If I had wanted to lead a quiet and dull life, I should have kept my distance from books. As it happened, I was interminably fond of them, and the more I read the more my appetite grew, with the result that my life became agitated with a restlessness that could be satiated only by adventures and more books.
While attending college in India, during a summer’s hiatus, I wandered in the foothills of the Himalayas, thinking about the slopes and peaks of dozens of poems I had committed to memory.
In the mountains, there was peace and stunning quietude, and time and space enough to contemplate all the nuggets of poetic wisdom that Rabindranath Tagore had brought together in “Fireflies.”
I traveled the length and breadth of West Bengal by train and bus, and made a stop at Shantiniketan, looking there to find a chapter in Tagore’s life.
I could not stop at Malgudi, for it was an invented place, but R.K. Narayan had imbued it so richly with Indian culture and mores that Malgudi could be found anywhere in India.
Outside the Meenakshi Temple in Madhurai, I danced in the rain while the rainwater was “running in rills through the narrow lanes like a laughing boy.” It was an invitation to a romance, or simply to “be wet with a decent happiness.”
While many of the books I had read drew me toward temples and caves, busy streets and bazaars, rivers and boat rides, some simply put the fuel in my spirit to march down a street holding a placard. I sought not the lotus’ serenity nor the jasmine’s allure, but the voice to speak out against some form of injustice.
At college in Calcutta, I organized a march to protest the arrest and imprisonment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Had I not read his books and become entangled in their compelling narrative, I would have been spared the confrontation with police outside the Russian embassy. That day, my friends and I were taken into custody for disturbing the peace.
It was also books that enticed me to seek new adventures outside the Indian subcontinent. From early childhood, I had been fascinated by the images proffered by novelists and poets about the English countryside. If the chaffinch sang “on the orchard bough in England,” I wanted to hear it.
And then there was London — the city that “doth like a garment wear/ the beauty of the morning.”
Holding on to these images, I pursued my dream, and landed in London in 1975. What a visual feast it was to be standing on the land that was the setting for so many novels I had read and reread.
This was Thomas Hardy’s land, and the land of the Bronte sisters. I cannot adequately describe the transcendence I felt gadding about the streets of England or walking along the Thames and the Avon.
Then there was the special thrill when a friend drove me to Bradford, West Yorkshire, for a wedding. Howarth, the village where the Bronte sisters lived and wrote, was only a short distance away, and I got my fill of moorlands, charming pathways, and ruins, all of which had informed the writing of “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre.”
If it had not been for books, I doubt that I would have embraced a peripatetic lifestyle, or sought out places marked by literary ink. England was only the beginning. The voices of Zola and Voltaire were echoing in my ears. So, too, were other voices pulling me in different directions across Europe.
I could have settled in England, I suppose, but then I heard the voices of Twain and Whitman, and it was time to put on my traveling boots again, and go another mile in a new direction.
“Can a word be a bird?” asked Gopal, excitement beginning to show on his face.
“Of course,” said Doraiswamy. “The bird is in the curves and flourishes of your handwriting, or in your hair which is full of wild romance. It’s full of new beginnings.”
“A word is precise as a question,” continued the interlocutor, “and wide as its response. It takes sunshine for a walk into unfamiliar and unknown places.”
I am happy when I see atoms dance. I like the new latitude and longitude of travels. I like the conversation of strangers in new places.
I like turning the pages of books, and going on new journeys to new places. I like to hear the whistle of a train leaving a platform, nudging the compass needle to a new resting place. I like the sound of a ship’s horn announcing a departure to a new destination.
I am thankful for all the things wrapped in wonder that are rounded like the silver of a full moon.
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Photographs by Maria Subramanian
Napoli Railway Station
Catching the train to Sorrento
Italy
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Inside a dome of music I floated
bird-like, and roamed a country
of romances; along the fluted columns
met Calliope and beautiful Simonetta;
in a world of mist and mystery, I roamed
looking for cause and curve, light and form;
three oceans collided with each other,
O! Kanyakumari!
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that “there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it is going.” In other words, the very idea of travel is imbued with romance when we allow discovery to set new destinations.
As so often happens, a walk to the lotus pond becomes distracted by a girl wearing jasmine in her hair.
The great art of living lies in raking the paths that intersect with the main road, and embracing happenstance and surprise.
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Painting
Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May
by John William Waterhouse
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When climbing trees and chasing butterflies,
or swinging on gates,
it was easy to be King;
the whole world of enchantment was mine.
The chariot stood ready for the next escapade,
horses with wings;
I was on cloud nine.
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Photograph
by Ramnath Subramanian
Painting
Happy As A King
by William Collins
National Gallery
London
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She’s quite alone,
And looking out beyond the bars
Of her window, she sees a world
That has flown.
Outside is humanity’s noisy bazaar;
Inside is stone.
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Photograph
by Ramnath Subramanian
The Louvre
Paris
Education Matters 