Vikram Seths
From Heaven Lake
Much has been said about travel broadening ones vision, and the journal of a traveller who has a broad outlook and a universal view of life, makes a rich reading experience. Vikram Seths From Heaven Lake - Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, which won the Thomas Cook award, is more than a travel book that traverses the length and breadth of a place with smatterings of history, geography and local culture. It is a verbal album of direct, down-to-earth images that personify the soul of the areas.
The book contains relatively little on the culture, civilisation or customs of China or Tibet. Rather, it is the personal account of an economic students experiences while returning home to Delhi from Beijing, via Tibet and Nepal, the novelty of the journey being that it is almost entirely hitch-hiked, relying on luck and optimism alone against all odds.
The idea of hitchhiking to Lhasa comes as a sudden inspiration to Seth while touring Turfan with fellow students. In serendipitous circumstances, he gets a travel permit to Lhasa. Perhaps, it is an indirect repercussion of his singing Awara Hoon (I am a wanderer) in an unplanned get-together with the local people at the students hostel! The song is amazingly symbolic of Seths wanderlust impulses that make him embark on this fantastic journey.
The rest of the book narrates his experiences during the journey that has many such coincidences and fortuitous events that seem to indicate life imitating art, as in an action-packed adventure story.
The journey also has a more than fair share of obstacles, from dealing with a belligerent shop girl, a suspicious mosque doorkeeper or a slightly eccentric truck driver, to major ones like trying to get a lift on a truck to Lhasa, going on an impromptu chase of lost luggage or being stuck indefinitely in deserted, muddy roads due to erratic weather.
But these not-so-enticing situations are handled comfortably by Seth, who simply refuses to give up. With remarkable candour and a liberal dash of his characteristic humour, he talks about his frustration, anger and minor irritations during the journey and how he got over them eventually.
Seth also focuses a great deal on the unexpected gestures of kindness that he encountered in course of the journey. Friendly policemen, amiable officials, store managers, tailors or even pedestrian citizens who helped him in several ways. Beyond the normal hospitable gesture of the Chinese helping a foreigner, there is an undercurrent of easy, casual familiarity that marks the interchange.
Seth seems to be at home in any part of the world. Climbing into lost caverns in Chinese temples or wading in underground canals, playing basketball with officials or frisbee with waiters, assimilating the quietude of a Chinese shrine and a mosque alike, enjoying a picnic with a Tibetan family he had just met and above all, conversing on all kinds of topics with an assortment of strangers. Not so surprisingly, the people he describes also begin to come alive, like many of the characters in his fiction.
Reflections and musings on various aspects of China, India and life in general are diffused throughout the book, along with an occasional verse. There is a great attention to detail like the descriptions of Heaven Lake, the Lhasa mosque with its amalgam of Chinese and Arabic styles, the interior of a common truck and even the unpalatable soup served on the way, which suggest Seths potential as a superior writer, this being one of his early works.
To quote Tolkien, Not all those that wander are lost. From Heaven Lake conveys that there is much to be found for potential wanderers _ besides new ideas and ways of thinking, new experiences, insights and interactions with peoples and cultures, a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
Source: amazon.com
