He rang a bell. A chaprassi came in to carry his briefcase to the waiting car.
“My bike?” I asked, uncertainly.
“You can leave it here,” he said. “My driver will drop you home after dinner, and you can pick up your cycle again in the morning.”
Well, I thought, getting into his official Ambassador car, here’s a man who thinks of everything.
from Randy Diggs’s notebook
October 11, 1989
Of course there’s no real hotel in Zalilgarh. Why would they need one? Just a few “lodges” for traveling salesmen and whores, dingy rooms above fly-infested restaurants. But the embassy has managed to get the government to give the Harts the use of the official Public Works Department guest house, which is where visiting officials stay when they’re touring the district. There is a bit of confusion when it turns out the staff only prepared one bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. Hart. Word of their divorce has apparently failed to penetrate down to the PWD caretakers. Nor have they been told about me. But the guest house is empty except for us. So, after a bit of to-do and some anxious hand-wringing on the part of the main uniformed attendant, not to mention the two twenty-rupee notes I slipped into his folded hands, a couple of additional locked rooms are opened up for our use. They’re musty and haven’t been dusted in weeks, and the once-white sheets on the beds are rough and stained, but I’ve no doubt they’re better than the alternatives in town. Hart seems glad enough to take my word for it.
After a government-issue dinner (atmosphere strained, soup not), Mrs. Hart retires to her room. Hart must be exhausted too — the jet lag, the courtesy meetings at the embassy, the slow and bumpy ride down from Delhi. His face, his eyes especially, tell the story: he hasn’t slept in days. But he wants to talk. We sit on the verandah in reclining wooden chairs whose woven-cane seats have begun to sag, and the mosquitoes buzz around our ears. Hart swats at them irritably until I produce a can of insect-repellent spray. “Thanks. Didn’t have the time to think about this stuff,” he says shamefacedly.
I always think about this stuff, of course. And also about booze. Hart looks almost pathetically grateful when I extract a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black from my bag and get a couple of plain glass tumblers from the attendant. No ice. Hart doesn’t seem to mind. He clutches his glass so hard I’m grateful it’s thick PWD issue — a finer glass would have left him with crystal embedded in his palm. So we sit there, the gloom barely dispelled by the dim light of a solitary bulb in a metal lampshade (dipping and flaring alarmingly with the inevitable voltage fluctuations), the buzzing mosquitoes — maddened and repelled by our proximity and our chemicals — swirling around us. And we talk. Or rather, Hart talks, and I listen, letting the tape recorder run discreetly, scrawling the occasional note.
Rudyard Hart to Randy Diggs
October 11, 1989
I asked for India, you know. The office couldn’t believe it. “What the hell d’ya want to go down theah for?” they asked in Atlanta. Coke had a decent-sized operation in India, but it was headed by an Indian, fellow called Kisan Mehta. Since he took over Coca-Cola India in 1964 the only Americans around had been visiting firemen, you know, checking out one thing or another, basically coming to remind the bottlers and the distributors that they had a big multinational corporation behind them. No American executive had been assigned full-time by Coca-Cola to India since the early 1960s.
But I was so goddamned persistent they relented and let me go after all. Just before Christmas 1976, I was named marketing director for India. I’d argued that a dose of good ol’ American energy and marketing technique was all that stood between us and real takeoff. Coke had opened its first plant in India in 1950, and at the time that I was asking to be assigned there, late ’76, we had twenty-two plants, with about 200,000 distributors. Not a bad rate of growth, you might think, but I was convinced we could do better. They were selling about 35 million cases of Coke a year in India in those days — a case had twenty-four bottles, seven-ounce bottles, two hundred milliliters in Indian terms. As far as I was concerned, that was nothing. A country with a middle class about a hundred million strong, and we couldn’t get each of them to drink just one small Coke a week? I argued that with the right approach, we should be selling 200 million cases in India, not 35 million. And that was a conservative estimate, because a Coke a week per middle-class Indian was really nothing, and I was confident we could exceed my own projections.
Besides, I wanted to go to India. I’d heard so much about the place: my parents had been missionaries there. They’d loved it, the whole schtick, the Taj Mahal, The Jungle Book, you name it. They’d even named me Rudyard in honor of Kipling, can you believe it? By the time I was born they had moved to China, but my parents were still so nostalgic for India that they were dreaming Bengal Lancers in the land of Pearl Buck. The missionary life came to an end when China went Communist, and I grew up mainly in the States, but my parents left me with an abiding dream of India that I never shook off.
Much of my working life was spent in companies that had overseas operations everywhere but India. But when I joined Coke I knew this could be my chance. Katharine wasn’t thrilled, I’ll admit it. I had wanted to take her to India for our honeymoon, but she didn’t want to go and we ended up in Niagara Falls instead. She always hated our foreign travels. Always preferred the life she knew in the States, her books, her teaching, to any exotic foreign adventure. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to work in India. She was afraid the kids’ schooling would be disrupted. She argued long against it, but I wouldn’t listen. In the end she gave in and I figured she’d just accepted how much I wanted this for us. For us.
We arrived in Delhi in early 1977. January first week, I believe it was. God, it was great to be there. The weather was fabulous, cool and sunny in January. The government was making all the right noises about opening up the economy to foreign investment. Mrs. Gandhi had been quite hostile to America up to that point, and you remember she’d proclaimed a state of emergency in mid-’75 and darkly claimed the CIA was out to destabilize her government. But with her opponents locked up and the press censored, she thawed quite a bit, and when I was still in Atlanta I’d read about her unexpected appearance at Ambassador Saxbe’s for dinner, which everyone interpreted as a major signal that she wanted to really open up to America. And, of course, to American companies. Her younger son, Sanjay, was already talking to McDonald’s about coming into India. We, Coke, were already in India, of course, but the possibilities seemed limitless.
Mehta told me soon after I arrived about the earlier warning signs. India had passed a law called FERA, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, in 1973, which governed the activities of all companies involved in international trade. One of the provisions of the law, Section 29 I believe it was, required foreign companies doing business in India to apply again to the government for registration, in other words to be reapproved to do business here. We treated this as just another bureaucratic requirement in a country obsessed with forms and procedures — you know these Indians, red tape runs in their veins. So we applied, quite routinely, and the government sat on our application, also quite predictably, and we went on doing business, so nothing was really affected by FERA. Except that, as Kisan Mehta reminded me, our case was still pending with the regulatory bodies, and in the meantime a fair bit of political hostility had been whipped up against us.