Asian
Absences: Searching for Shangri-La:
Wolfgang Buscher: translated by Simon Pare
Publisher:
Speaking Tiger
Genre:
Travelogue
Extent: 147
pp
Price: Rs
350
Some books
have the reader hooked by the last line on the first page itself; others grow
on the patient reader, gradually but
rewardingly. Asian Absences falls between the two stools. The very first essay
in this slim travelogue has to do with the journalist/writer/restless traveller
Wolfgang Buscher traversing a corner of India, Rajasthan to be specific. On the
very first page itself, appear dwarves and mountebanks, and the cautious reader
raises a wary brow. That brow doesn’t come down when the writer goes on to
mention the stultifying heat, the smothering and suffocating dust, and the
endless press of people.
Worse is to
follow because Bucher doesn’t intend to spare his readers. He talks of falling
in with a somewhat weird professor, encountering a yoga acharya who seems overeager
to make the visiting German his shishya; of meeting an eccentric prince (you
can almost hear the word `maharajah` here!) who plays ` a large instrument` to
an audience of uninterested monkeys; of falling prey to illnesses that invade
the head and the stomach (of course). So packed with clichés, platitudes and so
wince-inducing, the reader almost throws
in the towel.
Except, the aforementioned reader would be well
advised not to give up. Buscher isn’t
just another tourist who has come to Asian lands seeking and finding the exotic.
In the six essays that make up this book, he tells us about his experiences in
India, aboard an oil tanker on its way from Dubai to Singapore, a trip to Phnom
Penh quite unlike any other you will read, climbing a remote mountain in Tibet to
attend an annual shaman festival, trawling Tokyo all alone without any
knowledge of Japanese, and heading to a place which is actually named
Shangri-la. While he seems to struggle with describing what he saw and
experienced in India, the sketches of
the people and places that form the rest of the book are done with much
sensitivity.
An exhausted
and battered- by- India Buscher finds gods everywhere he looks in the country.
One Indian breath, he says, contained more religion than an entire German
advent. The streets were rivers of bodies pressing onwards, one cataract after
another; there were vehicles from the Bronze Age on; as for the smell of India,
he describes it succinctly as sweet and spicy, of rotting, excrement and decay,
the bright red spit of the betel nut chewers like spilt blood wherever one
went.
While on the
tanker which he boards at Ras al-Khaimah, the journey at sea become almost the
side story, since Buscher trains his interested gaze on the young Second Officer
who is known as St John, and always practices imaginary strokes off an
imaginary cricket bat. St John piques Buscher`s interest but gives up whatever
little information he wishes to, in
brief sentences stripped of emotion. Yet, the character sketch Buscher draws of
St John is a masterly one, of a man who is
a sailor because the sea really is in his
blood, how he had tried life on land for a bit, then returned to sea, never to long for the shore again. When the
ship reaches Singapore and Buscher disembarks, he waves a silent goodbye to St John
and the reader knows that it is the end of a brief interlude. St John is not
going to think of the German who sailed briefly with him, and Buscher, for his
part, is heading to fresh lands, new adventures.
Rain, damp, steamy rain, plays a major part in the story where Buscher
travels abroad a none- too- sturdy boat called the Mekong Mama. He is adviced
to travel on the roof of the boat and find himself sharing a tarpaulin against
the battering rain with a man who starts to, creepily, recite a litany, an account of the Khmer
years. The Khmer refrain is picked up again at Angkor where Buscher meets yet another man who tells him of the sinister
and pathetic part he played during the
atrocities. The writer who is the listener here, isn’t too sure whether to feel
sorry for the man or feel repelled by his tale, a dilemma Buscher`s reader mirrors.
In the
chapter titled `Among Shamans,` Buscher goes climbing a mountain in Tibet along
with a shaman expert and ethnologist, to be there when many shamans gather to
celebrate Shiva in the form of Rudra. En route, Buscher falls into some sort of
semi-comatose state for a brief while and is brought to by a shaman travelling
with him. `Shiva came and saved you,` the shaman tells him and Buscher is confused:
Shiva is not his god, this isn’t his country. Could you visit a god like you
visit a country, he wonders.
On the
morning of the feast, the veiled Himalayas suddenly reveal themselves in all
their glory to those gathered there. Buscher strikes an almost lyrical note
when he goes on to describe the setting, the people there, the mandatory
sacrifice, the feast, and it all makes for
compelling reading.
The Tokyo
essay is a study in aloneness, a man wandering streets which have no name and
looking down from a tall tower at a city with no roofs. The city, he writes,
came to such an abrupt vertical halt that it looked as if building had just
stopped one day. For all the courtesy he observes around him, what Buscher takes
away is the impression of a sadly soulless city.
The last story
is undoubtedly the best. Somewhere where Tibet, Burma and the Chinese city of Yunnan meet, Buscher come upon a town
called Shangri-La. The epiphany here is that this new town with its clean town
square, its traditional wood buildings with elaborately carved facades, its
surprisingly smart hotels, all looks decidedly unreal. And of course, unreal it
is, since Shangri-La is an elaborate tourist trap, a town set up to lure the Western
tourist. Only Chinese tourists have come up here, so far, and the irony of this
essay strikes the reader with some force.
This is a
quiet reflective sort of book, one in which the sensational makes its
appearance cloaked in restrained prose, a book that gains in strength, one that
leaves the reader with little nuggets of information in the most effortless manner
possible. There isn’t much humour to leaven the flow, except for a stray
passage like when Buscher hallucinates about Condoleezza Rice of all people, after
he consumes some Happy Pizza at Angkor. The translation cleaves close to the
meat of the matter, and you realise the writer has effortlessly taken you along
with him on his travels. Which is what the best travel writers do.
At one stage,
Buscher writes `The night was too magnetic
for me to be able to sleep, with all the small epiphanies of this tropical
journey.` That about sums up Asian Absences: a book of small epiphanies of one
man`s journeys.
Sheila Kumar is an
independent writer and manuscript editor, as well as author of a collection of
short stories titled Kith and Kin (Rupa Publications).