WORDS FOLLOW ME: Writing India

"Where are you from? Kenya!"

"U.S.A."

"Oh, U.S.A. Everything is good for you blacks now that you are in power. Now that Obama is in power."

"Not exactly. Politics doesn't work that way."

"You have the power now." He was sure of himself, so I thought I'd show him more clearly what I meant.

"Who's the prime minister of India?"

"Manmohan Desai."

"Manmohan Singh, you mean." He was mixing him up with the famous director, Manhohar Desai.

"Yes, Manmohan Singh," he said, impatient to see where I was heading with this.

"Does his holding of that office mean that Sikhs now control India?"

I could see that my approach had flummoxed him. He shrugged, and said, "No, you see, in India we don't have this kind of problem. There is no racial prejudice in India."

"There is no racial prejudice in India?"

"There is no racial prejudice in India. None."

I paid for my 7-Up.

*

What goes into writing a place? How do we give our experiences of it life on the page? I can feel a tension, or a sort of compression, within myself when I encounter a new place, or return to a place I've been before.

Not only is there a part of me that's already vigilant to the details of the place, but there's also a part that is trying to find how those details fit into a larger pattern.

And thus is it with India: this large, multifarious country, so readily characterised by visitors in stereotypical terms, and yet so resistant in reality to stereotype. This brief essay isn't so much about travel to India (that's a story for another day), but about my approach to writing about India, or any other place for that matter.

What are the images that come to mind when we hear the name "India"? Certainly, the best known photographs of India focus on the country's exotic side, the elephants and snake-charmers, the colourful saris and heavy jewellery.

The actuality of India, as life is lived there, is preempted by Bollywood to such an extent that many professional photographers come here (I write these words from a small village on the East coast of the country) and capture only those images that fit the exotic profile.

National Geographic photographers like Steve McCurry have made a career out of presenting nothing but exotic images.

Sad to say, writers also follow their lead, and if the focus isn't on the poverty or the bright colours, it takes the pernicious form favoured by the New York Times' Thomas Friedman: a decontextualised celebration of India's recent economic boom.

For Friedman, everything about India right now is wonderful, and he can barely contain his excitement about the technological verve and financial success of the country. Naturally, he makes no mention of the crushing misery that has led more than 10,000 Indian farmers in the last decade to commit suicide.

And so, in this country of red earth and pouring rain, my challenge is to be true to my emotions and experiences, to write even the stereotypical things if that is what presents itself to me. The kind of writing one sees in the travel section of a magazine, doesn't interest me in the least.

Travel writing, at its best, reveals not merely the place that is being written about, but also the deep implication of the person doing the writing.

We all have our reasons for covering great distances: for one person, it's family obligations; for another, it is on assignment; for yet another, it might be about a spiritual quest, or the search for work. And yet, I think that for all these, there are also nebulous and unstated reasons.

There is in humans a wandering urge, a yearning to be unplaced. In another country not ours, we are shocked back to our senses by how much is similar, and how much is the same.

The young man with whom I spoke at Margao café this morning was selling an idea of India: a place with no racial prejudice. But I, too, in responding that I was from the U.S. was selling an idea, too.

He had introduced the gambit with his assumption that I was Kenyan; I played along, and I was American to him. We wanted to meet, without explicitly saying so, on the common ground of Obama.

There have been other exchanges as well, in the week that I've been here, not least in the numerous staring contests I get into with strangers. Many Indians, a very great number, are darker than I am. Yet, the strangeness of an African, it seems, never ceases to amaze.

So people stop and stare, and even after I have acknowledged their stare, continue staring. Sometimes I wave and smile, sometimes I glare, and sometimes I make a face. In those moments, moments of a kind of extreme exposure, I feel myself most dramatically unplaced.

As the great travel writer Bruce Chatwin put it in one of the titles of his books, "What am I doing here?" And while I question that, all around me India goes on: not just the saris and the software engineers, but also order, grace, stupidity, violence, beauty, in every imaginable form.

Over coffee yesterday morning, I read the Hindu (one of India's largest English dailies), and was fascinated by the layers of national pride that were on display in the announcement that an Indian space probe had discovered water on the moon.

That was around 7.30am. An hour earlier, at first light, I had walked through a quiet village until I came to the creeks and backwaters and paddy fields it abutted. There, I saw a man fishing with a net from the bank. We acknowledged each other and I sat down to watch him work.

The catch was meagre, a great deal of work for very little return. But he had no choice.

How does one sit down to fit the pieces together: the lunar probe, the poor fisherman, the English-speaking café attendant who, after talking to me, climbed up on a chair and garlanded a portrait of his father with fresh flowers?

Again, a lesson from photography: there are certain wonderful pictures in which there is something of interest happening in all three of foreground, middle distance, and background. This kind of layering is difficult to achieve in spontaneous or unposed street photography.

The challenge facing the travel writer is similar: The small scale interaction and the tiny observation take place within a churning context. Without the context, the observation is meaningless, and without the observation, the context is dry.

The writing hand takes the measure of both large and small, and attempts to work alchemy.