Bhavani Nirmal was well into a distinguished career in the Indian civil service, when she took extraordinary leave. In officialese, this means leave without pay, but her Caribbean holiday was extraordinary in more than one sense.

She went to St. Kitts and Nevis to join her husband, an expert on agricultural machinery and found herself in the middle of what she describes as a “colorful” holiday. She learnt to surf, and to sail. She taught yoga to the local populace, and enrolled in a course or two in the St. Kitts University. When the weekly ship arrived with supplies, she found herself in the marketplace hobnobbing with the Prime Minister, and just about everyone else on the island. And on their Independence Day, she put up a show where the local children performed “a sort of hybrid dancing” to the strains of Lalgudi Jairaman’s thillana. She was, you could say, between cultures.

Or rather, between careers—the first as a high-level servant in various ministries, and the next as an equally successful immigration lawyer in the United States. The former career is easily attributable to circumstance and, of course, innate ability. She came from a family of civil servants: her father was the Accountant General for Central Revenues in India, and expected his children to follow in his footsteps. Two of her brothers obliged. One went on to become the Information and Broadcasting secretary and the other is the present Chief Vigilence Commissioner of India, P. Shankar. The other brothers differed in their choice of career. As for Nirmal, she wanted to please her father and wrote the civil service exams, right after finishing a degree in philosophy from Madras University.

However, she had to wait for two years till she turned 21, the minimum age requirement to join the service. In the interim period, she taught philisophy at the Women’s Christian College at Chennai. Soon after she became old enough, she got the call to join the secretariat. She soon discovered that her father wasn’t the only one pleased: she herself “liked the whole thing.” For one, she had a lot of time to study, and learn. “I was not just a pen pusher,” she explains. “There were challenging jobs everywhere.” Her first posting was with the Ministry of community and panchayat raj. Some time later she was shifted to the Ministry of shipping and transport where she helped execute what was undoubtedly the major challenge of her civil service career, and one of which she is justifiably proud of. Indian ports had been under a systemof administration that was in a state of confusion. Each port was under a separate government act, and its relationship with the center or the other ports wasn’t too clearly defined. As a result, the port authorities alleged too much control from the center; while the government appeared constantly suspicious of the the ports’ attempts towards increased autonomy. There was an act that was passed in 1963 aimed at bringing all of them under one umbrella, but this umbrella proved too small, and too full of holes, for everyone to stay dry. What Nirmal and her colleagues tried to do, with some success, was overhaul this ‘63 act. They drafted an amendment to this, and the newer, better act is the one that is in place today. It was, she says, a difficult task. They not only had to get various, quite divergent points of views to concur, but had to do this in the shadows of a string of shipping and transport ministers, each with his own ideas of how the job should be done.

However, the time she spent in this department saw the boom in the shipping scenario in India. Nirmal and her team had laid down the procedures, and were providing financial help to the companies, so tonnage grew at unprecented rates.

As for her next assignment, she is understandably secretive: it was with the Ministry of Defense. She was involved in indigenization of supplies, which involved “matching industries to help them produce some of the supplies indigenously.”

It was then that her husband got posted to the Carribean, and she followed. After her two year vacation during which, despite her apparently active life, she grew “tired of sitting at home and not working,” they moved to the Florida. She took a voluntary retirement, but had already decided that she couldn’t sit at home doing nothing. But the question was what she would do. There were two things, she learned, that were “happening.” One was computers. She decided to give it a shot, or rather, four shots—she enrolled in four successive courses before giving up in disgust. The other field, law, came more easy, since she had an idea of legalese from her previous experence. She took up an undergraduate course in political science at the Florida International University. Simultaneously, she took up a course in para-legal studies, which helped her get an idea of the system in the U.S. By the time she finished her course she was a certified para-legal, but that was merely the first step.

After she graduated from the University of Miami School of Law, she worked for a very brief period in a law firm, before deciding that she could not work under someone else. She tried her hand at a number of fields, before settling on immigration as her mainstay. She dabbled, as she does even now, in family law, real estate law, and once or twice, in bankruptcy law. One of the reasons she prefers immigration law, she says, is because it does not tie her down to Florida law.

She hails from Karnataka, but lived in Tamil Nadu for the first two decades of her life. Her time in Delhi helped her become fluent in Hindi and Punjabi, while marriage to a Keralite established new linguistic ties. Somewhere along the way, she picked up Telugu. All this means that immigrating clients who come expecting having to deal with a “hard-hearted person” are pleasantly taken aback to find a mild-mannered lady talking to them in their own language. Which makes her hard job noticeably easier.

She has helped a large number of IT people into the country, but they are not the only ones. Her clients cover a wide variety of fields.

For example, a manufacturer of stainless steel utensils who wanted to set up base in Florida, whose case she is particularly proud of. With equal pride, she points out the case of a certain large Pune-based agricultural company that wanted to set up a–this is the nub–computer subsidiary in the US. Needless to say, she helped their case too. She transferred the person on an L1 and now he has a green card and is doing quite well, thank you. “That was a challenge. It required some effort, some finesse, to do that,” she says.

Besides, she has helped the University of Miami, Jackson Memorial Hospital and Eckhard Pharmaceuticals, to name a few. She has helped people not only from India, but also people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and a few Latin American and Caribbean countries find new lives in the United States. Casting her mind to all the people she has helped in no small a way, she reflects that there are doctors she has helped place, and research scientists across various disciplines. Right now she’s helping chefs enter the country, something that is getting more and more difficult. There are innumerable technology professionals, and several mechanical and civil engineers. And not the least, she chuckles, she has helped herself. Nirmal’s career path. From civil service to immigration practise, Nirmal hasn’t lost her panache in drilling down to problems and nudging them to solutions. A civil service, indeed.