noise and curious odors was slow: so I had the opportunity to take a long look at the man the company had sent to bring me in.

 

In a country that seemed to value light skin, he was very dark: with a closely clipped moustache under a broad pockmarked nose. The watchful eyes - never still - were almost black, and I thought he might prefer short-sleeved shirts because they displayed the muscular definition of his arms. He wore glasses of an amber color - rather than real sunglasses - so I could see his slightly startled expression when I asked what I thought was an obvious question.

 

“How long were you in the Army?”

 

He used the horn to try to get someone out of our way, before responding.

 

“Twelve years, sir. Madras Regiment.”

 

“Is that one of the old ones? From the colonial days?”

 

“Yes. Exactly.”

 

“And did you enjoy that?”

 

“Yes sir. The Army life suited me very much.”

 

I didn’t ask him why his military career had ended. I already knew the answer to that.

 

“I’m getting conflicting information from different places. Can you help me straighten something out?”

 

“If I can....”

 

“Can you tell me how much danger I’m in, working in this country?”

 

“You are in no danger at all. Anyone that says that you are is exaggerating for some reason.”

 

“Can you tell me if you’ve ever killed anyone in the line of duty?”

 

“Not that I know of.”

 

“But you received training in how to kill people?”

 

“Of course....”

 

“What you would call extensive training?”

 

“Yes. Extensive.”

 

“Then why do I need a trained killer by my side if there’s no threat to me?”

 

“Because, speaking frankly - if I may - the most dangerous thing you might do in our city, is attempt to drive yourself. Street traffic, here, is not like traffic anywhere else. It is easy to make a mistake. Therefore, you are assigned a driver. Such as myself. The fact that I am qualified for weapons, and hand-to-hand combat, is just a bonus. Is that the correct word? Bonus?”

 

“Yes. ‘Bonus’. So this will be the most dangerous part of my job?”

 

“In my opinion.”

 

“And riding into town from the airport in Delhi? That was dangerous?”

 

“What was your choice of vehicle for your journey?

 

“Auto rickshaw....”

 

“Then very dangerous, in my experience.”

 

“That’s good to know. Because I was scared shitless. Everybody seems to think that they can do anything they want out on these streets....”

 

“Yes sir. That is a classically Indian attitude.”

 

At this point, the conversation seemed to die out - and the hotel was only a few minutes away - so that was the end of our introduction.

________________________________________________

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