This document provides background information on the global IT services industry and the competitive environment facing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It discusses key segments of the global IT services market, factors considered in vendor selection, the growth of offshoring and Indian IT services firms, and critiques of offshoring. The Indian IT services sector is highly concentrated, with the top 3-4 firms by revenue accounting for 45% of the market and holding a significant profitability advantage over smaller players. TCS, as one of the largest Indian IT services providers, was preparing to launch a new strategy to differentiate itself in the market and reach $10 billion in revenues by 2010.
2. In March 2007, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was India’s
largest IT (information technology)
services company in terms of revenue, profits and number of
employees, and Asia’s largest
standalone software company. Part of India’s venerable Tata
Group, TCS had inaugurated the IT
boom that earned India a new respect around the world. In its
2007 fiscal year (ended March 2007),
TCS revenues had grown 41% to $4.3 billion USD with 44%
and 22% gross and net income margins
respectively.1 It closed the fiscal year with a $27.7 billion
market capitalization.
After months of preparation, TCS stood poised to launch a
marketing campaign unveiling its
strategy to differentiate itself from its principal Indian
competitors, target the industry’s global
leaders, and reach $10 billion in revenues by 2010. TCS
intended to differentiate itself based on
operational excellence, promising clients that they would
“experience certainty.” While the strategy
built on TCS’s existing operational strengths, CEO S.
Ramadorai (“Ram”) knew that communicating
it to the market and translating it into a breakaway trajectory of
sustained profitable growth would
involve substantial challenges. Competition was intensifying as
foreign rivals built large centers in
India and local competitors pursued their own aggressive
growth targets. Each of TCS’s functions
would have to be aligned behind the strategy and strengthened
for the new competitive
environment.
Global IT Services
3. Global IT Services was a $628 billion industry in 2005,
expected to grow to $825-875 billion by
2010. Analysts segmented the market into two broad
categories: Product Support and Professional
Services. Product Support included Hardware Support and
Maintenance ($87 billion) and Software
Support ($49 billion). These covered installation, technical
support, and repairs but excluded
development or enhancement of IT hardware and software.
Product Support services were sold both
via long-term support contracts and per-incident fee-based
arrangements.2
Professional Services included Consulting ($52 billion),
Development and Integration ($193 billion), IT
Management ($155 billion), and Process Management ($94
billion). These services formed a rough
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PG0-004 Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty
2
process-chain for how IT was deployed. Consulting helped
companies align business and IT
strategies and adjust operations to take advantage of IT.
Consulting recommendations often led to
Development and Integration projects which involved the
4. development and deployment of customized
IT solutions. IT Management involved ongoing operation of IT
infrastructure, application software,
and help desk operations on behalf of clients. Process
Management went beyond operating IT systems
to run IT-enabled business processes for clients, such as
transaction processing. This was a
component of a broader adjacent market called IT-Enabled
Services (ITES) or Business Process
Outsourcing (BPO), often abbreviated ITES-BPO.3 The
combination of IT Services and ITES-BPO was
often abbreviated IT-ITES. (See Exhibits 1–3 for sales,
rankings, and market share.)
Consulting and Development and Integration were typically sold
on a project basis while IT
Management and Process Management were generally sold via
long term outsourcing contracts.
Outsourcing contracts often required vendors to hire members
of a client’s IT staff and purchase its
IT equipment. Contracts were typically structured either on a
fixed price or a time-and-materials
basis. Under fixed price contracts, profitability was often
contingent on achieving productivity
improvements over the life of the contract and might be
deferred until gains were achieved.
Recently, new pricing models had also begun to link price more
directly to business value delivered.
According to a Gartner survey, median gross margins for IT
Services companies by service line in
2004 were 21-30%. Business consulting and IT consulting had
the highest gross margins at 38% and
36.3% respectively while data center and staff augmentation had
the lowest, 22.9% and 23.3%. Project
based contracts had higher margins (33.5%) than ongoing
5. outsourcing contracts (27.8%). Smaller
companies (revenues below $100 million) outperformed with
34.4% average gross margins.4
Vendor Selection and Contracting
Clients typically entered into IT outsourcing contracts only
after very substantial analysis and
deliberation. Since 2001, the industry had seen 250-350 deals
each year with contract value over $50
million and 25 deals over $1 billion (however average contract
values were declining as clients shifted
toward multiple smaller and shorter deals).5,6 The integration
of IT into clients’ business processes
made outsourcing enormously complex and raised significant
execution risks. Given the cost and
risk, sales cycles often exceeded one year and contracts were
often for up to five years of service or
longer. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) typically led the
decision-making process for clients but
the deliberations often involved the CEO and executives from
human resources, legal, and various
business units. The largest deals also typically required board
of directors approval.
Clients consistently ranked technical expertise as the most
important criterion for vendor selection
followed by varying combinations of experience, financial
stability and price. While buyers did not
generally cite vendor brands as an important factor, research
indicated that brands did have
substantial influence on their ultimate decisions.7
Relationships also played an important role in
vendor selection. IT Services companies built relationships
both with clients at the company level as
well as with individuals who could carry their reputation into
6. new companies as they changed
employers. Industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and
IDC were important influencers,
especially through their evaluation of vendor capabilities with
respect to specific technologies and
project types. Specialized consultants were also involved in
assembling multi-vendor contracts that
were becoming increasingly common for very large deals.
Systematization and Quality
Historically, IT was viewed more as an art than a science,
delivered according to stereotype by
eccentric teenagers laboring in solitary garages at night while
drinking large quantities of highly
caffeinated beverages. Over time, efforts were made to
systematize processes for predictable delivery
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215-001 taught by Paul Kirwan, University of California -
Riverside from Dec 2020 to Mar 2021.
Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty PG0-004
3
of quality IT products and services. A major milestone was the
development of the Capability
Maturity Model (CMM) by the Software Engineering Institute
(SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University.
The CMM was written under a contract from the U.S. military
for use in assessing the ability of
7. defense contractors to complete IT projects. Originally
published in 1989 for software development,
CMM and its successor CMMI have since been expanded and
revised substantially.
CMM appraisals measured the maturity of an IT organization’s
processes. Appraisals ranged from
Level One (Initial) to Level Five (Optimizing). To receive a
high CMM appraisal, a company had to
achieve stringent standards of process discipline and have
systems in place to monitor processes and
improve them over time. Many organizations reported that
process improvement based on the CMM
led to improvements in cost, schedule, productivity, quality, and
customer satisfaction.8 Critics,
however, commented that CMM resulted in a bureaucratic focus
on filling out forms and that some
vendors misrepresented high maturity levels achieved in
isolated units or projects as applying to
their whole organizations.
In contrast to process assessments such as CMM, there were no
broadly accepted measurement
standards for output performance in IT Services. Surveys,
however, indicated that performance was
highly uneven across projects and vendors. According to The
Standish Group, only 34% of IT
projects in 2004 fully met business expectations on-time and
on-budget, half were “challenged”– they
were completed and became operational but over budget, late,
and with fewer features and functions
than initially specified, and 15% were considered to have
failed.9 According to a Forrester Research
survey in 2005, only 37% of users felt their IT shops delivered
new or enhanced applications on-time
and only 42% felt they were delivered with expected levels of
8. quality.10 Fewer than 5% of
organizations achieved “best in class” 99.9% availability of
computer systems.11
Offshoring and Indian IT Services
Offshoring (shifting selected activities to lower cost
international locations) first appeared in the
custom application development and maintenance (CADM) sub-
sector of IT Services in the late 1980s.
Offshore software development was spurred by the large
differential in skilled labor costs between
advanced economies such as the United States and emerging
markets such as India. (See Exhibit 4
for comparative data on labor cost and supply of technical
professionals.) Software development was
very labor intensive with personnel-related costs accounting for
70-80% of total costs.12
NeoIT estimated a typical offshore project delivered savings of
25-30%. Nasscoma estimated 25-
50% savings for IT Services work offshored to India.13 Lower
labor costs were partially offset by
higher communication and management costs, but costs could
be reduced further by efficiency gains.
(See Exhibit 5.) Nearshoreb project savings were estimated at
10-15%. Clients typically achieved
smaller savings for the first project sent offshore and better
results with more offshoring experience.
In FY 2005, India was the dominant location worldwide for
offshore services with an estimated
market share of 65% for offshore IT Services and 46% for
offshore BPO.14 By FY 2007, Indian IT
Services industry revenues were $23.5 billion ($18.0 billion
from exports). Total Indian IT-ITES
9. (including hardware) was $39.6 billion and 5.2% of India’s
GDP.15 The largest export market in FY
2006 was the Americas (67%) followed by Europe (25%) and
financial services was the largest client
a Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service
Companies) was a highly effective industry association that
promoted the interests of the Indian IT and ITES sectors via
collaborative problem solving and public policy advocacy.
b Nearshore locations such as Latin America for the United
States and Eastern Europe for Western Europe offered greater
geographic and cultural proximity to clients and the
convenience of operating in similar time zones while still
providing
savings versus onshore services.
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215-001 taught by Paul Kirwan, University of California -
Riverside from Dec 2020 to Mar 2021.
PG0-004 Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty
4
industry (38%) followed by High-tech/Telecom (19%).16 (See
Exhibit 6 for growth of Indian IT
Services.)
While initially motivated by cost and capacity considerations,
quality became a major selling point
10. as the industry matured. (See Exhibit 7 for Motivators of
Offshoring.) In early 2007, 48% of the
world’s CMM Level 5 software centers were located in India.17
Successful implementation of
offshore delivery required high levels of process discipline,
especially in documenting customer
requirements. High CMM appraisals were also viewed as
important qualifications for marketing
offshore services.
Custom Application Development and Maintenance (CADM)
accounted for 49% of Indian IT
Services exports in FY0618 and it was estimated that India had
reached a 16.4% global market share in
application development.19 However, this service accounted
for only 5% of worldwide IT Services
spending and Indian IT Services companies were aggressively
pursuing growth in new business
segments. Majors such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant
were all aggressively pursuing the
broader range of IT Services offerings, including IT consulting,
systems integration, and outsourced
management of IT resources. Many were also pursuing
opportunities in ITES-BPO, business
consulting, engineering services, and software products. (See
Exhibit 8 for mix of export services.)
Analysts maintained robust growth projections for offshore IT
Services. Gartner predicted
nearshore and offshore IT Services would grow sixfold from
2004 to 2010.20 Nasscom estimated the
total addressable market for offshore IT Services was $200-250
billion, implying only 10-14%
penetration. Similarly, Nasscom estimated a $120-150 billion
addressable market for ITES-BPO,
implying 9-12% penetration.21 Expectations for continued
11. growth were bolstered by an anticipated
shortage of IT professionals in the U.S. There had been a 50%
decline in the proportion of college
students declaring majors in computer science from 2000 to
200622 and computer science bachelor’s
degrees granted fell 28% from 2004 to 2006.23 Computer
science enrollments, however, were highly
volatile and had suffered a similar decline between 1983 and
1987.24 Meanwhile, the U.S. Department
of Labor projected 25-50% increase in employment in most IT
related occupations between 2004 and
2014.25 Proponents of offshoring argued that this implied an
environment where the alternative to
offshoring would not be higher cost local development, but
rather not doing some projects at all.
Critiques of Offshoring
While offshoring had grown rapidly in the late 1990s and early
2000s, many offshoring projects
had failed to meet client expectations. A survey by offshoring
consultant Ventoro indicated that only
half of respondents actually achieved savings via offshoring and
that offshoring actually increased
costs for 25% of respondents.26 Vendors, however, would
often cite insufficient client preparation or
poorly defined client processes as the most frequent cause of
failure.
Offshoring had also become hotly politicized in the United
States and Western Europe. In the
U.S., for instance, TV “newshost” Lou Dobbs had run sustained
tirades against offshoring to lower-
cost countries. And in the UK, the industry’s second-most
important market, a television station had
mounted a sting operation that purported to show that personal
12. information on hundreds of
thousands of Britons that had been provided to Indian BPO
operations had been sold illegally in
India for as little as £8 per person. According to a March 2006
poll by the Pew Research Center, 71%
of Americans believed “outsourcing is bad for the American
economy because it sends good jobs
overseas.”27 Economic research studies, however, indicated the
benefits of offshoring could exceed
the costs to the U.S. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute
estimated that for every dollar of
business services offshored, the U.S. economy gained $1.12 to
$1.14 via cost savings, freeing up of
workers to perform other jobs, repatriated profits, and
exports.28
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This document is authorized for use only by Dewen Sun in MGT
215-001 taught by Paul Kirwan, University of California -
Riverside from Dec 2020 to Mar 2021.
Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty PG0-004
5
Indian Competitive Environment
India’s IT Services sector was much more concentrated than the
global industry. The top 3-4
players (revenues over $1 billion) earned 45% of revenues, the
next 7-10 players (revenues $100
million to $1 billion) earned 25%, offshore operations of IT
majors earned 10-15% and smaller players
13. (over 3000, revenues <$100 million) earned the remaining 10-
15%.29 The largest firms were also the
fastest growing and held a substantial and growing profitability
advantage over smaller firms. In
2005, the top 3-4 companies had EBITDA margins of 26-33%
and ~40% revenue growth while the
next 7-10 had 12-26% EBIDTA margins and ~35% revenue
growth.30
After TCS, Infosys Technologies was the second largest Indian
IT company. Infosys earned $850
million in FY 2007 on revenues of $3.1 billion and ended the
year with 72,241 employees and a
market capitalization of $28.7 billion USD. Infosys was
generally recognized as the strongest Indian
IT company at branding and marketing. It had the industry’s
highest offshore billing rates and profit
margins. While Infosys pursued a range of growth
opportunities, two were particularly noteworthy.
It had made the industry’s most visible push into business
consulting via the launch of a U.S.
subsidiary led by the former top-selling partner at Deloitte
Consulting. It had also strengthened its
position in BPO, buying out its partners to transform its BPO
subsidiary Progeon into 100% owned
Infosys BPO. Infosys was also noteworthy for its almost
complete focus on foreign markets. It was
not a significant participant in the Indian domestic market. (See
Appendix 1 for a profile of Infosys)
Wipro Technologies was India’s third largest software exporter
and a major competitor in the Indian
domestic IT Services market. Wipro’s Global IT (excluding
domestic) sales in FY 2007 were $2.6
billion. Its Global IT workforce was 67,818 employees (50,354
in IT Services and 17,464 in BPO).
14. Wipro’s “string of pearls” strategy called for aggressive growth
via acquisition. The company built
India’s largest outsourced R&D business leveraging internal
R&D capabilities from its hardware
business and acquisitions of Ericsson India R&D in 2002 and
NewLogic in 2005. Wipro’s 2002
acquisition of Spectramind gave the company an early position
in BPO, where it held the #2 ranking.
In IT Services, Wipro had developed a strong position in
outsourced infrastructure management,
reducing its reliance on application development and
maintenance business. In 2007, Wipro added to
its infrastructure services portfolio with the $600 million
acquisition of U.S. based Infocrossing.
Cognizant Technology
Solution
s was based in Teaneck, NJ, but 75% of its employees were
located in
India making it the fifth largest IT Services company in India.
Cognizant’s 2006 revenues were $1.4
billion and the company had 38,800 employees. The company’s
revenues grew 61% in 2006, far
outpacing the average of 40% growth recorded by its peers.
Cognizant positioned itself as “easier for
Western companies to do business with than other other top-tier
vendors.” 31 Its business, however,
15. was less diversified than that of its peers, deriving virtually all
2006 revenues from application
development and maintenance and 86% from the United States.
Leading foreign IT Services companies were also rapidly
building capabilities in India. At the
beginning of 2007, IBM Global Services was the largest foreign
employer in India with 53,000
personnel, up from 9000 only 2.5 years earlier.32 In a speech
on June 6, 2006 in Bangalore, IBM CEO
Samuel J. Palmisano announced, “We will triple our investment
in India from $2 billion over the last
three years to nearly $6 billion in the next three years....that
investment will ensure that we make the
most of the opportunities to grow in this marketplace, while it
also enables IBM to fulfill its vision to
become a globally integrated company.”33 Electronic Data
Systems (EDS) took a major position in
India by acquiring a 52% stake in Mphasis BFL of Bangalore
and expected to have 20,000 employees
in India by the end of 2006. 34 By August 2007, Accenture
planned to have 35,000 employees in India
and was hiring nearly 1800 people per month in the
country.35,36 (See Appendix 2 for a profile of
IBM Global Services.)
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PG0-004 Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty
6
Indian Labor Market Context
Indian IT-ITES employment grew from 284,000 people in
FY200037 to 1.6 million people in FY2007
(690,000 in IT Services Exports, 553,000 in ITES-BPO Exports,
and 378,000 in the domestic sector).38
(See Exhibit 9 for employment trends.) Per a 2005 McKinsey
study, projected export growth would
increase employment demand by FY 2009-2010 to 850,000 IT
professionals and 1.4 million employees
in ITES-BPO. The same study estimated that as of 2005, India
had the largest pool of talent
17. appropriate for offshore IT-ITES, 1.77 million people or 28% of
the worldwide total (followed by
China with 11%). It projected that the current growth trend in
output of graduates from Indian
academic institutions would be able to meet projected demand
in IT Services. However, a shortfall of
500,000 employees in ITES was projected by 2010. 39
A variety of initiatives were under way to address potential
talent shortages. Nasscom and major
IT firms collaborated with academia and government to
strengthen the pipeline of new graduates.
An industry-wide skills assessment and certification program
helped companies find appropriate
talent. IT companies broadened their hiring to a wider range of
backgrounds and added locations in
smaller cities, relying on intensive internal training programs to
bring new hires up to standard.
Rapid employment growth translated into higher wages.
Average pay for Indian IT professionals
rose ~15% in 2006.40 Wage growth was most pronounced for
experienced workers. Nasscom
cautioned, however, that rapid wage growth in India did not
necessarily imply erosion of India’s
18. labor cost advantage. Per Nasscom, “A 15% increase in people
related costs for an FTE in India
amounts to an increase of $900-1,100 USD; in comparison a 3%
increase in people-related costs for an
FTE in the US amounts to an increase of $1,200-1,400 USD.”41
(See Exhibits 10 and 11 for wage
trends.)
Tighter labor markets also resulted in growing attrition rates.
Attrition was also exacerbated by
hiring activities of large foreign multinationals which typically
had hired experienced professionals
instead of building the training capabilities that enabled large
Indian firms to hire personnel fresh
from university and reportedly paid salaries 20-25% higher than
Indian firms.42 To control attrition,
firms increased wages, offered employees stock or options,
invested in training, and increased perks.
TCS History
TCS pioneered India’s IT Services sector in 1968 and remained
its largest participant in 2007.
Founded as a division of Tata Sons, Ltd. to serve its fellow Tata
Group companies, TCS soon took on
19. Indian clients outside the Group. Its initial projects involved
punch card operations to automate
clients’ data processing. Director-in-Charge (and later Deputy
Chairman) F.C. Kohli soon targeted
export markets, winning the company’s first foreign client in
1974 and building a joint venture with
U.S. computer-maker Burroughs Corporation. Exports enabled
the company to learn from overseas
markets and earn foreign exchange to import modern equipment.
Kohli explained, “We wanted to
build technological capability. It was not possible to do that in
the domestic market. We had to go
abroad, build capability, and transfer it back.”43
In 1978, Tata Sons split the Burroughs business off from TCS to
create an entity called Tata
Burroughs (which later became Tata Unisys and then Tata
Infotech) leaving TCS without its export
contracts. TCS set about aggressively rebuilding its client
base. Selling foreign clients on entrusting
their software development to an Indian firm without the
Burroughs relationship was difficult.
However, Kohli leveraged his personal reputation and
relationships as former President of the IEEE
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Region 10
20. (Asia/Pacific) to win contracts for TCS.
In 1979, future CEO S. Ramadorai opened TCS’s first U.S.
office. With an order from IGIC (a data
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Tata Consultancy Services: Selling Certainty PG0-004
7
center for U.S. banks), TCS resumed its growth trajectory and
soon added marquee clients such as
American Express. In 1984, exports overtook domestic sales,
reaching 80% of revenues in 1992-93.44
In the mid-1980s, TCS began expanding its export business
beyond sending engineers overseas to
work under the direction of client management. It started
taking on project management
21. responsibility for work executed at client locations, shifting
from time-and-materials billing toward
fixed price contracts and offering complete IT solutions for its
clients.45 A major milestone in TCS’s
evolution was its contract to computerize the Swiss banking
clearing house SEGA and its cross-
border counterpart Intersettle (later merged into SIS). Despite
bidding a higher price, TCS won the
project over the client’s regular consultants, Arthur Andersen,
based on TCS’s superior analysis of the
company’s requirements. Successful execution established
TCS’s reputation for quality delivery of
large mission-critical projects in the important financial
services vertical. TCS’s recently developed
processes for offshore delivery were also demonstrated and
refined on this project.46
In the late 1980s, TCS began accelerating its shift to offshore
development. By the late 1990s, TCS
had 27 development centers in India and derived substantial
revenues from offshore work. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, TCS also began investing in the
development of software products—both
tools for internal use to improve productivity and proprietary
products for sale to clients. In the early
22. 2000s, these were supplemented with additional service
businesses, as described below.
The Tata Group
Approximately 80% of TCS shares were held by Tata Sons,
Ltd., the Tata Group’s primary
promoter company. The Tata Group’s 2005-06 revenues were
$21.9 billion, equivalent to 2.8% of
India’s GDP. It included 96 operating companies in seven
business sectors: information systems and
communications, engineering, materials, services, energy,
consumer products, and chemicals. The
Tata Group also had the highest combined market capitalization
among India’s business groups.
Since its founding in the 1860s, the Tata Group was known for
its dedication to promoting India’s
economic development and upholding high ethical standards.
JRD Tata, Group Chairman from
1938-1991 encapsulated this philosophy in his statement that
“No success or achievement in material
terms is worthwhile unless it serves the needs or interests of the
country and its people and is
achieved by fair and honest means.” The Tata Group famously
23. refused to pay bribes and lost several
business opportunities due to this policy. Current Chairman
Ratan Tata oversaw codification of the
Group’s values in the Tata Code of Conduct, signed by all of
the Group’s over 200,000 employees.
TCS in 2007
Vision
TCS, as indicated by its name, had long aspired to be a trusted
business advisor to its clients. In
early 2001, TCS publicly articulated the goal of becoming one
of the Top 10 global IT Services
companies by 2010. By the end of 2006, it had already
achieved this goal along multiple dimensions:
it ranked 5th globally in market capitalization, net income and
number of employees. On revenues, it
ranked 12th but had targeted a goal of $10 billion by 2010.c
This “10x10” goal was more than a
financial milestone. It represented the company’s ambition to
squarely join the industry’s top tier
alongside global leaders such as IBM and Accenture. (See
Exhibits 12 and 13 for TCS’s financial
statements, Exhibit 14 for a breakdown of its cost structure,
24. Exhibit 15 for historical trends in its …
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE of OSCAR WAO
ALSO BY JUNOT DÍAZ
Drown
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE of OSCAR WAO
JUNOT DÍAZ
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
25. 2007
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New
York 10014, USA • Penguin Group
(Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario
M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of
Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin
Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of
Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group
(Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson
Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11
Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New
Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive,
27. 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Díaz, Junot, date.
The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao / Junot Diaz.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-101-14730-X
Dominican Americans—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I259B75 2007 2007017251
813'.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
28. Elizabeth de León
“Of what import are brief, nameless lives…to Galactus??”
Fantastic Four
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
(Vol. 1, No. 49, April 1966)
Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting
down Wrightson
Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these
islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings, But they had started to
poison my soul with
their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, nigger,
Syrian, and French
Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival—I taking a sea-
bath, I gone down
the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty
29. head sailor with sea-
green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red
nigger, and I,
Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I’m just
a red nigger who
love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch,
nigger, and English
in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
DEREK WALCOTT
T hey say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of
the enslaved;
that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one
world perished
and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation
through the
nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú
americanus, or
more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some
kind;
specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also
30. called the fukú
of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and
one of its great
European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the
Admiral died
miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo
Domingo,
the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the
Ground Zero
of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become
synonymous with
both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or
even to hear it is
to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.
No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the
arrival of
Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and
we’ve all been
in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú’s
Kilometer Zero, its
port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know
it or not.
31. But the fukú ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the
past with no
power to scare. In my parents’ day the fukú was real as shit,
something your
everyday person could believe in. Everybody knew someone
who’d been
eaten by a fukú, just like everybody knew somebody who
worked up in the
Palacio. It was in the air, you could say, though, like all the
most important
things on the Island, not something folks really talked about.
But in those
elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a
high priest,
you could say. Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Leónidas
Trujillo Molina.1
No one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse’s servant or its
master, its
agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an
understanding, that
them two was tight. It was believed, even in educated circles,
that anyone
32. who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful,
down to the
seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing
about
Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea,
fuá, a boulder
would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp
you ate today
was the cramp that killed you tomorrow. Which explains why
everyone who
tried to assassinate him always got done, why those dudes who
finally did
buck him down all died so horrifically. And what about fucking
Kennedy?
He was the one who green-lighted the assassination of Trujillo
in 1961, who
ordered the CIA to deliver arms to the Island. Bad move, cap’n.
For what
Kennedy’s intelligence experts failed to tell him was what every
single
Dominican, from the richest jabao in Mao to the poorest güey in
El Buey,
from the oldest anciano sanmacorisano to the littlest carajito in
San
Francisco, knew: that whoever killed Trujillo, their family
33. would suffer a
fukú so dreadful it would make the one that attached itself to
the Admiral
jojote in comparison. You want a final conclusive answer to the
Warren
Commission’s question, Who killed JFK? Let me, your humble
Watcher,
reveal once and for all the God’s Honest Truth: It wasn’t the
mob or LBJ or
the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe. It wasn’t aliens or the
KGB or a lone
gunman. It wasn’t the Hunt Brothers of Texas or Lee Harvey or
the Trilateral
Commission. It was Trujillo; it was the fukú. Where in coñazo
do you think
the so-called Curse of the Kennedys comes from?2 How about
Vietnam? Why
do you think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to
a Third
World country like Vietnam? I mean, Negro, please. It might
interest you that
just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam,
LBJ launched an
illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965).
(Santo Domingo
34. was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for
the U.S., and
many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in
the
“democratization” of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped
off to
Saigon. What do you think these soldiers, technicians, and
spooks carried
with them, in their rucks, in their suitcases, in their shirt
pockets, on the hair
inside their nostrils, caked up around their shoes? Just a little
gift from my
people to America, a small repayment for an unjust war. That’s
right, folks.
Fukú.
Which is why it’s important to remember fukú doesn’t always
strike like
lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by
degrees, like
with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside of Saigon.
Sometimes it’s
35. slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doom-ish in that way, makes it
harder to put
a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like
Darkseid’s Omega
Effect, like Morgoth’s bane, 3 no matter how many turns and
digressions this
shit might take, it always—and I mean always—gets its man.
Whether I believe in what many have described as the Great
American Doom
is not really the point. You live as long as I did in the heart of
fukú country,
you hear these kinds of tales all the time. Everybody in Santo
Domingo has a
fukú story knocking around in their family. I have a twelve-
daughter uncle in
the Cibao who believed that he’d been cursed by an old lover
never to have
male children. Fukú. I have a tía who believed she’d been
denied happiness
because she’d laughed at a rival’s funeral. Fukú. My paternal
abuelo believes
that diaspora was Trujillo’s payback to the pueblo that betrayed
him. Fukú.
36. It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.”
In fact, it’s
better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you
believe, fukú
believes in you.
A couple weeks ago, while I was finishing this book, I posted
the thread
fukú on the DR1 forum, just out of curiosity. These days I’m
nerdy like that.
The talkback blew the fuck up. You should see how many
responses I’ve
gotten. They just keep coming in. And not just from Domos.
The Puertorocks
want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just
like it. There
are a zillion of these fukú stories. Even my mother, who almost
never talks
about Santo Domingo, has started sharing hers with me.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I have a fukú story too. I
wish I
could say it was the best of the lot—fukú number one—but I
can’t. Mine
37. ain’t the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most
beautiful.
It just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around my
throat.
I’m not entirely sure Oscar would have liked this designati on.
Fukú story. He
was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was
the kind of story
we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo
Domingo?
What more fantasy than the Antilles?
But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn:
What
more fukú?
One final final note, Toto, before Kansas goes bye-bye:
traditionally in Santo
38. Domingo anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s
name or
anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to
prevent
disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell
that would
keep you and your family safe. Not surprisingly, it was a word.
A simple
word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers).
Zafa.
It used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak,
in
Macondo than in McOndo. There are people, though, like my tío
Miguel in
the Bronx who still zafa everything. He’s old-school like that. If
the Yanks
commit an error in the late innings it’s zafa; if somebody brings
shells in
from the beach it’s zafa; if you serve a man parcha it’s zafa.
Twenty-four-
hour zafa in the hope that the bad luck will not have had time to
cohere. Even
now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of
39. sorts. My very
own counterspell.
Contents
I
One: GhettoNerd at the End of the World
Two: Wildwood
Three: The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral
Four: Sentimental Education
II
Five: Poor Abelard
Six: Land of the Lost
III
40. Seven: The Final Voyage
Eight: The End of the Story
The Final Letter
Acknowledgments
I
ONE
GhettoNerd at the End of the World
1974–1987
THE GOLDEN AGE
Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s
always going on
about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a
41. playboy with a
million hots on his jock.
And except for one period early in his life, dude never had
much luck
with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).
He was seven then.
In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a
Casanova.
One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss
the girls,
always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving
them the pelvic
pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who
danced it any
chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a “normal”
Dominican
boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimp-
liness was
encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties—and
there were many
many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before
Washington Heights
42. was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a
straight shot of
Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative
inevitably pushed
Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy
and girl
approximated the hip-motism of the adults.
You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days.
He was
our little Porfirio Rubirosa.4
All the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad
case of
Captain Trips. Not Oscar. The little guy loved himself the
females, had
“girlfriends” galore. (He was a stout kid, heading straight to fat,
but his
mother kept him nice in haircuts and clothes, and before the
proportions of
his head changed he’d had these lovely flashing eyes and these
cute-ass
43. cheeks, visible in all his pictures.) The girls—his sister Lola’s
friends, his
mother’s friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colón, a thirty-
something postal
employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a
bell for an ass
—all purportedly fell for him. Ese muchacho está bueno! (Did it
hurt that he
was earnest and clearly attention-deprived? Not at all!) In the
DR during
summer visits to his family digs in Baní he was the worst,
would stand in
front of Nena Inca’s house and call out to passing women—Tú
eres guapa!
Tú eres guapa!—until a Seventh-day Adventist complained to
his
grandmother and she shut down the hit parade lickety-split.
Muchacho del
diablo! This is not a cabaret!
It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar, one that reached its
apotheosis in the
fall of his seventh year, when he had two little girlfriends at the
same time,
his first and only ménage à trois. With Maritza Chacón and Olga
44. Polanco.
Maritza was Lola’s friend. Long-haired and prissy and so pretty
she could
have played young Dejah Thoris. Olga, on the other hand, was
no friend of
the family. She lived in the house at the end of the block that
his mother
complained about because it was filled with puertoricans who
were always
hanging out on their porch drinking beer. (What, they couldn’t
have done that
in Cuamo? Oscar’s mom asked crossly.) Olga had like ninety
cousins, all
who seemed to be named Hector or Luis or Wanda. And since
her mother
was una maldita borracha (to quote Oscar’s mom), Olga smelled
on some
days of ass, which is why the kids took to calling her Mrs.
Peabody.
Mrs. Peabody or not, Oscar liked how quiet she was, how she
let him
throw her to the ground and wrestle with her, the interest she
showed in his
45. Star Trek dolls. Maritza was just plain beautiful, no need for
motivation
there, always around too, and it was just a stroke of pure genius
that
convinced him to kick it to them both at once. At first he
pretended that it
was his number-one hero, Shazam, who wanted to date them.
But after they
agreed he dropped all pretense. It wasn’t Shazam—it was Oscar.
Those were more innocent days, so their relationship amounted
to
standing close to each other at the bus stop, some undercover
hand-holding,
and twice kissing on the cheeks very seriously, first Maritza,
then Olga, while
they were hidden from the street by some bushes. (Look at that
little macho,
his mother’s friends said. Que hombre.)
The threesome only lasted a single beautiful week. One day
after school
Maritza cornered Oscar behind the swing set and laid down the
law, It’s
either her or me! Oscar held Maritza’s hand and talked seriously
46. and at great
length about his love for her and reminded her that they had
agreed to share,
but Maritza wasn’t having any of it. She had three older sisters,
knew
everything she needed to know about the possibilities of
sharing. Don’t talk
to me no more unless you get rid of her! Maritza, with her
chocolate skin and
narrow eyes, already expressing the Ogún energy that she would
chop at
everybody with for the rest of her life. Oscar went home morose
to his pre–
Korean-sweatshop-era cartoons—to the Herculoids and Space
Ghost. What’s
wrong with you? his mother asked. She was getting ready to go
to her second
job, the eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had
set. When
Oscar whimpered, Girls, Moms de León nearly exploded. Tú ta
llorando por
una muchacha? She hauled Oscar to his feet by his ear.
47. Mami, stop it, his sister cried, stop it!
She threw him to the floor. Dale un galletazo, she panted, then
see if the
little puta respects you.
If he’d been a different nigger he might have considered the
galletazo. It
wasn’t just that he didn’t have no kind of father to show him the
masculine
ropes, he simply lacked all aggressive and martial tendencies.
(Unlike his
sister, who fought boys and packs of morena girls who hated her
thin nose
and straightish hair.) Oscar had like a zero combat rating; even
Olga and her
toothpick arms could have stomped him silly. Aggression and
intimidation
out of the question. So he thought it over. Didn’t take him long
to decide.
After all, Maritza was beautiful and Olga was not; Olga
sometimes smelled
like pee and Maritza did not. Maritza was allowed over their
house and Olga
48. was not. (A puertorican over here? his mother scoffed. Jamás!)
His logic as
close to the yes/no math of insects as a nigger could get. He
broke up with
Olga the following day on the playground, Maritza at his side,
and how Olga
had cried! Shaking like a rag in her hand-me-downs and in the
shoes that
were four sizes too big! Snots pouring out her nose and
everything!
In later years, after he and Olga had both turned into overweight
freaks,
Oscar could not resist feeling the occasional flash of guilt when
he saw Olga
loping across a street or staring blankly out near the New York
bus stop,
couldn’t stop himself from wondering how much his cold-as-
balls breakup
had contributed to her present fucked-upness. (Breaking up with
her, he
would remember, hadn’t felt like anything; even when she
started crying, he
hadn’t been moved. He’d said, No be a baby.)
49. What had hurt, however, was when Maritza dumped him.
Monday after
he’d fed Olga to the dogs he arrived at the bus stop with his
beloved Planet of
the Apes lunch box only to discover beautiful Maritza holding
hands with
butt-ugly Nelson Pardo. Nelson Pardo who looked like Chaka
from Land of
the Lost! Nelson Pardo who was so stupid he thought the moon
was a stain
that God had forgotten to clean. (He’ll get to it soon, he assured
his whole
class.) Nelson Pardo who would become the neighborhood B&E
expert
before joining the Marines and losing eight toes in the First
Gulf War. At first
Oscar thought it a mistake; the sun was in his eyes, he’d not
slept enough the
night before. He stood next to them and admired his lunch box,
how realistic
and diabolical Dr. Zaius looked. But Maritza wouldn’t even
smile at him!
50. Pretended he wasn’t there. We should get married, she said to
Nelson, and
Nelson grinned moronically, turning up the street to look for the
bus. Oscar
had been too hurt to speak; he sat down on the curb and felt
something
overwhelming surge up from his chest, scared the shit out of
him, and before
he knew it he was crying; when his sister, Lola, walked over
and asked him
what was the matter he’d shaken his head. Look at the
mariconcito,
somebody snickered. Somebody else kicked his beloved lunch
box and
scratched it right across General Urko’s face. When he got on
the bus, still
crying, the driver, a famously reformed PCP addict, had said,
Christ, don’t be
a fucking baby.
How had the breakup affected Olga? What he really was asking
was:
How had the breakup affected Oscar?
It seemed to Oscar that from the moment Maritza dumped him—
51. Shazam!
—his life started going down the tubes. Over the next couple of
years he
grew fatter and fatter. Early adolescence hit him especially
hard, scrambling
his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his skin
with zits, making
him self-conscious; and his interest—in Genres!—which nobody
had said
boo about before, suddenly became synonymous with being a
loser with a
capital L. Couldn’t make friends for the life of him, too dorky,
too shy, and
(if the kids from his neighborhood are to be believed) too weird
(had a habit
of using big words he had memorized only the day before). He
no longer
went anywhere near the girls because at best they ignored him,
at worst they
shrieked and called him gordo asqueroso! He forgot the perrito,
forgot the
pride he felt when the women in the family had called him
hombre. Did not
kiss another girl for a long long time. As though almost
everything he had in
52. the girl department had burned up that one fucking week.
Not that his “girlfriends” fared much better. It seemed that
whatever bad
no-love karma hit Oscar hit them too. By seventh grade Olga
had grown huge
and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere, started drinking 151
straight out the
bottle and was finally taken out of school because she had a
habit of
screaming NATAS! in the middle of homeroom. Even her
breasts, when they
finally emerged, were floppy and terrifying. Once on the bus
Olga had called
Oscar a cake eater, and he’d almost said, Look who’s talking,
puerca, but he
was afraid that she would rear back and trample him; his cool -
index, already
low, couldn’t have survived that kind of a paliza, would have
put him on par
with the handicapped kids and with Joe Locorotundo, who was
famous for
53. masturbating in public.
And the lovely Maritza Chacón? The hypotenuse of our triangle,
how had
she fared? Well, before you could say Oh Mighty Isis, Maritza
blew up into
the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New Peru.
Since they
stayed neighbors, Oscar saw her plenty, a ghetto Mary Jane,
hair as black and
lush as a thunderhead, probably the only Peruvian girl on the
planet with pelo
curlier than his sister’s (he hadn’t heard of Afro-Peruvians yet,
or of a town
called Chincha), body fine enough to make old men forget their
infirmities,
and from the sixth grade on dating men two, three times her
age. (Maritza
might not have been good at much—not sports, not school, not
work—but
she was good at men.) Did that mean she had avoided the
curse—that she
was happier than Oscar or Olga? That was doubtful. From what
Oscar could
see, Maritza was a girl who seemed to delight in getting slapped
54. around by
her boyfriends. Since it happened to her all the time. If a boy
hit me, Lola
said cockily, I would bite his face.
See Maritza: French-kissing on the front stoop of her house,
getting in or
out of some roughneck’s ride, being pushed down onto the
sidewalk. Oscar
would watch the French-kissing, the getting in and out, the
pushing, all
through his cheerless, sexless adolescence. What else could he
do? His
bedroom window looked out over the front of her house, and so
he always
peeped her while he was painting his D&D miniatures or
reading the latest
Stephen King. The only things that changed in those years were
the models
of the cars, the size of Maritza’s ass, and the kind of music
volting out the
cars’ speakers. First freestyle, then Ill Will–era hiphop, and,
right at the very
end, for just a little while, Héctor Lavoe and the boys.
55. He said hi to her almost every day, all upbeat and faux-happy,
and she
said hi back, indifferently, but that was it. He didn’t imagine
that she
remembered their kissing—but of course he could not forget.
THE MORONIC INFERNO
High school was Don Bosco Tech, and since Don Bosco Tech
was an urban
all-boys Catholic school packed to the strakes with a couple
hundred insecure
hyperactive adolescents, it was, for a fat sci-fi–reading nerd
like Oscar, a
source of endless anguish. For Oscar, high school was the
equivalent of a
medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to
endure the
peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an
experience from
which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but
that’s not
really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be
56. gleaned from the
ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.
He walked
into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and
all he could
think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at
last be set free
from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on
Mars?—Hey,
Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic
inferno he knew
exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.
Sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping
245
(260 when he was depressed, which was often) and it had
become clear to
everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the
neighborhood
parigüayo.
*
Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican
male,
57. couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn’t
play sports for
shit, or dominoes, was beyond uncoordinated, threw a ball like a
girl. Had no
knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G.
And most
damning of all: no looks. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto
Rican afro,
rocked enormous Section 8 glasses—his “anti-pussy devices,”
Al and Miggs,
his only friends, called them—sported an unappealing trace of
mustache on
his upper lip and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made
him look
somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus. (A comparison he
made himself
one day going through his mother’s record collection; she was
the only old-
school dominicana he knew who had dated a moreno until
Oscar’s father put
an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World
Party.) You have
the same eyes as your abuelo, his Nena Inca had told him on one
of his visits
to the DR, which should have been some comfort—who doesn’t
58. like
resembling an ancestor?—except this particular ancestor had
ended his days
in prison.
Oscar had always been a young nerd—the kind of kid who read
Tom
Swift, who loved comic books and watched Ultraman—but by
high school
his commitment to the Genres had become absolute. Back when
the rest of us
were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our
older brothers’
cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents’ eyes, he
was gorging
himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs,
Howard,
Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the
Old Ones
who were already beginning to fade—E. E. “Doc” Smith,
Stapledon, and the
guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books—moving hungrily
59. from book to
book, author to author, age to age. (It was his good fortune that
the libraries
of Paterson were so underfunded that they still kept a lot of the
previous
generation’s nerdery in circulation.) You couldn’t have torn him
away from
any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or
spaceships
or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil
villains. In
these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother
insisted was
part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak
Chakobsa,
could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman i n
acute detail,
knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a
role-playing
game fanatic. (If only he’d been good at videogames it would
have been a
slam dunk but despite owning an Atari and an Intellivision he
didn’t have the
reflexes for it.) Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his
otakuness maybe
60. shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore
his nerdiness
like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t
have passed
for Normal if he’d wanted to.
*
Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym
class and
watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and
could tell
you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi
walker, and he
used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and
ubiquitous
when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high
school. One of
those nerds who was always hiding out in the library, who
adored Tolkien
and later the Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his
favorite
character was of course Raistlin), …