Only Connect

Anurag and Jiten

Jiten and I were grabbing a coffee on a sunny day at the Jaipur Literature Festival. A young man asked if he could have one of our chairs. We were standing, in any case, so I broadly gestured that he was more than welcome, and went back to my conversation with Jiten.

The hand that reached out for a chair was at the periphery of my field of vision, but something made me turn away from Jiten. Between the knuckles were bright pink slashes of recent scars, stretching down the back of the hand. The fingers ended in stubs, gnarled with recent healing. It’s probably not polite to comment on a perfect stranger’s disfigurement, and the younger me would have averted his eyes and smiled a bland smile.

Instead I asked what happened. 

“I am a mountaineer. I got stuck in a crevasse last year, and was rescued only twenty four hours later.”

I gestured to Jiten. He lifted up his stubby hands. On May 17, 1988, he was trapped in a snow-storm on Gangotri III, and lost all of his fingers to frostbite. 

I got to know Jiten Vaidya on an e-mail group about ten years ago, and, a couple of years later, met him with a group of other Indian techies in a bar in Palo Alto. One craft beer led to another, and by the time we were done, it was too late to get a train back to downtown San Francisco. Jiten offered to drive me twenty miles, and I was struck both by his generous spirit, and by how confidently he steered his car. Since then, we have spent scores of deep and warm hours together, trekking above Aspen, driving through Colorado and Nevada to his home in San Jose, and shooting the breeze in a swimming pool in New Delhi. Jiten has been a senior tech manager in Silicon Valley, and more recently, an extremely successful start-up founder.

When I gestured from Anurag Maloo to Jiten, I felt like I was joining two paths, one that was steep, rocky and uncharted, to another that had been smoothed by decades of grit and determination, watered by parents, wife and children, by friends, colleagues, and professional success. 

I had to leave for a meeting, but Jiten and Anurag talked for nearly an hour. 

“I told him he would be able to write again - he seemed very worried about that, in particular.”

I chuckled - there is pretty much nothing Anurag won’t be able to do, if he takes his cue from Jiten. This summer, Jiten was training to get a pilot’s licence.

On that warm day in Jaipur, I was nudged to help one human help another. Nudged by a flash of pink in the corner of my eye, or something more cosmic? Whatever you want to believe. 

For myself, it makes me question the nature of politeness. Where it steers us away from dealing with tough issues, it may also be steering us away from empathy, from reaching across the divide between hearts, and saying - 

“I know I can’t fathom the depth of your pain, but I feel some of it, even if I can’t help.”

For Anurag, I think Jiten could, and did help.

Jiten sent me this photograph, taken by his friend Meghana. 

“How lovely”, I messaged him.

“I smile every time I look at it, too.” he replied.

 There is a deep joy in helping others, which begs the question - is this just another form of selfishness, of feeding the ego? Perhaps, but I think reaching out is better than remaining cocooned in politeness and self-regard.