I’ll give you one example. The government had different rules for joint venture companies, so I tried to figure out a way to get those rules to apply to us. Coke itself would have to remain in American hands, of course, so I tried to invent a partnership between Coke and the bottlers that would qualify as a joint venture. But that didn’t wash with the Indian regulators. Then I spent an incredible amount of time with a whole bunch of lawyers inventing a scheme under which we’d establish a different Indian company in which Coke would have only a forty-percent stake; we’d manufacture the Coke concentrate ourselves, of course, as before, but we’d transfer it, at cost, to this new company, which would be the company actually selling the product to the bottlers.
I was making some headway in getting the Indian authorities interested in the idea when I found my home base slipping away from under my feet. Atlanta was not interested in pursuing such an unusual strategy for the kinds of rewards India seemed likely to offer. One of the suits in Atlanta wrote me a stern memo: “Coke is a product avidly sought by countries around the world. We shouldn’t dilute our own prestige by bending over backwards to accommodate every unreasonable demand of every intransigent government.” Every unreasonable demand of every intransigent government. I still remember the phrase. Those words are practically burned into my brain. It was with them, I think, that I began to stop trying.
I was still going to stay on in India till Kim finished school, of course, but increasingly I was just going through the motions. And, I’ll admit, I had found other ways to occupy my time. What the hell, it all came out in the divorce proceedings, anyway, so I may as well tell you.
I began an affair, Randy. In the most obviously predictable way possible. With my secretary.
Looking back, I’m ashamed of myself, and I suppose I was ashamed of myself even then, except that I was too blinded by own desires to see my own shame. That’s probably the missionary’s son talking. My marriage to Katharine had settled into a rut. Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we’d do, where we’d do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she’d become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She’s a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn’t all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn’t even seem to miss it.
I did.
But I didn’t miss making love with her. What I missed, frankly, was sex. The excitement of discovering a woman’s body, opening her up to my touch, possessing her as no one like me had possessed her before. That’s what I was seeking, and that’s what I found with Nandini.
She was exotic, Randy. I mean it — exotic. She shimmered into the office in gorgeous saris, bedecked with jewelry, fragrant with attar of roses, every nail perfectly painted, every hair in place. She smiled dazzlingly at me, her slightly uneven teeth gleaming, and she answered the phone in that convent-educated English with that special lilt only Indian women can manage, and she drove me crazy. I would call her in to dictate some meaningless routine correspondence and ask her to read it back to me just so I could hear her voice lend magic to my words. And also, I’ll admit it, so I could look at her.
Have you felt the allure of the exotic yourself, Randy? All right, you don’t have to answer that. Just give me some more of your Scotch. Sure you don’t want some yourself? Anyway, where was I? Yes, Nandini. Nandini was simply so unlike Katharine, I could have been dallying with another species. She wore little sleeveless blouses that revealed a generous amount of cleavage whenever that front fold of her sari slipped, which it did often enough, whenever she turned, or bent to pick up something, or moved in a dozen different ways. And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn’t another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman’s shape but hides the faults a skirt can’t — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman’s hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn’t even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten.
And she was attracted to me, too. I could see that. In her smile, in her way of talking, in her eyes when she looked at me. It was not just that she was trying to ingratiate herself with her boss. The signals she sent me were quite clear.
It still took me some time to read them. But one day, late one evening, in my office, when everyone else had gone, it just happened, as these things do.
She was on my side of the desk, standing next to me as she looked over my shoulder at a document I wanted her to retype. As I explained my revisions to her, she looked at the document and took quick notes on her steno pad. Then at one point, she dropped her pencil accidentally, right into my lap. Instinctively, she reached down to pick it up.
My hand closed on hers, keeping it in my lap.
“I like it there,” I said.
Don’t worry, I’m not drunk. I can handle this stuff. I even used to live on Indian Scotch, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. “Indian-made foreign liquor,” they used to call it. Would you believe it! “Indianmade foreign liquor.” But it was better than the fake Scotch the bootleggers peddled at four times the price. There was more Johnnie Walker Black Label sold in India than was ever manufactured in Scotland, I can tell you that. Go ahead, pour away.
It’s good I can hardly see your face in this light, Randy. I don’t have any excuse for myself, and at the time I wasn’t really looking for any. I wanted her, it was as simple as that. And at a time when I wasn’t able to have much else I wanted, Nandini came as a source of pure, unqualified satisfaction.
When she moved her hand, it was not to extricate herself but to burrow her fingers deeper into my lap. “I like it there, too,” she said.
And then she was kneeling by my side and I could smell the fragrance of the attar of roses, I could sense the pressure of those uneven teeth, I felt those elegant fingers on my thigh, and I was in another world, in my office and yet completely outside it, my head swirling with pleasures tangible and imagined. .
That was how it began, Randy. And it continued, madly, obsessively, everywhere I could contrive — in hotel rooms booked by the company for visitors who hadn’t yet arrived, on official trips where no secretary had been taken before, and of course at the office, mainly on the couch where I received visitors.
And once, thrillingly, on my desk. I came back one day from a particularly frustrating meeting with a smug functionary called the Controller of Capital Issues and Foreign Investments, having heard in tones of complacent arrogance that I was pushing what his government considered an “inessential product.” Furious and defeated, I stormed into my office. Nandini walked in behind me, concerned, and closed the door. “Bad meeting?” she asked, gently rubbing the nape of my neck, where a hard knot of tension throbbed.