What Books Taught Me About Travelling
What I learnt about travelling, I learnt from inside closed doors.
I grew up in a small town in Rajasthan, the kind of town that appeared in the marginalia of the capital. For school holidays, the town offered little distractions. There was a much-frequented cafe that served disgusting burgers, and an equally repugnant concoction called ice-cream soda. Despite the atrocities on its menu, the cafe was popular and expensive, making it approachable only a few times over the summer break.
It was during one such school-break that I started to search for options to while away my time. One summer afternoon, I biked around idly scouting for distractions. There were no smartphones then, and those days, boredom, when explored at depth, was like a superpower that led to unanticipated discoveries. I was whiling away these meaningless hours when I noticed the pale-yellow building that flanked the town square. The building was always there but I noticed for the first time that it housed the town’s library. I set the bike against an orphan electric pole and went inside.
Like unfrequented closed quarters, the library smelled of stale air and musky untouched paper. There was a single vacant table pushed against the wall and spattered with books; it must have been the librarian’s corner. I walked past it and continued my exploration — marking off dust with my finger, from the books lined in perfect order.
‘What are you looking for?’ A man’s voice interrupted my play. I kept quiet, feeling caught in my intrusion by the librarian. Noticing my trepidation, the voice mellowed to gentle hum, ‘Do you have a library card?’. I shook my head. ‘Let’s make you one, then’. But I don’t have money, I said. The man laughed, ‘It’s a public library. You can borrow the books for free’. He went to the desk and pulled out a box of yellow paper. Carefully, he filled out the details with my name and age. There I had it, a yellow folded card with my name in neat handwriting on the top. I felt the urge to fill in the empty squares that stared at me. ‘Let’s show you where the children’s books are,' the man beckoned me to a corner of the library.
In this library, I first discovered Enid Blyton. I devoured her books over the summer relishing the adventures from a world so different and far from mine. I wished to travel to that world. Just when the summer break was nearing its end, the librarian, perhaps impressed with the ferocity with which I was devouring books from the children's’ section, offered a book. ‘It’s by Prem Chand. Read it. You won’t understand it now but someday you will come back to read it again’. With that he handed me Godan.
Godan opened a world that felt equally far from mine as were Blyton’s — only that the characters of Prem Chand lived in a wretched world, struggling with their distressing realities. I didn’t understand the story much and said so to the librarian while returning the book to him at the end of the break. ‘That’s okay,' he said, ’as long as you become aware that this world also exists somewhere on this planet’.
School became intensive, and progressively the school breaks began to fill; first, with preparations for the mighty Boards, and then for the JEE. I stopped frequenting the library, pausing my journeys to other worlds through moth-eaten pages. I promised myself to return to the books once I cleared JEE.
Years passed. Stuff happened, and I cleared JEE. On entering IIT Delhi, my first act was to search for the campus library. It stood right over a coffee shop near the main institute building. I couldn’t have been happier to have found this well-stocked haven. While filling my engineering credits, I chose to study Modern Fiction (studying a humanities course is a requirement at the IITs). When I look back at my IIT credits, what I remember most now is this course, which opened me to the worlds of Joyce, Rushdie and Camus. While I struggled with my engineering courses, I was happily discovering and consuming books from the IIT Delhi library. If my friends were to find me, they knew which table of the library I would be on.
In the four years that followed, I read Rushdie, Camus, Marquez, Llosa, Naipaul and several others. Through their works, I travelled back to the time of the partition, explored the streets of the fictional city of Macando, and felt tinges of existentialism through Camus’ explorations of destiny sweeping across French-Algerian cities. It was Naipaul’s travels and commentaries, especially to Africa and Islamic worlds, that made me realise that the purpose of travel is not just to explore and rejoice in fancy worlds, but to learn —about the cultures different from ours and from histories that often tend to be forgotten.
With books borrowed from the library in my backpack, I started to travel. First, I explored my surroundings. Every weekend, I would head out to Old Delhi, which birthed from overlapping histories. There I learnt that the story of a city is not the definitive account found in history books. It is more like a loosely fused collage of impressions. A city shapes itself in everyone’s mind, memory and imagination, and is often altered, battered and elevated by individual experiences. It’s so with Delhi.
Gradually, I explored beyond the confines of the capital. On Friday evening after classes, I would head to ISBT and catch a bus to random destinations and return via an overnight bus by Monday morning. In those years, I explored Himachal, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttaranchal — and not only the well-knowndestinations but also places unknown, smaller towns and destinations that don’t usually show up on tourist maps.
Those four years I oscillated between spending time in the library and on the road. I explored the cosmoses that books led me to, while I filled my cloudy imagination with concrete realities of the world around me. My grades suffered — while my batch mates were hitting a GPA of 8, I was stuck around a lowly 6 — but I more than compensated the loss with experiences I collected from the books and the roads that I travelled on.
My love for libraries only reinforced with time. So, after graduation, when I moved to Gurgaon to work, the absence of a good library stood out like a gaping hollow. Bookshops offered a poor replacement — they were mostly shelved with newer publications, while the collection in libraries is skewed towards older publications and classics. Having started reading comparatively late in life, I still felt that I needed to get my fill of older classics first before exploring the newer writings.
Cognizant of a missing library, I filled my vacant hours exploring the neatly arranged shelves of book shops. It was here that I stumbled across the works of Orhan Pamuk andwas hooked at once. Years later I would see him in person atCopenhagen’s Black Diamond library and get a signed copy of his My Name is Red. (I remember the moment clearly for when I handed the book to him, he paused his robotic signing spree to examine the version. ‘It’s not the European version’, he remarked. Absolutely true, I said, for it was the one that I’d picked up during these Gurgaon days). When I moved to Sweden to work, one of the first trips I took was to Istanbul to explore the Bosporus that was the backdrop of most of Pamuk’s novels.
These days I live in Malmö, Sweden. In the first week that I arrived here, I searched for the library and found a modern glass and stone building with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the magnificent green stretches of Kungsgården, the royal garden. I was overjoyed at this discovery, and now, after ten years of living in this city, I still spend weekends – when not exploring Europe – sitting next to these windows and reading from the vast English section of this library. And, from Malmö, just over the Öresund Straight is Copenhagen, which has perhaps one of the most well-known libraries in Europe — the Black Diamond, named so after its polished black granite cladding and irregular angles. I don’t go here to read, but to listen. This is where I heard not only Pamuk speak, but also Rushdie and Llosa.
Over the years, I have become a travel writer. When I look back at what propelled me to write about my travels, I realise that it’s not only my travelling adventures that I should give credit to, but also to the books that pushed me to explore unfamiliar worlds. The books I discovered in patronised or lonely libraries, in their dusty or spic, neatly arranged shelves, housed in closed rooms or next to ceiling-high glass windows overlooking manicured gardens.
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A version of this story appeared in The Hindu
