The Traveling Minstrel Journals – Page 2

Gori, hometown of the most (in)famous Georgian

Do not look up Gori on a map. You might chide me for going to a place that is less than an hour’s drive away from the zone of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that is closely allied with Russia, is inaccessible to tourists traveling through Georgia.

Gori, however, is lovely and I’m glad that I was able to have enough time to stroll around its old city, buy steaming cheese khachapuri from a random bakery, and see its medieval fortress and quaint old town — Gori sites normally overlooked for its main attraction. History enthusiasts come here for only one reason: It is the birthplace of the most (in)famous Georgian: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin.

All in a single compound, one can find the wooden house in which he was born and in which his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, maintained a shoe workshop in the basement; Stalin’s personal bulletproof railway carriage that he used from 1941 onwards; and the stately Stalin Museum that was built in 1951.

Nagged by the question of how someone so dashing and acutely intelligent became the ruthless tyrant that he was, I squeezed this sizable book into my busy schedule while planning this trip. Doing so earned a valid question from my goddaughter as to why I was reading about him if I knew he was a bad guy. Haha! But this book is informative, and engaging, but also heartbreaking. Young Stalin’s life turns out to be the stuff movies are made of. This award-winning biography doesn’t turn one into a Stalin sympathizer, however. It offers an in-depth understanding of the world that nurtured him (“a ferociously Caucasian kaleidoscope of east and west”), the times and the circumstances surrounding the would-be dictator, and a rather sinister intimation of how idealism mixed with unchecked personal trauma and history can dangerously spill into collective trauma and history.

Stalin is celebrated as a hero for defeating the Nazis, but part of me still cannot grasp how anyone can revere him and overlook the Holodomor and the Great Purge of his rule in which the death toll was millions more than that of the Holocaust. But who am I to judge when Filipinos also have a penchant for charismatic strongmen who disregard human cost for political gain?

But before I end up touching on something too sensitive, let me just say this: It should be a crime for a war criminal to be this good-looking. 😅

Like drinking the sunlight of a Georgian autumn

November 16, 2024 — That cliché about turning forty? I don’t buy it. People shouldn’t wait that long for life to begin. I am, however, a believer in new stories and new adventures beginning at forty.

As light often precedes sound, the moon casting an ethereal halo over the city greeted me as the plane landed. The polyphony followed; of old and new, of east and west, of a language that sounds like a blend of High Valyrian and Dothraki, of autumnal chill and inner fire.

It is almost midnight in yet another junction of the immeasurable Silk Route, one of the oldest trade centers in the Caucasus. A stone’s throw from where I’m staying is an underground market that was part of a network of tunnels dating back to the 4th century where East and West have traded goods and stories for hundreds of years.

It is safe to walk at night. I have only encountered friendly faces and a group of men intoning the most otherworldly polyphonic singing at a roadside table as if it were the most natural thing on earth. At every turn lingers the influence of Scheherazade, mother threader of stories in the East, and Penelope, mother un-threader of storytelling in the West. Here, the narratives do not seem to contrast, they coexist. They take turns coaxing travelers to find their own stories to weave, and to unravel.

Looking around and looking within, I can tell you that forty (and Old Tiflis), is a wonderful place to be. And I cannot wait to see Old Tiflis (and forty) shimmering in the sunlight!

November 20, 2024 — “It’s likely and unfortunate that you are probably only dimly aware of Georgia—the country, not the state. It’s tucked away beneath Russia, next to Turkey, a contentious, strategic piece of real estate under constant pressure.

You should know Georgia because it’s nice. Because the food is excellent. The country is beautiful—some of the most beautiful scenery on Earth. It’s a place you should absolutely visit if given the chance.

But you should know it as well because it’s important. Because it emerged from years of Soviet rule into a chaotic, awful, lawless period, yet managed to turn itself around into a functioning democracy in a few short years.

And because, as you will see, it is still under constant threat from an increasingly belligerent Russia.

It’s a fascinating and very welcoming country. And I hope we convince some of you to visit it.”

Don’t take my word for it. Take Anthony Bourdain’s. He said that, and I took his word for it. And so the first restaurant I checked out was one that he visited, and I ordered a dish that he also had (lamb ribs “semichka” with pomegranate sauce). Since that first dinner I haven’t had bad food or bad wine.

I’ve been pairing most of my meals with the amber wine for which Georgia is known, and I don’t even know where or how to begin with Georgian wine. But as a preview, let me just say that it tastes exuberant. It’s like drinking the sunlight of a Georgian autumn.

In autumn, Sighnaghi is tinted by all the colors of Georgia’s wines.

The Georgia Book Stack

A light rain was falling, a fine spray, unlike what rain is in the tropics. Within a couple of hours the deep purple of evening entered through that same window and transformed the spray into delicate snowflakes that vanished even before you could touch them; inconspicuous magic in the micro details when one season gives way to another.

It was toward the end of the trip when I took this photo of my traveling companions on the windowsill. Absent from the stack, but verily lodged in my consciousness, are Euripedes’ Medea and Percival Everett’s For Her Dark Skin.

I went to Georgia accompanied by seven books, and after jaunts to Tbilisi’s charming bookshops, a modest number of three Georgian masterpieces were read on the train and during long drives, then added to the pile.

The eclectic curation is an education in itself as it includes a Greek tragedy, a rather feminist and modern retelling of the tragedy, a wonderful and informative chronicle of Georgia’s unique wine culture, journalistic reports and stories from the early years of post-Soviet Georgia, the greatest love story of the Caucasus, literary criticism, a portrait of young Stalin that is also a portrait of a nation, a painful recollection of the Georgian-Abkhazian armed conflict in the 90s, epic poetry, and Tolstoyan short stories.

Once again, people wondered whether I had gone to another destination just to read. But I know they’re only kidding.

For who isn’t aware that reading and traveling are not separate experiences? They are halves of a whole that lend clarity and depth to each other.

In our travels, what we notice, perceive, and experience — and what we contribute to meaningful interactions, or how we overflow — largely depend on what is already inside us. “Nothing flows out of a jar except that already inside it,” writes the preeminent Georgian author, Shota Rustaveli in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.

In life, reading and traveling are merely expressions of how one chooses to take their fill.

Sheesh Mahal (Mirror Palace) and a passage from Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”

“…Your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art… Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the Shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirrors, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches… I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how these mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred… it means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures.” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Currently reading Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and this passage reminded me of the 16th century Sheesh Mahal (“Mirror Palace”) in Rajasthan, and the photos I still have not uploaded from the India trip.

I have not read historical evidence, but I was told Sheesh Mahal’s mirrors were transported from Belgium by Elephants.

Traveling Companions in India

“A small bookcaseful of the right books, and you are set for life.” — Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey

Friends can tell when I have re-attuned to daily life because I become a bit scarce on social media, and I return to writing about (or not about, in the case of Vikram Seth) the books I have read.

This is the India-themed reading stack for June that has spilled over to July. Not too different from the way India spills beyond what you have allotted for it. India has a way of spilling over from a journey and into a life.

But it’s time these books are homed into the sections where they belong, in close proximity to each other, in a library organized by political geography. And I can’t do that without at least writing a few lines about each one.

These particular books deserve exhaustive reviews, but for the time being, I will have to be content with abridgments of why they accompanied me on my trip and what I loved best about them.

Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry

Several Mistry volumes wait on my shelf. And yet, this is my first time to read him. I was not sure where to begin. All I instinctively felt was that a Mistry perspective was necessary for a more encompassing idea of India. I ended up choosing his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

Contemporary Indian literature that come my way overflow with the repercussions of British colonialism, the partition, or the relationship of India’s Muslim and Hindu populace. But this is a seldom explored perspective of India’s modern history through the Parsee experience — an exciting realization for someone who is enamored with Iran! (As most of us know, Parsees are descendants of Zoroastrians from Persia who fled to India as a result of the Arab Conquest.)

It is set in 1971, the year of the Indo-Pakistani war and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Centered on Gustad and his family, this is a story of ordinary lives enmeshed in extraordinary times. It teems with the humor, the pains, and the realities of living. This is a book for readers who do not skim over the prose but find beauty in taking time to appreciate details pregnant with cultural understanding.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple’s name is often identified with lyrical prose and India, so this choice does not need any expounding. Although I was wrong in thinking it would be an easy read. I thought it would not be too emotionally affecting and would balance out the heavy themes of The Raj Quartet. Three stories in, I was already sniffling and wiping away tears inside my room in a Jaipur haveli.

This resulted in the decision that I would not read the nine stories straight, that I would read them in-between other books, in between deep breaths, in between exploring the land in which these stories are set, and that it would be the book I’d carry in my sling bag throughout my whole stay in India.

The nine lives that Dalrymple immortalizes from his travels flow from a pen of empathy and genuine curiosity, always with the intention to “humanize rather than exoticize”. It is a portrayal of nine characters that break free from standardized religions, and which represent different sects and personal beliefs that the author hopes to have escaped “many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much of Western writing on Indian religion”; they are also manifestations of how, despite the exponential rate of change and modernization in the country, an older and more diverse India survives.

It is a book I would highly recommend even to those who are not planning a trip to India. Its lessons in faith and tolerance are relevant and enduring.

Jaipur Nama, Giles Tillotson | Banaras, Vertul Singh

“There is a beautiful word in Bengali — boi, which literally means a book. The word was commonly used in the vernacular for cinema and later came to be picked up by the Bengali elite while referring to an artsy movie and continues to be used to imply films. It has a deep connotation in that cinema is not just seen, it is also read. While walking through a city, one also reads it…” — Vertul Singh, Banaras

These two books have these in common: I purchased them from independent bookshops in Jaipur; they concentrate on a single city in India as the subject for the entire book; and they are books a reading traveler would benefit from tremendously when traveling to Jaipur or Varanasi.

While I learned so much about Jaipur from Tillotson’s Jaipur Nama, was thoroughly entertained by it, loved the passages on Jaipur’s architecture, and saw with my own eyes the wonders described in its pages, I was inscrutably drawn to the tone of Singh’s Banaras. There seemed to be an imploring strain that made itself heard to me, beckoning me to Varanasi, waiting for me to read the city beyond book pages, asking me to look into its soul.

Pyre, Perumal Murugan

Rajat Book Corner’s shelves were cascading with the best selections. They had Pamuk, Mahfouz, Proust, recent literary prize winners, the Indian greats, among many others. So you can imagine the argument between my other selves against the practical one who kept whispering firmly, “Just one book, just one book.”

After a while of intense internal struggle, I finally went with something I hadn’t seen in Philippine bookstores: Pyre, a 2023 longlister of the International Booker Prize written by Perumal Murugan.

“Good choice,” said the man at the counter.

“Thank you,” I answered, thinking it was something he always said to bookstore clientele.

“It’s a great book! We discussed this in our bookclub.” That’s when I realized he meant it. He had read Pyre. To my surprise, he added, “Wait. I think this is a signed copy. The author signed it when he came here.” And indeed, it was!

Pyre was the only book from this stack that I was able to finish reading within 24 hours, but the ending left me stunned for days!

This is powerful storytelling, but it is, by no means, a pleasant read. It feels claustrophobic and asphyxiating: But that’s how prejudice is. That’s how ignorance and intolerance feels. That’s what hatred is.

The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott

And now, the portion of this stack that took me longest to finish — The Raj Quartet: Four volumes of what is often declared as the nonpareil narrative of the dissolution of the British Raj.

The claim was convincing enough for me to take the massive tomes along for the ride even if that was all I heard about it. As I slowly turned page after page, I increasingly understood that it is necessarily heavy. It is, as Scott himself wrote, “The luggage I am conscious of carrying with me everyday of my life — the luggage of my past, of my personal history and of the world’s history.”

In Hilary Spurling’s introduction, she writes, “Scott did not condone the Raj. He looked long and hard at its many failures, its inhumanity, its smugness, self-righteousness and rigidity.” And although it is written in a Tolstoyan sweep, it finds a Filipino parallel in Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun in the way it shows how India’s War of Independence was not merely a confrontation between the Indians and British, but also between British and British, and between Indian and Indian. Scott lays open the lives of the unrecorded men and women, the lives that fall under the gray shadows, the ones “historians won’t recognize or which we relegate to our margins.”

Imagine this, a sketch. The first volume an outline on which Scott would continue to color and add contrast in the succeeding volumes, peopling it with new characters and adding the Second World War as another layer of complexity against an already rich and tumultuous Indian tapestry.

The first page of Volume I reads, “This is the story of a rape.” Reading about rape is not something a solo female traveler would intentionally do on a trip. But I was astonished by how Scott’s writing carried me through anyway. It made Volume II inevitable, wherein, all of a sudden, the characters became so fully dimensional you could touch them!

It was not lost on me that the first two volumes ended with two women giving birth but with grave consequences on the women. A metaphor for the birthing of nations, perhaps? Volumes III and IV continued to consistently reveal the multifacetedness of human beings, of nations, of identity, and of history. By the end of it all, I could only close my eyes, sigh, and try to take it all in, then whisper to myself, “What a journey!”

Rohinton Mistry’s Gustad once wondered, “Would this journey be worth it? Was any journey ever worth the trouble?”

Whether the question refers to journeys in literature or other lands, you won’t really know the answer unless you take it. Take it.

How not to write about books and their authors

Vikram Seth. His bearing was elegant and cosmopolitan even as he walked barefoot across the centuries-old stone floor of the family courtyard.

I had just arrived from an 8-hour road trip. I was groggy from the Bonamine. His manners and speech were refined. I was smitten. I allowed myself the harmless attraction because: I could blame the Bonamine, I knew nothing about him, the attraction was one-way, I was leaving the city the next day, and I would never see him again.

He shook my hand firmly, checked the haveli logbook and complimented my penmanship. I had only written my name and “Udaipur,” but perhaps the combination of the letters with my handwriting looks slightly elvish.

I had booked a smaller room, but because the haveli was not fully-booked, he assigned me a more spacious room — the room he had as a boy. Of course, it had dreamy windows overlooking the courtyard and the sky.

He introduced himself as Vikram Seth. I squealed inside, “Like the author?” I immediately checked if they were one and the same person. Because of his air of profundity, I wouldn’t have been surprised had he turned out to be the writer. But Google came up with a different face. The author will have to forgive me: This Vikram Seth was younger and more good-looking.

When I had freshened up and settled down, he asked if I had tried Kingfisher beer. I indulged in a mug and a conversation. Theirs was the only garden in a radius of several kilometers, he mentioned. Friends thought it laughable, he said, to keep it when building a modern hotel extension on that garden can be more lucrative.

“I’m glad you kept the garden,” I said. “It’s proof that you treasure things that are more valuable than money.”

He nodded thoughtfully and smiled. I left for Udaipur early the next day and never saw that smile again.

But I did not feel wistful. It was not love. It couldn’t have been. And it’s easy to practice anasakti, non-attachment, whilst traveling (and groggy on Bonamine). But now I’m wishing that I were a better practitioner of anasakti and traveller of life than I am in and of India.

So forgive me if the only thing I can tell you about this book that I got from the Jaipur Sunday Book Market for 200INR/140PHP is that it has some poignant lines that accompanied me on days when I waited indoors for the sun to soften, and that British composer Jonathan Dove set the poems to music in a song cycle of the same name. And forgive me, if all you learned from this post is this: How not to write about books and their authors.

The transmutation of India into a memory…

And just like that, I am back home, and immediately started teaching a series of online students in the US within the hour I arrived.

When people ask about my trip, I find myself answering that it was eye-opening, very much like reading a satisfying book.

I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I knew what it would be like. I soon learned that what I had in mind was a narrow-minded, stereotype-based, and extremely ignorant idea of India and its people. And to think I read! To think I’ve been lugging books, including all 2000 pages of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. How much more if I didn’t?

But the beautiful thing about being a reading traveler is that we do not read or travel for the certainties; and reading and traveling is an intuitive acknowledgement of an ignorance that we treat with a book or a trip.

It was Emerson who wrote, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” A great book does this. India does this. But only, perhaps, if one pays attention. India has expanded the way I think about places, people, and even design.

“Thank you,” one guide said earnestly, “for paying attention.” After I repeatedly refused his offer to take touristy photos of me, “So you’re not a Tiktok girl, huh? Most of the time people are only interested in having their pictures taken, they don’t even listen anymore.”

We have stereotypes of Indian men and they have stereotypes of us. Fair enough. But would you believe that two of the most cultured, educated, and refined men I have ever interacted with I encountered in a father and son duo in Jaipur? Would you believe that I felt more safe and respected in the company of my guides, drivers, haveli owners, hotel staff, than in one provincial event that I attended back home where a senior and former politician (someone I’m supposed to be able to trust) undressed me with his eyes? But that’s a story for another day. I have way better memories now.

Like this memory of a Mughal garden across the Yamuna River, yet unravaged by the claws of Agra’s over-tourism, where one can spend the entire afternoon reading and contemplating, or gazing at the Taj Mahal.

Just like that, the transmutation of India into a memory has begun…and what a memory to relish!

Five Indian Forts

Although the stories about these places are just as intriguing and twisted as Game of Thrones, what may look like promotional shots for season two of House of the Dragon, are photos of five out of approximately a thousand forts in India that are triumphs of strategy and engineering.

Amber Fort: The most picturesque. Jaigarh: Where one will find what used to be the largest cannon in the world, and along with Amber Fort and Nahargarh, has the best views overlooking the city of Jaipur and the sunset. Chittorgarh: The largest living fort in Asia, and where I was congratulated for being named “Mira” and being a musician, as Chittor residents are devotees of the mystic musician, Meera, or Mirabai. Agra Fort: The only Mughal fort among these, commanding a majestic view of the Taj Mahal, standing since 1530 and is still being used by the Indian Army up to this day!

June 2024 – The Taj and Other Mahals

The sky is despondent in Agra. I also saw an Indian vulture perch on the Taj Mahal and camouflage itself against the cornelian and onyx marble inlay. It has made me pensive. Maybe it should. After all, two of the main sites here are mausoleums: The Taj Mahal and the Tomb of I’timād-ud-Daulah, often misnamed “Baby Taj”, despite being the predecessor.

So little is said about the latter, but it literally sets in stone the transition period of Mughal architecture from red sandstone to intricately inlaid marble. Its details made me gasp! And to my surprise, no one else was in sight!

But the Taj, the Taj… when you’ve seen it so many times in friends’ pictures, and in books, you think you already know what it looks like. Nothing prepared me for how much it moved me! Something stirred in me when I came closer, when I felt the inlaid precious stones with my fingers, when I looked through the delicate lattices carved from entire slabs of marble… now I know what Victor Hugo meant when he described architecture as, “the handwriting of the past.”

We all know the story: 20,000 workers, 24 hours a day for 22 years. Its maintenance workers of today are descendants of the original construction workers 17 generations down. All these, to eternalize this handwriting of love… which, of course, Mumtaz never read, or laid eyes on.

*Mahal* in Filipino means either love or expensive. (Their synonymity is relative and will depend on how much, or what, love cost you. Haha) Mahal, in these parts, means palace. And yet, this is not a palace, but a mausoleum. It is, however, expensive; and is probably the world’s best-known and well-preserved expression of love.

It is interesting how this particular Mahal, the Taj, the crown of all Mahals, is ironically inaccurate in Urdu and accurate in Filipino.

Fatehpur Sikri

It was a mind-blowing family tree that brought me here.

Fatehpur Sikri was established as the capital of the Mughal Empire in 1571 by Emperor Akbar. Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan I is famous for having the Taj Mahal built. Akbar, as we know, is the third Mughal emperor, as he is the grandson of Babur, founder of the Mughal empire. Babur in turn, is the great-great-grandson of Uzbekistan’s Amir Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane.

I cannot think of a longer bloodline of distinguished rulers who have left their mark so distinctly (with conquests and architecture) in this world. And oh, did I mention that Babur is a descendant of Genghis Khan on both his father’s and mother’s side?

The architectural details of Fatehpur Sikri are just as astonishing as Akbar’s pedigree. The fort walls, the gates, the palaces, the mosques, are made predominantly of red sandstone. And because Akbar had three royal consorts, one Muslim, one Christian, and one Hindu, their individual palaces were masterfully designed and decorated according to their religion and culture.

The Anup Talao especially left an impression on me. It is a pavilion overlooking a platform for musicians. My guide explained that oil was added to the pool of water surrounding the platform to enhance the sound of the musical performances!

On the opposite side is what used to be the library, now off limits, now sans books, but I can only imagine how glorious it must have been. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was the first novel I read long ago that got me interested in the Mughal Empire. It was partly set here in Fatehpur Sikri.