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SECOND
THOUGHTS – THE HINDU The long way home In From Heaven Lake, Seth mingles historical fact with poetic description and telling anecdote to take the reader along effortlessly. Conversations
and people can convey more about a place than several turgid
paragraphs and Seth knows this well. Photo:
K. Bhagya Prakash The
other day in the hills I rose, after many years, to the sound of a
cock crowing. Compared to the metallic, penetrating cell phone alarm
that is the gift of technology to us, the cock-crow was sweet music.
And the cloud had rolled up right to the large glass window,
swallowing the heart-numbing sight of several half-built houses,
gouged hillsides and handsome pines felled while asleep. For
a moment, I was once again the teenager of a lifetime away, treading
lightly with the goats from the little village of Ani where the young
and vigorous Sutlej rushed under a narrow bridge, to the village of
Khanag, hidden high up among the conifers. Leaving the crystal-clear
stream with its churning water-mills, we began the climb upwards,
lunching against large rocks on parathas and mango pickle, when the
cloud rolled down, like some lazy white pillow, from the mountain
crest and covered everything in sight with a thin magical haze. It was
the same sort of cloud again and holding on to the vision, I began to
scour my shelves for travel books once again, books that would talk of
unknown roads, open starlit skies, trains whistling in the dark... A
clutch of books presented themselves and in the coming weeks I will
drift through them, wistfully and randomly, as these books deserve to
be read. There is Chatwin's masterly The Songlines, Kerouac's Lonesome
Traveler, Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life and Peter Fleming's One's
Company. And a special re-rea d is reserved for that mother of all
travel books: Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana. It is possible that any
or all of them may surface more than once in this column at some time
but today I will prefer to stick to a slim travelogue, From Heaven
Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, written by a young Vikram
Seth before he amazed us with the sheer inventiveness of The Golden
Gate and then staggered us with his wrist-wrenching magnum opus A
Suitable Boy. Seth
spent two years as a student at China's Nanjing University and, in the
summer of 1981, as he announces almost casually in the introduction,
“returned home to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal.” His journey begins
in the towns of Urumchi and Turfan on the northern branch of the
ancient silk route, hot Xinjiang towns crowded with flies, donkey
carts and watermelons and not far away, at the intensely blue Heaven
Lake, surrounded by green mountain walls and fed by the snowmelt from
the Mount Bogda ranges, which sit “abrupt like a shining prism laid
horizontally on the desert surface.” Like for so many of us who have
worked or travelled in China, the former Soviet Union or West Asia,
the immortal words of Awara Hoon open an unexpected door for Seth and
he obtains a permit to travel by land to Tibet. Like any traveller,
and particularly any travel writer, worth his salt would, Seth
immediately begins to hallucinate on visions of yaks, trucks, lamas
and the sloping white walls of the Potala palace rising forever into a
cloudless azure sky. Not knowing quite how, he plans to cross over
from Tibet into Nepal and then onto India. But
before that, he has a long way to go. First there is the frustrating
detour to the east; to Xian (which reminds him “irresistibly of
Delhi, with its “broad streets, dryness, the shop canopies leaning
out over the pavements, the bicycle-riding white-shirted
population”) and to Nanjing and Beijing, to pick up his passport,
more money and the essential cell for the light meter of his Nikon.
That light meter was well worth the effort: the book has some telling
black and white photographs, showing sunburnt faces of smiling Uighurs
and Tibetan yak herds, a desert storm building up over Liuyuan, trucks
stuck in a desert flood, the oasis silk-route town of Dunhuang and of
course, the Potala. Hitch-hiking on random passing trucks, closeted
with chance acquaintances, a group of teachers, even a bunch of
chickens, the writer moves on relentlessly towards Lhasa, crossing the
lonely Chaidam Basin and then over the Kunlun range and onto the
Qinghai-Tibet plateau. In
the classical manner of the successful travelogue, Seth tells the
story of his journey with complete honesty. Mingling historical fact
with the poetic description and telling anecdote, he takes the reader
along effortlessly. Conversations and people can convey more about a
place than several turgid paragraphs and Seth knows this well. He does
not hide his frustrations and his fears or even his headaches. He
bluffs his way, trades cigarettes, uses his “foreignness” when
required and loses his temper with disturbing regularity. Most
important, he does not romanticise: despite his yearning to see the
Potala he describes the experience of being pushed around by a
relentless juggernaut of pilgrims like someone coming out of a
wringer, the rotting dirt of Lhasa is not swept away by sentimentality
and an idyllic Nepal night is truthfully marked by mosquitoes, flies
and bloodsuckers. And of course there is the beauty too, of the
landscape, of flute music, of a “light paper kite, rhomboid,
tail-less, like the ones we have at home, a prisoner of string and
wind, flying now in one direction, now in another, with no appraisable
trend or endeavour.” Ultimately,
overcoming bureaucratic imponderables and floods, he does cross over
into Nepal, without knowing that he has done so, on some green slope
in the Himalayas, and is greeted with the sight of a woman in a sari
washing clothes at a stream, quite oblivious whether she is one
country or the other. From there to Delhi airport, a bottle of
duty-free Glenfiddich in his hand, is a short journey. And yes, one
early morning, at the spring-fed lake at Nanhu, he too is woken up by
an insistent cock-crow. E-mail:
navtej.sarna@gmail.com Website:
www.navtejsarna.com |
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