Travels in the Other Place

All unhappy travelers are alike; every happy traveler finds their own path.

Dear Global Jigsaw,

Some exciting news. My new book, Travels in the Other Place, will be out in December this year. My publisher just made the acquisition announcement.

For this week’s post I am sharing the introduction to the book, hoping it will tempt you all to pre-order copies once the link is available.

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Do not tell me what you have studied, tell me how much you have traveled

Anonymous

For a quarter of a century I’ve been in geographic flux, making nests in eight countries across three continents. As a child, I rarely left Delhi, save on the pages of a book. Yet, I grew up into a perpetual peripatetic, on the move as a reporter, tourist, wife, patient. And along the way, I have learned something of the art of traveling well.

Travel can be a misleading term. In our everyday lexicon it refers to movement that privileges space, in the sense of referring to going from one place to another. But travel is also woven into the texture of time. “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” said Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher. And indeed, we are not the same at eight as at eighteen or eighty. Life is a collage of temporal journeys through schools and marriages, hospitals and haircuts. Learning to travel well as an expat in a new country is practice, in many ways, for learning how to journey well through these vital chapters of being.

This book is inspired, in part, by the 16th century, French essayist, Montaigne, in particular the manner in which he transformed the individual quotidian into the collectively insightful. It takes the form of a series of travelogues knitted around universal milestones– from crossing over into what Susan Sontag called the kingdom of the sick, to learning to navigate the frontiers of Gen Z.

The conclusion that links them all is that ultimately every destination is enjoyable if appreciated for what it is, rather than disparaged for what it is not.

In China, where I lived in the early 2000s, the expat chorus groaned about malodorous toilets, natives spitting on the street, shoddy infrastructure, and “inscrutable” locals. Personally, I found the services to be remarkably efficient - furniture made to order in weeks, faulty plumbing fixed in hours. The food was a constant delight. The locals, once I learned Mandarin, were frank and funny. And the country was convulsing with epochal change, history unfolding in real time. Given this, disposing of toilet paper in a bin instead of flushing it was only onerous for those unable, or unwilling, to see the rest of the panorama.

When I moved from Beijing to Brussels, European friends rejoiced for me. “It’ll be so much easier back home,” they said, oblivious to the fact that I did not share their “home” either cartographically or imaginatively. “Everything works there,” people sighed, misty-eyed at memories of flushing toilets. Europeans queue, I was assured. They don’t spit. But within half an hour of arriving, my bag was stolen—inside the Brussels airport, and I then spent the next three years chasing unavailable plumbers.

This was one way of looking at life in the city. And many of the expat crowd appeared determined to behold it in exactly this miserable manner. Brussels, they groaned, was a dirty place. No one cleaned up after their dog on the poo-punctuated streets. There was graffiti on the walls and the city was rife with thieving immigrants from North Africa. Belgians were corrupt, lazy and unfriendly. I grew to love Brussels: its coffee and waffles-scented squares and the quirky art-nouveau architecture that unexpectedly popped up at the turn of a corner. I made local friends who floored me with their generosity. And the city was home to more chocolate shops than churches - just the right ratio.

Beijing and Brussels are as different as Sun Tzu and Jean-Claude Van Damme. But bad travelers complained about them in strangely similar ways. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all unhappy travelers are alike; every happy traveler finds their own path.

Travel in both its literal and symbolic avatars is the process of acquiring cognitive empathy. When you visit somewhere with different norms to those that you have known so far, the realization dawns that those norms are not “normal.” Every person’s experience of the world is particular, but this specificity only becomes obvious when another way of being is accessed as a point of contrast. The greater the variety of lenses we acquire, the more skilled we become at embracing a range of perspectives, be these the norms of Japan or Mandarin or Cancer or Loss.

At root, travelling well is about continuously expanding your identity, by making the “other,” your own. It is to shape a luminescent shell whorl around your core, each layer adding texture, rather than erasing it. And what a good traveler needs, above all, is attention. The ability not just to look, but see - with the kind of focus that allows meaning-giving details to emerge from undifferentiated experience. Lacking words can help. When you don’t yet know the local language of a place, you walk around with all synapses firing – and really see how people hold themselves and how they laugh. Without language you are displaced to the margins. And from the periphery you watch filling in the gaps with little epiphanies. Acquiring a new language isn’t only about grammar, but awareness – of vulnerability, of the invisible privilege of having the right words. Just as the real value of traveling to a new country is not a selfie in front of a monument, but what you learn about yourself having gained an outsider’s lens to train inward.

Finally, travelling well is a practice in gratitude for the journey, sharpened by the knowledge that it is finite. During the years I lived in Japan, watching cherry blossoms blaze in their brief beauty was a spring-time ritual. The feeling that sakura evoke is called mono no aware, a phrase that refers to the pain of the transience of things, laced with the knowledge that it is their very evanescence that makes them so beautiful.

There is one thing that you must do before you can travel- begin. As Montaigne, echoing Heraclitus, put it:

Dare to be wise, begin: he who defers the hour of living well, is like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but the river still runs on, and will run on, withconstant course, to ages without end.

And so, let us begin.

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I can’t wait for you all to read the book. I will be sharing extracts over the coming months here. So watch this space. And in the while, do upgrade to a paid subscription if possible. There are four years' worth of of archives available on The Global Jigsaw.

Hasta luego,

Pallavi