Having lived in Spain, China, Japan, India, and Indonesia, Pallavi Aiyar has been a nomad in the truest sense of the term. Yet, her book Travels in the Other Place is not a conventional travel book.
She measures her journey not in terms of geography, but rather, in terms of discovery. Travel, for her, is about lingering at life until it yields its magic and meaning.
That is why her childhood wanderings in Enid Blyton books form as much a part of ‘travel’ as her cancer diagnosis in 2022. Both splintered her world, not taking her to new terrain as much as helping her see the old in new ways.
Aiyar’s prose is beautiful, not because of profundity or insight—although there is that—but because it is suffused with a searing honesty. Whether she is writing about imagining her own funeral, the flak she got for her writing, or the misogyny she faced as a foreign correspondent, it feels like she holds nothing back.
She seems to have grasped that truth—no matter how painful—speaks a universal language which calls to the heart.
There is the cerebral about her writing—a reflection of her intellect—but she always wields it to make sense of things and glean a deeper understanding into the machinery of the world. Intellect for her is always the means and never an end.
Whether it is untangling the frustrating knots of language—why does tang, for example, when expressed in two tones, mean both 'soup' and 'sugar' in Chinese—or attempting to discover the ‘real’ China of poverty and scarcity, Aiyar always offers a unique perspective, making you see things in a different light.
Among the eight essays is one on pedagogy, which describes the differences in her upbringing and those of her two boys. They, for example, are not gripped by her life-or-death attitude to education. They don’t find it nerve-rackingly necessary the way she did.
“Their Spanish passports are talismanic protection from resource scarcity,” she writes.
There are also essays on passportism (the inferior status accorded to her because of her Indian passport when compared with passport brahmins like her Spanish husband), language, reporting, and a surprising inclusion on hair—on losing it post-chemotherapy, and how much it is linked to patriarchy, religion, and identity.
But my favourite essay was on her grief at losing her famous news presenter mother, Geetanjali Aiyar.
The ‘Jar of Happiness’—notes her mother wrote to help her get through cancer—was heart-rending. She describes grief poignantly, as a “gravity-free zone, a floating dead weight. Untethered, undone, unravelled. The sorrow sticks insistently to the body, like a shadow, lengthening and shortening through the day, but attached to the heels even as I try and kick it off.”
Then she writes something simple, yet profound: “Love illuminates grief to something akin to beauty.” Everyone sees the burden of grief, but not many see its beauty. Aiyar has the rare ability, not just to see it, but to show it to you.
Travels in the Other Place
Author: Pallavi Aiyar
Publisher: Westland
Pages: 185
Price: Rs 599