Travel Tales
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it, by limiting the experience to a search for the photogenic
Susan Sontag
TO MARKET, TO MARKET
It was a small idea I’d floated on top of the day’s main agenda: the Giza pyramids. Everyone understood it as a “maybe”, especially after the previous night’s indulgence: flaky fiteer, rooftop cocktails, and the city humming below along the Nile.
But by 7 a.m., my sister-in-law was at our door, flustered and holding out her phone.
“The guy doesn’t speak a word of English.”
Our driver — arranged through an airport travel desk hustler — had arrived. With my bare-bones Arabic and a working knowledge that "P" is pronounced soft, I helped him find our Golden Balace Hotel.
Ahmed wore a pressed waistcoat and an impeccable haircut. He nodded politely and handed over his phone for us to type in our destination. Thirty-five kilometers, two hours in traffic. While the rest of us managed to doze off in the stop-and-go traffic, I soaked in all the filtered sun and streaming radio music as our Fortuner crawled past the Nile and out of Cairo.
Soon, the highway narrowed to a single dusty road cutting through emptier and emptier land. I asked Ahmed to stop and get directions to the souq, which he did — hesitantly. I’d later learn he was Syrian, newly arrived, and unfamiliar with the local dialect. Locals responded with amused shrugs and half-smiles. Eventually, we passed rows of old Chevy pickups and saw the sign: Welcome to Birqash.
The Birqash Camel Market sprawled across acres of sunbaked dust, scattered with tin sheds and clustered animals. Camels from Sudan, Somalia, and headed for tourist-rides or slaughter-house, stood tied and twitching — one leg bound at the knee to stop them from bolting. Not that it always worked.
“Khalli balak! Fī khatar!” (Be careful — danger!)
A group had broken free, rushing toward us in a blur of limbs and dust. Oddly, this left the lot of us quite unflustered. Our nine-year-old son, camera in hand, stood calmly, attracting a group of boys in white Galabiyas who began posing silently for each other.
Traders circled camels, inspected teeth and hides, shouted, haggled, walked off, came back, started again. The scene was loud, layered, theatrical. By late morning, the heat pushed Ahmed into motion. He worried we’d have trouble parking at the pyramids. As we bought tourist tickets at the modest office, only now at the time of exit, our son lingered with his photo crew. One boy turned to him and asked —
“Do you know Kareena Kapoor?”
It was a moment so out of nowhere, it felt perfect.
Later in the day, at the Giza plateau, the pyramids stood stoic and golden as they do in the postcards. But our son, flipping through the camel photos, looked up and grinned.
“This was better.”
And that was it. A minor detour. A dust-filled morning. And the story we ended up telling.
Parakeet City
The last time I was close to this city was also the first time. I had an interview at the IIT, for a Masters' programme in electron devices, which I wanted quite a bit to get into and fatefully flunked. Post interview, I was pretty sure about the outcome. So when my host at the IIT, Chhotku-da, a cousin of A, proposed a night out in the city before my early morning train back home, I lapped it up. Going from room to room in his hostel block, we gathered a few more who had nothing better to do but spend a night in the city. Close to midnight, we took a train from Powai which was carrying a motley of souls as trains do, spirits suspended in various degrees of animation. We reached VT and had Chhotku-da's favorite anda-pav. We walked along Marine Drive as a mild breeze from the sea caressed us, a group of four, who had only known each other for a few hours but radiated an easy camaraderie to rival the glitter of the necklace night. The night burned bright and soon it was time to look for my name in the reservation chart pasted on the platform notice boards. Save for Chhotku-da. who would continue to host me in a faraway land several years later, I do not remember any of their names. But I can still smell the salt from the sea as fizzy words of no consequence wash the shores of my forgetting.
In the US, our good friend D used to say, we will keep going to New York, so why make plans to visit the city at all. When we are back in India, probably the sentiment got carried over to Mumbai, or Bombay of our adolescence, a city which has movie names for neighborhoods. So we never made plans for Bombay, until now, when N started tuning out of folk and pop, right into rock and with the zeal of an eleven year old, convinced us to take him to the Guns N' Roses concert in the city.
Why don't you wait till you are an adult and go to concerts with your friends?
But they will die, they are quite old already.
We hardly knew much about the band, besides the aura of their recognition and a fistful of overheard songs, but in some perverse way we also wanted a share of the light in N's eyes when he got to live his first real big-boy concert. As that afternoon burned and splashed a purple of rage into the evening sky, hordes of misfits of all ages and gender moved and groaned at Slash's guitar's command. N missed his buddy terribly, but on the same grounds, A found one, remarkably, as the universe still works in mysterious ways. I held N up for the last song, Paradise City, for him to see the tiny specs of the band in a faraway stage, and I could perhaps understand a little how my brown skinned boy of a tender heart and variegated manners found a key to unlock his own mysteries.
Night opens up a layer of cellophane from our lives in ways daylight can't. So a taxi driver would let his Bhojpuri speaking friends know that there is money to be made from concert returnees from the Mahalaxmi race course, a doorman from a late-open restaurant could ask a customer straight in the face - do you guys eat out every night and a bright young man with five star smile could usher us into our hotel rooms with an equal elan as he solves problems from his paper bound big book of banking exam papers, at his night reception desk.
The morning after the concert, A and I went to the Malabar Hills, quite early. The day before, I had looked at the Mumbai map many times - up and down - from Borivali to Colaba, just like I had done so many times with hotel lobby maps of New York, tracing neighborhoods from Bronx till Brooklyn, a cheap callout to a big city to let you in. So I knew where we were to go and find a recently commissioned elevated nature trail and pretend a bit like locals. As our Uber rolled out of the Fort area, past the colonial facade of the big banks that push money through the city's veins, driving straight along the Veer Nariman road bisecting the Oval Maidan and the Cross Maidan to crash on to the Marine Drive, which now in sunlight was taken over by Sunday runners and cyclists, from itinerants and lovers of the night before. After being dropped off, we were still a little lost and hovered around the Hanging Garden Park, till a sweating sweet lady, finishing her morning walk, guided us to our destination, marking our missed turn by the banana-seller. All her friends had already visited it, but she hadn't yet, and there are tickets to be booked online.
It was a puny trail, hardly half a kilometer long one way, with some signs announcing to the city people the trees you will find and the birds you will hear. The trail is made with care, intending to disturb the surrounding forest floor as little as possible. We bought tickets in black, paying 50 for 25 a piece, and strolled along, looking at the jackfruit, jamun, banyan and gulmohar trees and tried to gather the songs of the white-throated kingfisher, ring-necked parakeet, indian grey hornbill and the common tailorbird. Neither all the trees, nor all the birds are native to this land. And yet they thrive, together. The house crow does not have a plaque, A complained. A group passed us, immersed deep in an agitated conversation in Gujarati about mismanagement of association funds.
Back in the hotel, the service staff at the breakfast made sure that A tried all the three varieties of cookies and I took an extra vada-pav with enough mirchi, just like the previous day's lunch at Jimmy Boy when our server would not give us caramel custard unless we finished all the berry pulao and salli boti we had ordered.
I had to visit the Haji Ali Dargah, just across the road from last night's concert venue, a place that anchors me to this land through Rahman's rendition. Song birds do not belong to a country or a nation, but their music helps you find your own.
Off-Road Memories
Sometime around 3rd or 4th year of my graduate school, I read Jack Kerouac's classic - On The Road. Aside from the impression of the beatniks criss-crossing America, one particular memory stayed with me - one in which Jack is going back east, leaving behind Terry, and their fortnight old love. Now, when I searched the book for this episode, I found the paragraph:
I told Terry I was leaving. She was thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly, she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.
My goodbye to America, the land, wasn't that electrifying. And yet, it was curt, and a promise of seeing each other was a mere 'we'll see'. Of the many things that I would come to live without and be tempted by, being on the road perhaps tops. The blood of American living flows through its roads. Roads that go back in time to when the United States were invented. Roads that promise a reset. Roads, that hold America.
My graduation gift from A. was Robert Frank's The Americans. In its introduction, Jack Kerouac writes:
That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.
We knew what to do. After my dissertation formalities were complete and much in the American tradition, we were moving - from the midwest to the mountains, from the shadows of the windy-city sky-scrapers to the sunny embrace of the mile-high city, packing our cartons of books, a futon and a TV into a u-haul, to set up a nook as cozy as the one in Evanston, IL, now in Boulder, CO, which we will come to call home.
While the container would be driven by one of the millions of Americans who call the road their home, we were to drive west, past DeKalb, IL, a city that came to introduce me to an America of escape and hope, an America where pantomime shows sell because you have two scantily clad women dance beside the performer, an America where you can redeem acts of crime and love committed in a different continent, DeKalb, IL, that I came to see first in the pages of a Bangla novel by Sunil Ganguly that I was supposed too young to read as a seventh grader. The road would then take us to Savanna, IL, where waters of the Mississippi flow under the bridge to Iowa, so that I could catch a glimpse of the steamships that Mark Twain worked in his Life on the Mississippi. We must go past Des Moines, IA, where every leap year the American people obsess about caucuses of presidential primary voters, where candidates of every hue and aura deep fry oreos and embrace farm life, to sleep in a motel room in Perry, IA, which would become famous only this year with yet another kid shooting others in an American School. The road would then reliably deliver us to North Platte, NE, a city where ninety-five years ago all the Black residents had to flee when a black man was accused of killing a white police officer attending a distress call. The black man did not stand trial as a mob of white men and police descended on his home and trapped him inside of a chicken coop on the property. The mob then doused the coop with gasoline and set it ablaze with Mr. Seeman inside; when his body was pulled from the wreckage, it was clear he had died from a gunshot wound. We would spend a night in North Platte, NE, where they established the largest canteen of the second world war when tens of thousands of volunteers from North Platte and surrounding towns met the troop trains passing through North Platte, offering coffee, sandwiches, dessert, and hospitality to nearly seven million servicemen. As we would peer over the drying Platte river, across the rolling planes of middle America, we would perhaps glimpse Fort Collins, CO, gateway to our future home.
This road-trip actually did not happen.
A. was pregnant with N., and all that lima-bean sized life needed was Bengali fish-curry and rice to survive. In a way, it was fair, as a couple of years later we would be on the road, not to move, but to be.
N. was only a year and a half old that July of 2015. It was a difficult time in our lives, particularly A's. She was still working from home, full-time, in a project that gave her very little joy. Weeks would pass and she would not have put on anything apart from PJs. Save for N. and I, only human face she would have seen was our UPS delivery person. A. had started to look for a local job, a place she could physically show up, and as a necessity, she knew she needed to get a drivers' license. This, she forced herself to get though. She also had gotten a 35mm prime lens that summer.
So, that 4th of July holidays, with our 15 year old graduate-school Toyota Camry, a couple of mirrorless Sonys and 19 month old son, we set off on a trip to the roads of America, seeking liberation, if you will. It was a short one, but one for the road.
Our first stop would be Cheyenne, WY. Only a 100 miles from our home in Boulder, CO, Cheyenne is a city we had always heard mentioned on KUNC, our local NPR Radio Station. Right across the northern border of Colorado, it is not only the capital city of Wyoming, but in its days of glory days was a busy railway hub. The drive from Boulder to Cheyenne was A's first drive on an inter-state. Also, the first thing the she said after the initial jitters was "Does your car have its steering wheel offset at an angle?" It turned out, I had never ever got wheel alignment done for our car and this would lead to a catastrophic damage to all the tires, leading to getting stranded one fine Sunday afternoon - but that is another story. My mind had perfectly compensated this left-ward tilt all along so it never bothered me. After checking in to our hotel, we set out to roam the empty evening streets. A tired sun smiled on a movie theatre billboard that promised big Tuesday screens and all seats for small prices. Lights were not yet out in the offices of Wyoming Tribune Eagle, but someone's eyes twinkled when they pressed hard against the camera's view finder.
The next day we would travel to Rawlins, WY, a city where the population dropped from 60,000 in Cheyenne, to a meagre 10,000. But before that, we were to pay a visit to Terry Bison Ranch. In another time of our lives, we would have planned a trip around Cheyenne Frontier Days, which is held over ten days centered around the last full week in July. It is the largest outdoor rodeo and western festival in the world. The events include professional bull riding, calf roping, barrel racing, steer wrestling, team roping, bronc riding, steer roping, bareback riding, and many others. But we were there, just to be on the road, with our restless minds and a curious toddler. As the toy train chugged along through the farm and a Vietnam vet guided us through the motions of a conducted tour, N. searched intently for the bisons.
Our pitstop for lunch was at the Bunkhouse Bar and Grill, in the outskirts of Cheyenne. The restaurant made its character clear through the array of parked Harley Davidsons outside, and a unique selection of stuffed hunting trophies inside. We had one of our best green salads there. The way to Rawlins had some more adventure in store for us, as we missed an exit and A. got her first taste of off-roading.
The hotel lobby in Rawlins was hard to find, even though it was one of the popular local hotel chains. It turned out, a big camper van shaped restaurant, right outside, also served as the front desk. In America, everyone has her own best milk-shake. That afternoon, we found ours in Penny's Diner.
The hotel happened to be right next to a fair ground, and as luck is all that you have on the road, we now had a carnival in our backyard, on the eve of the 4th of July. We never owned a home in America to host a summer barbecue in the backyard, but for one afternoon in Rawlins we owned all the fair rides.
As night fell and a tired toddler body coaxed its busy mind to call it a day, A. needed only a little push to go out, with her camera. For an hour she went around the fair ground, catching in her lens the contagion of happiness that spreads wild when you press yourself close to your companion in a roller-coaster.
The next morning, our little one decided to throw us a challenge. Playing in the front seat of our parked car, N. managed to lock the steering wheel. After about 30 minutes of frantic google and car manual search, we did find a way to fix it, though I have no recollection of what exactly needed to be done. This was the fourth of July, a beautiful sunny day, and we drove to the city center of Rawlins, half expecting some show or fanfare. There was not a soul, save us, and so we played with N., pretend delivered newspapers, climbed up and down parked Union Pacific Rail containers and posed in front of huge murals installed in the downtown.
Walden, CO, with a population of around 600, was calling us now. Unlike most other American small towns, this happens to be named after a postmaster, who was an early settler. All along the way, and not just this leg, we have been chasing windmills. Much of the mountain states in the US have moved significantly to renewables, contrary to the popular political perceptions. The sun slid back behind the clouds and very soon, A. was driving through a rain spell with less than a couple of feet visibility. That afternoon in Walden, we lazed around in our motel, watching Independence Day on TV. As the sun got a little more friendly, we strolled past the closed city library, museum and dishevelled store fronts to reach the cemetery. We met the Brands, with Mary having missed a century of living by a whisker. But close by, there was Hetty Hendrikson who had seen two turns of century. We wondered if they were friends and talked about the world changing around them.
Our return from Walden was through a mountainous stretch, and I was a little worried if A. was ready for yet another challenge. So I took the wheels for now, though only a few months later she would prove her mettle, driving through the independence pass at 12000 feet. As we drove through a random sequence of sun, cloud, howling winds, blinding lightning and downpour, a song was playing in my head - one of my memorized English songs while growing up - Colorado, Rocky Mountain High/ I have seen it rain and fire in the sky. The last stop on our way home was Fort Collins, CO, for a pretty late lunch. It was also to be the last stop of the road-trip that did not happen.
The trip was short, and nothing like what Kerouac did. But his was also in a time of his life when he had split up from his wife and was doused in a feeling that everything was dead. Unlike Steinbeck, when he undertook a travel with his dog Charlie to rediscover America, ours was more about looking for an opening, a ritual in renewal, a journey to find something you are not looking for. As Kerouac puts it, Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. Well, a pearl doesn't get made just in three days so we'll just be at it. That girls part, let's just say I am no Kerouac.
Love your soulful style ! You create beautiful imagery with your words Suva.
Right now, I am standing right there in the sand, peeping into your son's phone and smiling, a little bit indulgently.