Day Zero A
I didn’t see any monkeys at Tribhuvan International Airport – the exiles from Pashupati have been an attraction of late for prospective flyees – but I did see the superlatively human Vikram Seth. Or someone like what he may have been decades ago when he snuck across the border with Tibet, down from Heaven Lake (the edition in my parent’s library depicting Phewa Lake instead). Clearly, I was raring to go to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
All such sentimentality vanished when Bikram-not-Vikram’s wife asked me if I could move from my right-side-of-the-plane window seat so the family three would not have to be separated by an aisle (as if they did not have the rest of their lives to spend together). Loth to give up views of the Himalaya, I refused. And what views!
Massif followed massif, and shocked as I was to see the bare, black southern face of Machapucchre, I wouldn’t have given up my seat for anyone at that point. I searched for familiar shapes and sizes in the rock and ice complexes looming above the clouds, and imagined, once we passed magnificent Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, that I could espy Kailash in the far distance. Bikram’s family snoozed by my side, oblivious in heaven’s wake.
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They say modern travel is a dislocation that deprives us of the organic transition in time and space that conventionally slow travel allows us, and thus of a real understanding of the connections between places. We jump on a plane and hey presto! step out into a reality that has no logical connection to what we have left behind. To fly up into the ether of mountains and valleys and descend into the flat patchwork of the Gangetic plains is clearly such a dislocation. But a bird’s eye view of the geological history of our continent is no mean bargain either. Looking down at the map of your world, you cannot but comprehend the connections in a more ancient fashion.
Day Zero B
Being generally disdainful of Delhi’s delights, it was a relief to to roost in the ‘new’ Tibetan refugee camp of Majnu ka Tilla. The stimulating chill of January lent a transient authenticity to the narrow streets of Free Tibet signs, DVD stores, stalls selling highland fare, thronged by monks, lay Tibetans, and the odd Nepali.
But there was no time to explore, with half the day given over to travelling by bus to Jaipur. Nursing a persistent hangover, I attempted to sleep through the cacophony of horn blares, ringtones, and heedless conversation. As the flyovers of Delhi gave way to endless mustard fields and then the semi-arid expanses of Rajasthan, there was time aplenty to consider the pithy condensations within Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes. For here I was as a journalist of sorts, approaching a festival celebrating books. Taleb reviles one, and reveres the other; he finds only books sacred, and journalists so profane (along with economics, professors, and consultants) that he has to take a ritual bath after contact with them.
I decided I would shed my ill-fitting journo’s cape, all the better to work my way through the mystery of words.