Detours: Songs of the Open Road

by Salil Tripathi

There are clearly understood rules of staying safe in a country still at war: which areas to avoid; how not to get abducted; where it is safe to go out at night; and there are intricate rules about taking taxis. When you call the cab company, the operator gives you a secret code. The driver gets another secret code. You exchange those codes when you meet the driver, and only if they match the driver trusts you, and you trust the driver: then the journey may begin.

Fiction writers have it easy while writing about history, Romesh Gunesekera once told me; they can make up things. Journalists can’t, and shouldn’t.

A Muslim man had once told me he ate no pork but liked bacon, and I’m still not sure if his command was poor over his English or his scriptures.

But Jakarta’s slums and poverty seemed more miserable, because the wealth surrounding it was so much more opulent.

You can also buy tiny models of the Trabant—the ugly car of East Germany, which made India’s Premier Padmini look cute and elegant.

Soon after the Berlin Wall was built, President John Kennedy stood near the gate, and addressed the city, saying: Ich bin ein Berliner. He meant he was one of them, not realising that Berliner is a pastry, so what he actually said was that he was a German pastry—but the good people of Berlin cheered him nonetheless.

In the alcoves I saw elderly monks, wearing dark glasses, sitting away from the sun, looking not unlike the Buddha images behind them. And then I saw a cheerful boy, his head

The British, who ruled Burma too, denied him access to pen, ink, or paper, which was particularly cruel, as he was a mystical poet, a contemporary of Mirza Ghalib.

Churchill was wrong about calling India ‘a geographic expression’—that honour belonged to Yugoslavia, where its boundaries tried to contain Croats who saw Bosniaks as their enemies, Bosniaks who fought Serbs, and Serbs who battled Croats.

Mostar, executives of a company proudly showed me the files of their past employees —Muslim employees’ records were in green folders, Croats in blue, and Serbs in white folders. Everything was separate. Had they been South African bureaucrats in the 1970s, they’d have won certificates for meritorious performance.

Mostar personified those divisions, with its parallel structures. Garbage disposal companies, schools, government departments, cultural centres, universities, hospitals: one for Croats, one for Bosniaks; one in the west, the other in the east. Many Croats still defiantly flew the Croatian flag, just as some Serbs flew the Serbian flag.

At a café in western Mostar, the waitress gave me a bill that seemed too large for a cup of coffee until I realised that she had written the bill in kuna, the Croatian currency, even though Bosnia-Herzegovina’s convertible mark is more stable, being pegged to the defunct German mark. ‘I can’t count in the other thing,’ she told me somewhat contemptuously, not dignifying Bosnian ...

It depicts the relief of one of the temples. In the story, devas, or angels, and asuras, or demons, worked together to churn the milky ocean for nectar.

hey @saliltripathi equatibg devas and asuras with angels and demons is a bit simplistic right?

Several European journalists were complaining to me that Indians had taken it upon themselves to do it their own way: the Indians were washing, scrubbing, and at times even repairing the haunting sculptures on the walls of the ancient temples (quelle horreur!). Broken idols should be kept broken, they felt—authenticity mattered, even if the breaking of the idol may not have been because of the weather, but because

Not only did the national flag of his short-lived Republic of Kampuchea have the outline of Angkor’s temples, his soldiers were warned not to loot those temples. They protected the site the only way they knew–by planting landmines around the temples, making it impossible for anyone to visit.

It is odd to think of a mass murderer like Pol Pot guarding Angkor Wat, and half a century earlier, a Paris sophisticate like Malraux, talking of culture and humanity, stealing Angkor’s statues. Ironies occur

Under the 1907 delimitation protocol, Thailand ceded the territories of Battambang, Siem Reap (which happens to mean “Thai defeat”) and Sisophon to Cambodia in exchange for Dan Sai and Krat.

Or the wind with the rain in Bombay, when you are on the waterfront—it is not cold, it is not warm, but it is powerful, turning your umbrella into a cubist sculpture.

The Dutch empire was in full bloom at that time, and Van Riebeeck was not going to let a khoi rebellion change his plans. Battles followed, and the khoi were pushed back, their final humiliation coming in 1659.

Dee’s ancestor was Johannes Rissik, the city’s surveyor-general, and the city derives its name partly from him (it is named after Johannes Rissik and Johannes Joubert, an early mine prospector).

Mining companies needed a cheap workforce, and for that young black men were brought from the interiors, housed in hostels, and made to work in the mines, their rights to enter the “white” city restricted severely. The blacks lived in townships far from the city. Makeshift and presumed temporary and without character, one was simply called south-west township, which later got abbreviated to SoWeTo, or Soweto. Van Riebeeck’s hedge was made solid at last.

Today, District 6 is a metaphor of what was, what could have remained, and what must be remembered.

The Singapore he wrote about was exactly the Singapore Lee hated. It wasn’t a surprise then, to find that the novel was banned in Singapore. When Peter Bogdanovich made a film based on the novel, he had to shoot it surreptitiously in Singapore, not revealing what he was filming, to prevent the authorities from stopping the filming. He succeeded, and so the film, too, got banned, and remained so until 2006.

New ones had emerged, like the casino on the Marina waterfront, looking like cricket stumps, slightly askew and at an angle, as if intimidated by a fast bowler.

It was fun but wholesome; as William Gibson was to describe the island, it was a “relentlessly G-rated experience”. He also wrote: ‘If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore. There’s a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humourlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates; conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.’ (Singaporean officials probably saw that as a compliment.)

The boundaries of transgression were not defined. Singapore’s leadership bemoaned the lack of creativity among its people, and exhorted them to be different. But when some did, the establishment came down upon them, because it feared spontaneity.

medieval city had once stood there, called Temasek, over which the Javanese and Siamese had fought, and Temenggong wanted to reclaim it for the Malays. He held it for six years, before Stamford Raffles took over the island for the British East India Company.

The sky is already dark and it is the middle of the night, confirming the cardinal rule of aviation—the poorer the country, the more unearthly the time of arrivals and departures.

A woman who called herself a human rights activist was, we found out, the wife of a general, and her job was to spy upon us.

Cities that were landlocked had a different relationship with strangers. Here, the strangers came on horses or camels, with swords, to loot the shops, to kill the men, to steal the women. Cities by the sea welcomed the outsider, the foreigner, because in that contact they saw the opportunity to trade.

The Dutch writer Geert Mak calls his city “impossible”, reminding us that in its struggle for physical survival (the country needs dykes to prevent the sea from swallowing land), ‘Holland is kind of Bangladesh—a rich and modern Bangladesh, but still a Bangladesh.’

An investigation after the Second World War showed that many Dutch had collaborated in some way with the Nazis, helping send ninety-eight deportation trains with over 1,00,000 Jews from Amsterdam’s central station to places like Auschwitz.

Muslims’ devout religiousness reminded the Dutch of their own religiosity withering away, about which they didn’t wish to be reminded. As the Muslims built mosques, churches were getting empty. In 1958, Buruma points out,some 25 per cent of Dutch were atheists. By 2020, that figure is likely to rise to three-quarters. In the fifty years since that 1958 survey, the percentage of people calling themselves Catholics in the Netherlands has fallen from forty-two to seventeen; Protestants, from thirty-one to ten.

But Hemingway’s courage—grace under pressure—was of a different kind. He wasn’t a pacifist. He liked the just war; some causes, and some lands, and some people, were worth fighting for, worth defending. Even an honourable defeat was preferable to a dishonourable retreat. Hemingway wanted the bad guys beaten; he wanted the good guys to win, get back home, and he wanted that soldier to come back to his girl and sweep her off her feet and plant a long kiss on her lips, as if in a Norman Rockwell painting, even if it was a momentary pleasure, even if what was to follow was miserable loneliness, of working in a steel plant or stacking shelves in a small town, after those few months of pure heroism where to win something, you had to destroy something else.

Hemingway played finite games

we had walked through several back alleys behind the opera house. Pakistanis ran little shops and cafés alongside the alleys, and one of them curiously called his shop a Tandoori House which oddly served pizzas.

raval

Turner credits Hemingway for being ‘almost single-handedly responsible for the American myth of absinthe, namely its supposedly hallucinogenic properties. He was gifted in this respect: what he did for bulls in Pamplona, and daiquiris in Cuba, he did for absinthe in Barcelona.

The Swahili word for freedom is uhuru and, as is the case with postcolonial societies where most landmarks get named after a revolutionary cry (think of the number of things Malaysians have named merdeka, for example), many landmarks in Nairobi are called Uhuru.

Defeated, the Moors retreated, Boabdil settling in the mountains of Sierra Nevada, before their eventual disappearance from Europe.

Shanghai’s skyline looks like the copy of a copy of a copy. Shanghai tries to outdo Singapore, just as Singapore wants to outdo Hong Kong, and Hong Kong wants to be pre-eminent, and has a skyline more inspiring than New York’s.