Spaniard Goes West

A little more to the West as Calculus might have said.

I am off to Karachi for the Lit Fest and after that, to Lahore for two days. Of course, it's impossible to make the short hop from Bombay to Karachi in the civilised hour or so that it should take, so I will be jetlagged with a day-chewing couple of flights, but hey - I'm westward bound!

Unexpectedly, for me, I think I will blog as often as time permits. I won't be able to take my SLR because baggage rules about one bag are very strict and I really can't stuff a camera into my laptop bag. There will be another camera, though it's old and the images it produces are rather grainy but that can't be helped.

What has been interesting has been the reactions of people to the news in the last two days. 

"Why are you doing this?!" one person said. "You'll never get a visa to the US again." 

"Karachi? Oh! Oh!" said another friend. The second oh was both exclamatory and silent. I could tell.

Another misheard me and was puzzled. "What?" I asked, maybe a little aggressively. When she asked what I'd said and I repeated myself, she said, 'Oh, Karachi! I thought you said Karate."

One friend of my mother's has just been and back and she had much advice to give me. We've made a date to compare stories once I return. Another sounded wistful; she had tried so hard to visit her sister for a whole year and at one point it looked like the visa might come through. But then it didn't and her sister died.

Visas. Let's not talk about them.

Let's talk about PACKING!

(Actually, let's not. You lot know me and know it was and continues to be epic. One day, I will inaugurate a new genre of travel writing that is almost entirely told via the packing for it.)

Maybe let's talk about shopping instead? Or things I absolutely must do and see in both these cities?

Suggestions, please!

Two Minutes Older: Packing It All In

There’s an Iznogoud story where Iznogoud gets a gift from someone and each time he opens the box, there’s another one inside that’s bigger than the box it came in. While this may challenge the laws of physics, I have often wondered when someone will invent such a useful object. You see, I have trouble deciding what to pack.

This is how it goes: one month before I need to travel, I begin to make lists of things to pack, under the general headings of Must Take, Can’t Do Without and Just In Case.

The first two categories are the easiest and most obvious. For instance, Must Take would include clothes, the house keys for when you return and suchlike. Can’t Do Without would be items like necessary, basic medication or camera/laptop/phone. It’s the third category that constantly challenges me and makes me out-Girl Guide myself each time I travel.

Just in case, I carry extra clothes. My logic – what if there’s no way I can wash my clothes? What if it rains? What if someone steals my clothes off the line? But most times I don’t have a reason for why I pack what I do, unless you count the category itself as not just self-explanatory but also logical.

Just in case, I (always) carry several zip pouches containing rings, toe rings, payals, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, even if it’s a two-day trip. Just in case I decide not to chew my nails, there are scissors, nail cutter and nail file (but, thankfully, no nail polish or remover). Just in case, also: torch, extra batteries, universal adapter, extra footwear, spare soap, hand sanitiser, hand mirror, extra handbags …you get the picture. Like Harold Wilson, I am an optimist, but an optimist who takes her raincoat. (I should say here, that of all the things it’s occurred to me to pack, a raincoat has never made the list. Not even when I travel to Bombay in the monsoon.)

And then I worry that I will run out of reading material. I assume that my mere presence in a city will repel bookstores or cause them to hide themselves from general view. And so I pack the book I happen to be reading, two more that I definitely will have the time to read, and a couple extra – you got it – just in case.

If you thought that all this advance planning would intimidate me right at the list stage and that better sense would prevail when I looked at my tiny, empty suitcase, you’d be wrong. All that advance planning achieves is it give you ample time in which to expand your list to unwieldy proportions. If you’re like me, you’re more likely to mentally list the number of suitcases and backpacks you have and wonder if you need to buy more. Just in case.

This time, when we travelled to Pondicherry, we packed one suitcase each and a couple of other bags that we thought we’d leave half-empty so that it could contain any shopping we might do or gifts we might buy.

What happened was, every time we closed our eyes, our bags reproduced. Before we knew it, five bags became seven and – by the time we settled ourselves in the train back home – eleven.

The night before we left, I had a panic attack and my son asked me – half anxious and half tickled at the amount of stuff lying on the floor waiting to be accommodated in our eleven bags, “What will happen if all this doesn’t fit?”

“Then you just wear whatever’s left,” I said.

I assure you, I wasn’t entirely joking, though my son giggled with delight at the thought.

It’s at times like this that I wish that Mary Poppins’ bag was an already achieved invention – one that could make the immaterial material, make object out of thought and horse out of wish. (Though, of course, for that to work properly we’d have to live in a benign Disneyworld uniformly coloured by niceness, decency and self-deprecating humour. Such a bag would be totally out of place in, for instance, Chennai Central).

The other way to avoid the horrors of packing is to stay at home and read travel blogs.

*

This column appeared in today's New Indian Express.

Two Minutes Older: I Know What To Do This Summer

April rolls around and a sizeable portion of the country wonders what to do with the summer. One slice of those with disposable incomes and children scouts around for summer camps, swimming lessons and any manner of activity that will ensure the continued absence of their offspring for a part of the day. Others – also with disposable incomes but with children optional – begin to look for vacation cool-spots.

Vacations once meant the inevitable trip to what is sometimes still called ‘the native place’. This usually meant dusty train journeys sometimes followed by bus journeys to places like Mettur, Kancheepuram, Kumbakonam or plain old Chennai. Once in a rare while, it meant exotic places such as Kashmir or Rajasthan.

Maybe it’s because these exotic vacations were always attended by disasters such as flat tyres, missed flights and bookings that we found cancelled just as we gratefully collapsed in the hotel lobby, that I am now a very jittery and reluctant traveller. I don’t travel if I can help it and I am puzzled by this passion Indians suddenly have to see every place on this planet before it is either submerged by the sea, or destroyed by war, natural disaster, disease or plain old economic development.

It hardly needs to be said that travel of a certain touristy kind is partially responsible for the disappearance of whatever it is the traveller has come to see: those swirling mists now carry not the scent of pines or eucalyptus but of garbage; that ancient temple will always tell you that Ravi loves Sujata (whatever the current state of their relationship may be) and the ads promise you that everywhere you go will be just like where you left.

The seasoned traveller takes these paradoxes in her stride but I am not one of them. Of late, I find more things to offend me and make me indignant about the consumption of places and people. In the documentary film, Jashn-e-Azadi by Sanjay Kak, one sequence shows a bunch of people posing with army jawans, sometimes with guns slung awkwardly over their shoulders, sometimes with borrowed army caps, but always with big, happy grins on their faces. Are they really unmindful of what it means to pose for those kinds of photographs in present-day Kashmir?

I can’t decide if vacationers are especially good at wilful blindness or if it’s just me who is morbidly sensitive. I suppose it depends on why one travels. If travel is one way of enlarging one’s experience then surely the traveller must engage with the place at also the human level? Places aren’t just mountains and sea or food and handicrafts.

When I think of the chattering busloads standing on the suicide points scattered across the hill stations of this country or bargaining hard over a mekhla-chador or bastar toy, or even making a mini-pradakshana around the swimsuit-clad woman lying on a beach in Goa, I can’t help remembering Pablo Neruda’s sprawling, incantatory poem, ‘Spain in our Hearts’. The last section of the poem, ‘I Explain A Few Things’, sets up a series of questions the speaker of the poem is supposedly asked: “You will ask: and where are the lilacs?/ And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?/ And the rain that often struck/ your words filling them/ with holes and birds”. The answer, after a several detours, is stirring and unforgettable:

Come and see the blood in the streets,

Come and see

The blood in the streets,

Come and see the blood

In the streets!

The inevitable question, if one does see the blood in the streets is, it possible to be unaffected and continue to look for beauty or peace or the gods or the past or whatever it is one is looking for, as if nothing were happening now? Where can one safely travel without being crass or insensitive?

Since I don’t particularly want to wring my hands in public, let me also confess that I don’t have answers to these questions.

What is clear to me is that I won’t be going anywhere this summer. Instead, I will travel with a remote and a bowl of murmura. If there’s no electricity, there’s always a stack of books to hand. 

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)