The poetic and the prosaic
More than a travelogue is what Sania Aiman reads
The idea of reading an account of another person's travels did not attract me until I read Vikram Seth's From Heaven Lake.
It will be quite an injustice to limit the narrative to being only an account of travel through China's Nanjing onwards to Tibet and then on to Delhi, and look upon its as a mere travelogue. Seth pulls you into the journey, taking you along for a wonderful and interactive ride, bringing alive the surroundings and the people he meets.
The journey is an engaging description of how Seth, as an Indian student in China in the 1980s, suddenly desires to and, eventually, gets permission to visit Tibet along his trek from Nanjing to Delhi for the summer vacations. Beginning in Turfan, he took possibly the most unconventional route, through the exotic sounding Xian, Urumqi, Antioch, Yarkhand, Kashghar, Chengdu, Germu, Dingri and Qinghai, then on to the more familiar Lhasa and Kathmandu, finally to arrive home. People of different areas, over the stopovers that they made, had different stories to tell, showcasing differences in culture, expectations, reservations and implications.
The stories of an old Uighur who could not write to his son, and of a son who could not write to his own child, due to a government experiment with the Arabic script of the Uighur language into Latin, is an eye-opener to how short-lived policies can have long term effects on the lives of common people.
Little tidbits of knowledge keep the reader engaged, for example, the beauty of the underground storage of water for irrigation in the desert-like Xinjiang, in formations called karez. The writer discerns the difference in Buddha's demeanour and effect, on the faces of huge statues that scare, others that appear benign, simply due to the sculptors' moulding of Buddha's face. Seth points to the spiritual scar of the common man caused by the wanton destruction of places of worship held in some value. Such an event is brought to attention by the poignancy expressed in some Chinese poetry written on the charred walls of a burnt-down temple in Dunhuang:
"This day Zhi Xiong came to the old temple
He came from far away with no other intention
Than to see the ancient temple
And he saw it and wept."
The familiarity, adaptability and no frills attitude that the student Seth carries are translated into his writing. He seems to have this irresistible urge to jump into water bodies of all types that he comes across, which are blessedly clean and calming to the frayed nerves of the hitchhiker.
Hitching on to a truck to Lhasa, he spends a large part of his journey in the company of the truck driver Sui and two other people. Their sometimes easy, sometimes uneasy camaraderie that develops despite the language and racial differences are a testament to the equalizing qualities of hardship suffered by travellers together.
Seth tries to describe his experiences with an open mind. Many Han are said to be prejudiced against the minorities, especially the Tibetans, and their cultures. But some do not differentiate, like Sui, and judge people from a narrow point of view. However, a chance encounter with Norbu and his family in Tibet leads Seth to see a more cruel side of the Chinese cultural revolution and the persecution of Tibetans that it caused. On many occasions, Seth gets warm and kind behaviour from strangers because of his being an Indian and singing popular Indian songs, knowing a bit of the Arabic script, and simple good manners.
From Heaven Lake is a gem of a travelogue, full of information, even though it might seem dated at times and somewhat redundant due to China's leaps of growth and change in the past two decades. The political or economic commentary is not very deep, Seth having travelled as a wanderer rather than as an analyst.
But what will enthrall readers, irrespective of their predilection for one type of writing or the other, is his narrative whose literariness is steeped not only in his penchant for lucid details but also in infusing it with a language that combines the poetic with the prosaic in a manner unique only to Seth. This book heralds both the poet and the novelist in Seth, and rightly so.
Sania Aiman is pursuing her master's degree in economics at Dhaka University.
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