Summary
In Chapter 9, Changez describes his return to Pakistan to spend the holidays with his family while under the threat of war with India. When he flys back, he decides to grow out his beard, which makes his coworkers wary of him. Wainwright and Jim, his only two friends and supporters at work, both advise that he get rid of his beard, not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, but because it is making other people uncomfortable.
Changez visits Erica at a clinic outside of New York where she is staying to recuperate. At first, Changez has to speak with a nurse instead of Erica, because, as the nurse tells him, Erica has been feeling very delicate and does not want to meet him immediately. When he does see Erica, she tells him she is grateful for his care, but he is left disappointed. Jim gives Changez an extraordinary chance to work on a project in Valparaiso, Chile, and Changez accepts.
In Chapter 10, Changez says he travels with Jim and the Underwood Samson team to Valparaiso to valuate a publishing company. They meet with Juan-Bautista, the chief of the company. Changez finds himself unable to work and ends up spending all his time reading news about impending war between Pakistan and India. The vice president of the company they are working with berates Changez for his lack of productivity, and Changez promises to get himself together.
Remembering that Changez mentioned earlier that his uncle is a poet, Juan-Bautista looks him up. This mention of Changez's personal connections with literature, as opposed to Jim's purely business-side experience with publishing, makes Juan-Bautista warm up to him.
Noticing Changez's distraction and different attitude, he invites him to explore the city and then takes him out to dinner, where he uses the story of the janissaries as an admonition to the young Pakistani man against working with the Americans against his own people.
Changez realizes that what had seemed to him to be a pure meritocracy is in fact a machine working in favor of the Americans over people in the rest of the world, especially the Third World, to which he belongs by his family roots. The revelation of this contradiction within his life disturbs him and makes him distrust the things that Jim had told him before about doing well in business.
Feeling profoundly changed, Changez tells Jim that he refuses to work further and is going back to New York. Jim tells Changez that he would be betraying his trust in him, but Changez is already firm in his decision.
Analysis
These two chapters mark the turning points in Changez's two most important relationships—his romance with Erica and his employment at (and firm belief in) Underwood Samson.
When he visits Erica at the clinic, he finds that she has almost entirely retreated within herself and her thoughts of Chris. Although, even more vehemently than before, he recognizes this as pathological of her, he also begins to become more conscious of his own selfish desire to possess Erica in the relationship, a tendency that complicates his desire to help her. This is most clearly represented by his sudden impulse to want to abduct her from the clinic.
With Juan-Bautistia, Changez effectively undergoes a second selection that heavily evokes his interview with and discovery by Jim for the firm; he says of Juan-Bautista that "I never came to know why Juan-Bautista singled me out. Perhaps he was gifted with remarkable powers of empathy and had observed in me a dilemma that out of compassion he thought he could help me resolve; perhaps he saw among his enemies one who was weak and could easily be brought down" (146).
This also, coincidentally, establishes a parallel with the ambiguity of Changez's own conversation with the American, whom he could be taking into his confidence or trying to seduce as tactic. Whereas Jim saw Changez's feeling of not belonging as a way to bring out Changez's competitive spirit, Juan-Bautista tries to help Changez find a sense of rootedness in allegiance to a culture to which he belongs to substantively.
However, at the same time, Juan-Bautista has a personal, selfish stake in Changez's quitting and thus derailing Underwood Samson's valuation of his company. As Changez knows, Juan-Bautista runs the company but does not own it and is in conflict with the owners, who likely want to get rid of him. Thus, his move could be understood as a kind of aggressive self-preservation. In a sense, so many of the characters with sharpened sensitivity persuade others out of such a motive.
