BackSongs of the Open Road
A girl is cold in Bogot; in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo, women in niqab inspect lingerie; and Paris stays changeless
Premium
Since 2007, Detours, Salil Tripathi’s monthly travel column for Mint Lounge, has poked at places to reveal themselves beyond the instagrammable moment and the easy itineraries. His new book of travel essays, Detours: Songs Of The Open Road, continues that journey. Edited excerpts:
Gabriel and his Labyrinth
The girl from the coast stood by my side as we waited for the bus that was to take us to a posh club in downtown Bogotá. It was early morning—not yet seven—but the road was already busy with traffic. Had I been there five years earlier, my hotel’s receptionist would have thought of all sorts of ways to restrain me from waiting outside the hotel, even though the bus picking us up was owned by a travel agency the hotel had recommended, and the driver would be known to the people who had invited me. Nothing was safe in Bogotá then. If you were a foreigner, you were worth something. But it was different now, even though the receptionist had just reminded me that not long ago, bearded rebels had attacked the club to which we were going. The rebels did not like tall and shiny buildings made of glass and steel in this city surrounded by hills; they claimed to represent the authentic people, those who toiled in the fields in the plains. Military guards had been defending the club, because in those days, as now, only fat ranchers wearing gold watches and expensive suits could afford to be club members. And those ranchers were the rebels’ enemies. They fed their cattle better than what the peasants who worked on their farms could feed their children. With the casual familiarity people display in Latin America, the girl turned to me as if she had known me all her life, and placed her palm in mine, and said, in Spanish, as she laughed: ‘My hands are so cold!’ Her hands were indeed cold, and while soft, her palm was dry. She was unused to the chill—she was shivering like a palm tree on the Caribbean coast where she grew up—because where she lived, the sun almost never set, the air was always moist, and it was always warm. She was used to welcoming the breeze, which foretold relief from the heat and the arrival of rains. Bogotá was the big city; it was too cold for her. I felt like placing my arm around her shoulders, but I did not. Latin American writers celebrated the easy encounters between sexes; morality from another century had conditioned my teachers and my parents in India to teach many of my generation that you didn’t hug a woman you had barely met. Bollywood heroes could sing, wink, dance, and flirt in what seemed like a long how-to manual of sexual harassment; we were supposed to be brought up better—we were to reveal our charms through restraint. So I smiled.
Walk like an Egyptian
The next day we are in al-Gamaliya—the long road that formed the central artery of Naguib Mahfouz’s life in Cairo—near the mosque of al-Hakim, close to the sabils, or fountains built by devout traders for people thirsty for water, at the suq (market) and the hamam (public bath), and those shops, past the persistent hawkers of Khan al-Khalili. There were women in niqabs quietly inspecting lacy lingerie, concealing their excitement shrouded beneath their veils. We saw fresh olives and garlic and tomatoes and mint piled high for sale. A milkman poured milk in steel tumblers and sold it to women who looked away from me, hiding their faces when I tried to photograph them. Then my friend Steve took me past the shops with Qur’an and carpets. There was a chicken seller, an old shop selling palm leaves, an ironing shop, and cafés with their fresh coffee and more bread. There, a store selling cotton by the sack, and toy stores now flooded with Chinese goods. Beyond, the wholesale market, where traders sell copper, coal, and steel bars; and still beyond, the street with jewellery and perfumes. Across that, there was another store, as if stuck in 1919, the year of the uprising against the British, where I could buy large clocks and watches, each showing a different time, as if each were frozen in another age. A donkey cart passed by, oblivious of us.
This was the heart of Bayn al-Qasrayn, the Arabic title of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, called in English, Palace Walk, or literally, between two palaces. Bayn al-Qasrayn was the first in Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, written in the 1950s and set at the time of the nationalist revolution of 1919, revolving around the el-Gawad family. The two palaces symbolised the milestones pointing out the political changes Egypt underwent. Qasr el-Shoak (Palace of Desire) followed, bookended by El-Sukkareya (Sugar Street). Each a location of old Cairo, each resonating with the calm mood of the city, encompassing the quarter century between the Egyptian uprising against the British and the end of Second World War. The three novels captured the essence of Egyptian transformation, solidifying Mahfouz’s reputation, ultimately leading to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
This part of Cairo represented the soul of Mahfouz’s writing. ‘The shadows of the place, the voices of those gone, and the clamour of the passers-by,’ Mahfouz wrote once, remained with him for long...
...I stepped into Mahfouz’s interior landscape that day with friends Steve and Sumita, who had made Cairo their home at that time, and we walked into Mahfouz’s world. In the trilogy, the youngest son of el-Gawad family is Kamal, who according to critics is Mahfouz’s alter ego. He is a philosophy student grappling with the clash of his faith and science. He is a child in the first novel, grows to a university student in the second, and becomes a teacher in the final novel. As he grows older, he gets bitter, losing the certainties that childhood has taught him, and yet he is not at ease with tradition. The gradual progression is redeemed at the end, when Mahfouz ends the novel on a note of quiet optimism, but its overall mood is unremittingly bleak.
Change is inevitable, but certain things remain the same. Time, and its pace, are at the heart of those novels. Modern Cairo represents some of that—in the old Cairo, in the area around Khan al-Khalili, the activity is paced evenly, where nobody seems to be in any hurry, and each walk is a stroll. Life goes on, as it always has, gently, the child going to school now will inherit the family home, and his children will wear the same sort of clothes, go to the same school, wake up to the sound of the muezzin’s prayer and the gentle thump of the dough being pounded for bread, the smell of fresh coffee wafting through the air. And they shall step beyond the markets, to Cairo’s busy streets, where the traffic is snarling, cars weaving through the mess impatiently, the driver’s palm never too far from the horn, the driver pressing the accelerator the moment he can see a bit of open space between his car and the one ahead, desperate to beat the traffic light about to turn amber. We are near Tahrir Square.
Lighting Literary Lamps in the City of Lights
As the bells chimed at Notre Dame and the wind whispered through the trees on the banks of the Seine, I sat under a parasol at a café sipping Tavel, a pleasant red wine from the Rhône region. American teenagers walked by, cheerfully bidding bonjour to every passing Parisian and giggling cheerfully, even though Le Paysan de Paris had little time for their juvenile pranks. French men at the café continued to smoke, cigarettes stuck in their mouths, ashes smearing their jackets, as their fiercely gesticulating hands did the talking, while they sorted out some issue that bothered them intensely. North African immigrants played their drums with careless abandon, while a young French student played the saxophone to nobody in particular. A painter vigorously brushed her canvas, while a clown mimicked a blonde woman walking precariously, as if she was on stilts, weighed down by parcels she was carrying, containing boxes of clothes she had bought from Galeries Lafayette. The fragrance of Mediterranean soups from the alfresco restaurants wafted through the air.
By early afternoon, the sky had turned pale, and Notre Dame was visible in full glory, its beauty no longer hidden by the ugly scaffoldings that I remembered from my last visit to this city, when the church was covered with a dull net as though there was something embarrassing about its appearance. It was winter: the trees had discarded their leaves, and their delicate branches curved like the curlicues of an intricate window. There was a chill in the breeze, and the buildings along the riverbank lit up in the fading sunlight, and the most remarkable aspect about Paris revealed itself—how modern it was, and yet how changeless it seemed.
Detours: Songs Of The Open Road, published by Tranquebar Press, will be released this month.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
