School portraits / One fee deadline, then seven months
The Question on the Fee Form
A refundable deposit or an annual payment: the NIST joining form asked a couple the one thing they had never agreed on.
Priya and Daniel Whitfield had been married nine years and had never once agreed on how long they were staying anywhere. NIST International School, on Sukhumvit Soi 15, asked them in writing. New families choose between a refundable Campus Development Deposit of 575,000 baht, returned within 45 days of leaving, or a non-refundable 60,500 baht a year. The form did not say “how long is your posting”, but that is what it said.
Daniel, who worked for a firm that described every assignment as “two years, initially”, read the choice as a bet and wanted to take it. “Three years of annual payments is under two hundred thousand. We’ll be gone by then.” Priya, who had unpacked their wedding china in four countries and never once got it all out, read it differently. “Every time you say two years, I find myself still here with the box of plates.” They were sitting at the table of a serviced apartment, which is where expat marriages do their accounting.
They did what people do, which was build a spreadsheet. Daniel’s had a column called “likely departure”. Priya’s had a column called “Daniel’s likely departure, adjusted”, with a formula she would not explain. Their daughter Anjali, who was seven and had been told this was a conversation about school, asked whether the school was any good. Both parents said yes at once, and then went back to arguing about the only thing the school had actually asked them.
Daniel took the question to work. His boss, a Dane who had arrived in Bangkok “for a year” during a previous decade, laughed for a surprisingly long time and then said, “Pay the deposit.” A colleague on a genuine two-year contract said pay the annual. HR said it depended, which Daniel reported to Priya as “HR says it depends,” and Priya said she could have told him that for free, and had, several times.
The deadline settled it, as deadlines do. On the last evening Daniel added up what they had spent on serviced-apartment coffee and found it was most of a year’s annual payment, which proved nothing but shook him. Priya pointed at the box in the corner. “If we pay the deposit,” she said, “I’m unpacking the plates.” It was the first thing either of them had said about the future that was not a number. He ticked the deposit.
Seven months later the firm moved Daniel to Singapore, “for two years, initially”. Priya wrapped the plates. The school refunded the deposit inside its forty-five days, less a canteen bill Anjali swore was not hers. On the night the money landed, Daniel suggested, carefully, that this proved he had been right about the length of the posting. Priya pointed out that the deposit had come back and the plates had been out for seven months, which was more than Singapore was going to give either of them.