A spell of romance to awaken a sense of reality

When I was young, travel writing was a mandatory segment in Tamil magazines. In an age without TV and internet, “I-was-there” accounts of places faraway grabbed every reader’s heart. For sheer mass appeal there was nothing to beat ‘The Heart Speaks’. It had its own style. In Nanking or New York, our writer remained quintessentially Tamil, viewing other cultures from a higher pedestal. From cities above or below the Equator, the traveller unfailingly drooled over jasmine white idli or ghee dripping dosa, pridefully provided by some immigrant host, a pukka Tamil born of course!

Closer home there was mother Anandhi, who wrote indefatigable letters to family and friends, from the quietude of a Kyoto monastery which broke its ban on female guests to house her as a “teacher from India”. From a café in Oslo frequented by Henrik Ibsen. A note dashed off from Yellowstone Park. A postcard from the Parthenon. A reflective “epistle” from Assisi, as a lifelong admirer of St Francis, patron saint of animals. Photographs show her traipsing through all these colourful spots in Kanchipuram saree and tennis shoes!

No wonder Marco Polo became my childhood hero. ‘The Odyssey’ fascinated me as an account of strange lands and stranger customs. I continue to enjoy picaresque novels and road movies. I can watch ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ again and again, not for Che Guevara’s ideologies, but for what it tells me about people and places. In the more recent Oscar winning ‘Green Book’, racist bigotry came alive because an African-American pianist is driven by a white man across the deep (still Confederate in spirit) south.

The magic of travellers’ tales is best invoked by two English writers. Shakespeare has Desdemona sighing, “Passing strange, and pitiful, wondrous pitiful!” as Othello mesmerises her with stories of impenetrable caverns, man-eating cannibals, and an African race with heads growing beneath their shoulders. PG Wodehouse has stories where the homegrown lad watches the girl he loves being stolen by the ‘Big Game Hunter’ with his hair-raising raconteurings nonchalantly peppered with local jargon. Of how, as he was eating his longo (soup) in his wongo (tent) in the zongo (wilderness), he was called to action by the pongo (drum) to grab his dongo (gun), and shoot the jongo (lion).    

The writer who haunts me has a name I cannot pronounce: Ryszard Kapuscinski. His ‘Travels with Herodotus’ records sojournings in Asia and Africa, interweaving the Greek historian’s epic tales with his own, thus spinning double strands. His masterly strategy of using the present tense to retell ‘Herodotus’ makes ancient characters and long-ago battles vibrate in the present. This process turns their modern equivalents -in actual wars and apparent peace- into terrifying action replay. We are simultaneously plunged into time past and time present. We begin to understand human nature with acuity.   

The geopolitical map of the region described in my next random choice — ‘Baghdad Without a Map’, has changed drastically. But Tony Horowitz captures the spirit of the people he meets with fellow feeling and wry humour. A black woman with nose and neck rings, basket on head, walks a camel down the road. Says Horowitz, “Abdul said she was Tihama, from the Red sea coast where the Arab world meets the African. “Village not like city,” Abdul explained. “Every person knows every person. Why hide?” I asked Abdul why everyone carried a dagger. “Yemen not safe,” he said. “And Yemen is very proud history.”  

Bruce Chatwin remains a king of storytellers. His perfectly named anthology “What Am I Doing Here?” shows how he can transform the narrative into arresting, even startling images. Look at the tall and lovely mad woman of Ghazni rattling her bracelets before the tomb of Mahmud. “When they opened the doors, she flung herself on the wooden balustrade, and flapped her crimson dress and cawed like a wounded bird…She kissed the inscription, as if each marble letter contained the cure for her sickness.” 

Great travel writing does not merely describe experience or document visuals. It sets your mind free to soar above, dive below, and explore everything in between. To relish pluralities, find wisdom in diversity. It casts a spell of romance to anchor us in grim realities. 

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist