A traveller's diary: travelling in time

The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see, GK Chesterton had famously remarked. When you roam the streets of some foreign land, letting your instincts take you where they will, you drink in and feel a lot more than you would if you rushed around with a fixed itinerary, oblivious to those tiny nuggets of living wonder that beckon in between. There’s a third kind of travelling too, which most people hardly pay any attention to. That’s when you see distant lands through the eyes of someone else, someone who knows the place inside o­ut, someone w­ho can sketch for you the life within it. You are neither the traveller nor t­he tourist, but the reader. And the reader sees what the writer wants him or her to see.The act of r­eading can be just as exhilarating as the act of actually tr­avelling to the pla­ce menti­oned in the book — if you have chosen t­he right guide for yourself. There are certain authors who have the sorcerer’s kn­ack for conjuring up images of the wet, the arid, the blossoming or the wild and to take you deep into realms unknown.Among the most rec­ent books, the one that would really take the cake for detailed visual images and living descriptions of the flora, fauna and life of a place would most certainly be Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke. While the first book in the tri-series mostly explored poppy-fields of Bihar and the cabins aboard the Ibis, the second book has amazingly vivid word-images of China’s fanqui-town, the island of Hong Kong and Deeti’s shrine in Mauritius. In particular, the bustling life of fanqui-town, full of traders of all shapes and sizes, resounding with overlapping tongues, can be seen with astonishing clearness. It takes you effortlessly into the very heart of a place that doesn’t exist now and which none of us have ever seen.Another book that takes you inside a land you would never be able to see again is Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Through the eyes of the protagonist Aamir, it shows the world a happy, flourishing Afghanistan, its skies full of kites and its land sprouting pomegranate trees — an Afghanistan which the modern generation, fed on images of gun-toting tribals and bombed towns, would gape at disbelievingly. It winds through the streets of Kabul with the lingering smell of kebabs, through the gardens of the rich and the pretty holding parties at night, through green fields and happy meadows that a grown-up Amir, returning to the place, searches for in vain.Finally, any discussion on word-sorcery is incomplete without a mention of the ultimate word-sorceress, Arundhati Roy. Her only work of fiction, The God of Small Things, is unique in its descriptions for they breathe life into inanimate things, painting everything with a wild brushstroke. Be it the baby bat that the ‘dead’ Sophie Mol spots from ‘inside her coffin’ or the river, in Kerala’s Ayemenem, which, though it appeared to be a tame ‘church-going amooma’, was actually a wild thing — every object within a frame has life of its own. The best of all, perhaps, is the ‘moth’ that lays its cold, hairy feet on Estha’s heart, a huge moth that you can somehow see before you.From China to Kabul and Kerala, you move not just in space but also, smoothly, in time. Now, that’s one helluva way to travel!