Finishing in Kolkata

I am back in Kolkata winding down the last few days of my trip. I will be home in Calgary on the weekend, and while returning to a Canadian winter and the Christmas nonsense holds little appeal I am glad, in a way, that this trip is over. It has been a frustrating couple of months. Early snowfalls, security bureaucracy, controversial elections, official-but-undeclared curfews, and the occasional terrorist attack scuttled much of what I wanted to do. At least I’ll be home for Christmas Eve dinner at my grandmother’s house.

(My wife has been printing off my blog entries and giving them to my grandmother to read. This is no small task. Nonna is in her eighties and English is her second language. She manages to read through the blogs alright, but apparently it takes the better part of a day. Each time I write a word she might find difficult I feel a brief snap of guilt. Wait until she sees all the Indian names in the next paragraph….)

I’ve been spending the last few days eating Bengali and Hakka Chinese food, and immersing myself in ‘Indian Lit.’ Having given up on ‘wall’ research for the time being means I can devote serious hours to other people’s books. The shops and streetstalls are filled with wonderful Indian authors that I never read before. This is a welcome change from North African travels earlier this year when I could not find English books anywhere. In India, I’ve ‘discovered’ Kirin Desai (I am the last to read Inheritance of Loss, no doubt), Amitav Ghosh, Siddharta Deb, Basharat Peer, Amit Choudury, Sanjoy Hazarika, and Calcutta literary saint Rabindranath Tagore.

What most of these writers have in common is a remarkable eye for detail and a poet’s gift for description. Even when the narrative fails to hold my attention, which happens once in a while, I am happy just to give in to the beauty of the language.

It is strange to me, then, that the same community that produces such rich and observant fiction can write such bland nonfiction. I read an anthology of Indian nonfiction early on in this trip and was alarmed at the clichés and flat prose. I found the same phenomenon in another anthology, called AIDS Sutra. Even gifted Indian novelists – with some exceptions, my friend Jaspreet Singh being one of them – tend to write stilted nonfiction.

I wonder why this is. In spite of India’s pantheon of great writers, nonfiction is a genre that does not seem to be fully embraced or explored. The abundance of Bollywood biographies in the ‘best of nonfiction’ anthology is, perhaps, a good indication of this.

Solitary and Southbound

Today I slipped south out of Tiznit and into ochre hills covered in bent trees spaced so far apart you'd think they don't get along. It was my third long roadtrip in as many days. I've traveled south from Casablanca to Essaouria, Essaouria to Tiznit, and Tiznit to Tan Tan where I now sit. Each journey has been about five hours long, and I've got another haul to Smara tomorrow. Yesterday, at least, the day ended with my greatest shave yet. My barber literally kissed my freshly-smoothed cheeks when he was finished.

And today, at least, I was not on a bus. I managed to hitch a ride on a truck loaded with bottles of mineral water. It was not a cheap ride, but I figured if we got lost in the desert at least we wouldn't dehydrate.

It feels good to be back south. Once again, I am surrounded by women wrapped in great swaddles of coloured cloth, and every man my age or older has a tremendous beard and missing teeth. I am in the Western Sahara, but I am not sure if I am in 'disputed territory' yet. There were a few checkstops en route, but my driver breezed through them pretty quickly by dropping a ten dirham coin into each officer's hand. He turned to complain to me after each time, shaking his head and saying 'Morocco is zero!'

Since Moonira returned to Canada a few days ago I've been thinking a little about traveling with someone else and trying to write. I realized that in order for me to engage with another place enough to be able to write about it I have to travel alone.

Please understand. I love traveling with my wife. We had glorious fun on our honeymoon and in Morocco this month. It was two weeks of real hotels, Moroccan wine, ocean sunsets, sandstorms, leather slippers and walks along the beach. More than all this, though, I adore Moonira's openness to the world and her kindness to the strangers we meet. Each time we travel I discover new reasons to love her.

From a writer's perspective, however, when I travel with someone else I learn more about them than I do about the place we are in or the people that surround us. This is fine for a vacation, but I find that when I sit down to write about 'our' travels instead of 'my' travels that I've missed the details that good travel writing requires.

It is true that I wrote three magazine pieces based on experiences Moonira and I had on our honeymoon, but these were happy exceptions. In each case the story presented itself as a complete narrative. I wrote about a dinner we had in Istanbul, a night among drunk Georgian men in a Tblisi tavern, and a weird festival in the hills of Adjara. These stories came complete with characters, plot and drama. As a writer, I had to do little else other than remember. Other than these sorts of rare, 'ready-to-write' experiences, I find that I only catch all the nuancess I need as a writer when I travel alone.

I used to think, somewhat romantically, that the world only reveals itself to the solitary traveler. Now I believe that only the solitary traveler has the space to see what the world is willing to reveal.