Episode 06 - Chosen

People assume a career is a thing you build. Mine was a thing that happened to me, twice, in two countries, and I have been dining out on both accidents ever since.

I have told you a great deal, over these few episodes, about the flying and the heights and the bridges - about the machinery of dread I carry from one departure lounge to the next. What I have not told you is why a man so constitutionally unsuited to leaving the ground has spent his whole adult life doing precisely that. The honest answer is that two countries reached out and took hold of me, one at each end of the world I knew, and I have never fully recovered from either.

One I chose. The other chose me. Between them they made everything that came after, including these.

The first was Bosnia, and I chose it, though "chose" flatters the decision considerably. The truth is that I went because of my wife.

The secondment, three months, they said, help stand up a bit of the legal apparatus a war had left in pieces, was the sort of thing a sensible young man turned down, and I was, then, a sensible (relatively) young man. I had reasons. I had a diary. I had, above all, an airplane to avoid. And my wife, who had understood the shape of my life some years before I had, looked at the offer and then at me and made the case in a single sentence I have never been able to argue with, which is a professional embarrassment given what I am paid to do.

So, I went. For three months. The love affair with with Bosnia started on Valentine's Day 2002, the day I arrived.

I came back, in the meaningful sense, about eight years later. Because Bosnia in those years was not a posting, it was a whole world with the lid off, a country being reassembled in real time by people who were making the rules as they went, and the rules were law, and the law needed arguing, and it turned out I could argue it. Everything I now know how to do I learned in rooms in Sarajevo and Banja Luka and Mostar, on problems no textbook had reached yet. A three-month favour to my marriage became a career.

I have met men who planned theirs more carefully and did worse, much worse. The second country was Bangladesh, and I did not choose it in any sense whatsoever. It chose me, by a mechanism so undignified I can barely commit it to the page: a client, on the far side of the planet, with a problem and a search engine, typed some words into Google, and my name came up first.

That is the whole of it. First result. A lifetime's professional identity, and it turned on where my name happened to fall in a machine's estimation on a particular afternoon. As I've said more than once, my father wanted me to be a civil engineer, to earn my place by building something. I earned mine, it transpires, by search-engine optimisation I did not know I was performing.

They called. And to get there I had to do the thing I dread above all the other things: my first flight out of Europe. Everything before it had been the short hops of a nervous man staying close to home, an hour to a Balkan capital, eyes shut, breathing managed, back before the fear could properly organise itself. This was different. This was hours of it. This was the continent falling away behind me and something entirely unknown coming up ahead, and me strapped into the middle of it with a handle I was pretending was structural.

And then Dhaka.

I have tried many times to describe what it is to step out of an airport into South Asia for the first time, and I have never managed it, because the thing that happens is that every sense you own is spoken to at once, at volume, and asked to keep up. The heat arrives first, as a physical fact, a hand on the chest. Then the sound; a city of millions all doing something urgent simultaneously, horns and voices and engines and prayer, none of it apologising. Then the sheer, staggering, exhilarating density of people, more human beings in one street than my entire country seemed to contain, every one of them going somewhere with total conviction. I stood in it, jet-lagged and terrified and forty years from the flat road to Waitrose, and I felt something I had not expected and have chased ever since.

Not calm. The opposite of calm. I felt enthralled. I felt, for the first time in my life, that the fear and the wonder were the same instrument played from different ends, and that a man could not have the one without agreeing to the other. Two frontiers, when I look at a map now. Bosnia at the far Ottoman edge of Europe; Bengal at the far edge of the old Mughal and then British world. Two places where empires had drained away and left the law behind them like a tide leaves a coastline, complicated and contested and full of things to argue about. I have spent my career walking those two shorelines, and I would never have found either if I had been left to plan it. One I was talked into by the person who knew me best. The other was handed to me by an algorithm that did not know me at all.

This is the part I keep coming back to, in the lounges, waiting to be boarded. We tell the story of a life afterwards as though it were a decision. But mine turned on a sentence from my wife and a line of search results, and everything since, every country I cannot reliably name, every road I have crossed with my eyes shut, every one of these, hangs off those two accidents like a coat off two hooks. I am afraid of flying. I fly perhaps a hundred times a year. And I have finally understood why I keep doing it, against every instinct I own. Because the two best things that ever happened to me were waiting on the far side of a flight I did not want to take.

They're boarding. More from the next one.