Chapter

THREE

MY FATHER HATES TRAVEL. HE ADMITS THIS FREELY, with no shame or guilt. When he hears about other people’s road trips, he shakes his head sorrowfully, wishing they had more common sense. There’s only one place in the world where he can get a good night of sleep and that is his own bed, which is a decades-old coir mattress that he has worn down to the appropriate firmness, like a Birkenstock sole. My father’s greatest pleasure is to be at home reading news online and eating rice and coconut chammanthi every day. Ideally, the coconut should be from his village in Pathanamthitta District, southern Kerala, India.

Unfortunately, all his children live in other countries. One by one, we left behind our Kerala childhoods for school, for work, to join a spouse, to make a family. My sister and brother now live in the United Arab Emirates and I live in the United States, and thus our own family is no longer United in one place.

Every few months, my brother will send my parents a nonrefundable COK-DXB-COK ticket. My father’s reluctance to travel will battle with his parsimony and my mother’s determination to see her children. Eventually, he will board the flight, bundled up thoroughly against air-conditioning, which he hates almost as much as travel. Once he arrives at my brother’s house in Dubai, he refuses to stir as much as possible. He knows what he likes: reading news. The Internet has brought him a bottomless newspaper to read every day. Someone has to read it all. Also, what could possibly be more interesting? When he does go out, it is usually for Friday prayers followed by lunch at one of the hundreds of Kerala restaurants in Dubai or Sharjah. In this way, he has managed to resist the terrible fate of doing something unfamiliar.

Outside these annual exiles, my father has made two international voyages. As soon as my parents could afford it, they went on the hajj pilgrimage to Makka, a journey mandated for every Muslim who has the health and means to do so. The other journey was a visit to New York to see his granddaughter.

When my daughter was a few months old, my father steeled himself for the ritual humiliation of the United States–visa interview, the eighteen-hour flight, and airplane coffee. They arrived on a fall evening in New York, on the same flight as Radiohead, which meant that my husband was busy staring open-mouthed at the band as they left the airport while his in-laws wandered around Arrivals, culture shock having been activated at the baggage carousel. (Five dollars for a luggage trolley? What kind of mafia runs this place? Etc.)

Somehow they made it to my living room with all eight pieces of luggage. My father immediately wanted to excavate his favorite coffee powder and drink a real cup of coffee. But before he could reach the suitcase, he was asleep on the couch. I couldn’t help feeling slightly victorious. My parents had always been skeptical about the strange hours I kept in the first few days of coming home to them from New York. They would joke about the way I was up all night, raiding the fridge, and then falling asleep just as the household woke up. They were embarrassed when guests came to visit and were told at eleven in the morning that I was asleep. Jet lag seemed to them some kind of American double-talk, like invading a country for its oil and calling it democracy. But now here they were, fast asleep at three in the afternoon.

While my parents were in New York, I started freelancing for the United Nations as a writer of press releases. My job was to attend meetings of various General Assembly committees, listen to hundreds of delegates, and write coherent summaries that were circulated online. Governments read these summaries with a cold eye on how their positions were represented, counting the number of sentences given to their adversaries.

Every day the topics were different. I was working full-time after a long time and catching up on world news after months of relentlessly scouring parenting blogs. So I would wake up early in the morning to read up on the meeting topics of the day. My father, jet-lagged and out of sorts from sleeping on a soft bed, would be up already. He would make us coffee. While the rest of the household slept, I would pick his brain: “Tell me everything about the Western Sahara problem.” Without batting an eye, he would give me the whole story, many decades’ worth of reading international news, from both mainstream and alternative sources, condensed and articulated into his elegant and precise English. “What is happening in Gibraltar?” “Malvinas or Falkland Islands?” Every single time, he had nuanced answers. No offer of aid or proclamation of threat passed him by without a recounting of the submerged histories that had led to that point.

It was during those early morning conversations that I started realizing that there are many, many ways to travel. For years and years, my father had been traveling in exactly the way he wanted. He had been obsessively reading world news, scanning its politics and geography and the shifting landscape of squabbles, borders, allegiances. In this, he is very much a product of Kerala, a place where barbershops and bus stations ring out with intense conversations about international politics. But even among the argumentative Malayalis I grew up with, he stands out with his hunger for getting to the root of an issue, for reading multiple perspectives on the same debate, for forming informed opinions not for the sake of impressing friends and employers but for the sake of informed opinion.

The critic Benjamin Moser writes about the writer Machado de Assis, who lived a quiet and provincial life in nineteenth-century Brazil, “Machado is proof that cosmopolitanism comes from reading, not from travel: through books he knew the world.” A certain kind of provincial can often be much more cosmopolitan than many world travelers. More often than not, this provincial is to be found in the Third World, where the hardship of getting visas and the financial inequalities between formerly colonial and colonized nations means that travel is out of reach, while reading is not. We often blithely say that reading is a passport to the world. For those whose passports carry the stigma of a Third World citizenship, reading is often the more accessible passport.

But reading is not simply a fat-free, gluten-free version of travel. Reading the world is, for the provincial, an act of self-preservation. People in Kochi and Rio cannot afford to believe in their exceptionalism. It would be pointless for them to pretend that they are isolated from the world or that they come first in the world. A butterfly wing flapping in Geneva or Rome or London or Washington, D.C., could well decide the fate of hurricane recovery on an island thousands of miles away. The current dominance of Western culture means that one does not have to travel to the West to find it, so non-Western cultures have learned to live alongside it, carefully assessing its predatory nature while attaining fluency in its tropes.

I have learned to respect this particular brand of worldliness that hinges on making sense of a precarious world, rather than enjoying the spoils of war. In his essay “Defining a New Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Dialogue of Asian Civilisations,” the Indian critic Ashis Nandy writes: “It is possible to argue that Asia, Africa, and South America are the only cultural regions that are truly multicultural today. Because in these parts of the world, living simultaneously in two cultures—the modern Western and the vernacular—is no longer a matter of cognitive choice, but a matter of day-to-day survival . . .” Nandy points out that Western dominance has increasingly reduced the Western imperium to a provincial, monocultural existence. World domination comes at a price. This is the paradox by which European and North American cultures are increasingly losing their cosmopolitanism, because their definition of cosmopolitanism hinges on the universality of their own culture, from its version of coffee to its brand of human rights. On the other hand, the quiet, calculating cosmopolitanism of the non-Western provincial takes care to disguise itself as non-cosmopolitanism, to camouflage itself like an Amazonian butterfly. It takes on more layers of subversiveness the farther it moves away from the center.

Kerala is particularly fertile with this kind of camouflaged cosmopolitanism. In The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a marvelous book that describes the world that Battuta traveled through in the fourteenth century, the historian Ross E. Dunn writes of the worldliness of Muslim minorities in the Indian Ocean world during the time that Battuta spent among them. “Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind,” he writes, noting that being minorities, the Muslim communities in these regions felt deeply invested in preserving their links with the wider cultural world of Islam. Further, these communities were concentrated in coastal towns and dependent on maritime trade relationships. Often the inhabitants of these coasts responded more intensely to one another’s political affairs than to what was happening in their own hinterlands.

Seven centuries later, this is still true of Kerala, where, according to cynical local wisdom, when the Arab Gulf countries catch a cold, Kerala sneezes. For me, as a child growing up in the 1990s in India, the Iraq-Kuwait war of 1991 was not a distant world event; it had ripple effects in my own neighborhood and school, when thousands of Malayali migrants suddenly had to flee Kuwait and their children turned up in the middle of the school year to join our classrooms. The first and second intifadas in Palestine were grieved in mosques all over Kerala. To be a minority is to constantly orient yourself against the world. Around the world, the people of small coastal Third World towns have a vested interest in the world. They are curious about how it works and does not work. It’s a curiosity often missing in far-richer regions in the First World, whose inhabitants have the resources to travel but in ways that ensure that they can stay insulated from complicated historic, political, and economic subtexts. We are led to believe that cosmopolitanism comes from tourism, from the ability to tick items off a bucket list or stick a colorful tack on a pushpin “conquest” map, but, in fact, migration and minorityhood is a more effective education in worldliness.

And so for my father, reading is not a substitute for travel. Reading is travel. Reading is how he understands the world. And there is nothing he likes reading as much as the international section of a newspaper. His mother loved newspapers. Even when his family fell on hard times, when crops dried up and fields had to be sold to pay her hospital bills, she would not give up her newspaper subscription. Every day she would quiz my father and his sister on the news stories of the day.

My father was born in a newly independent India. He came of age in the second half of the twentieth century. The Third World was shaking off colonial and feudal overlordship; the promises of democracy and freedom hung tantalizingly in the air right alongside the sulfur smell of bankrolled coup d’etats and instigated civil wars and partitions that redrew entire chunks of the map. Within many freshly minted nations, like India, communal and caste privilege reasserted itself, rising to occupy the seats freshly vacated by colonial rulers. The attention with which my father read the news—the first draft of history—is the watchfulness of someone who understands that knowledge is not power.

During those early morning conversations in New York, my father and I bonded deeply over chicory coffee and our shared disgust for the United Nations Security Council. In my growing-up years, we had fought so much, both of us argumentative and sarcastic. Now as we reflected on who gets to speak for nations and who doesn’t, what gets left out of press releases, I appreciated his long memory, his epic view of world affairs.

But he refused to see any sights. Even New York City could not shake my father’s desire to not see the world. He begged off the usual adventures to the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Empire State Building. “It’s not the Grand Canyon,” he would say jokingly whenever I suggested sight-seeing. This was his “joke”—that there was only one thing he wanted to see in the United States: the Grand Canyon, which was conveniently far away.

While my parents acted as if they had flown eighteen hours around the globe to cook multicourse South Indian meals and sing lullabies, I wanted to show off the city on whose fortifications I had chiseled my little hollow. One day I surprised my parents with a helicopter tour over Manhattan. My mother got off the copter with windswept hair and shining eyes. “Just wonderful. What a way to see New York,” she told me. My father shook his head and muttered, “Eminently avoidable.”

But he loved grocery shopping in Brooklyn. Every day he would go to the Caribbean stores on Flatbush Avenue, near my home. My father didn’t so much buy vegetables as investigate them. He was intrigued by the profusion of bananas, since these are not indigenous to the United States. He looked up Caribbean banana plantations and started reading about the history of the unequal trade between the United States and the region.

He also loved picking through my farm-share vegetables. It was fall, and week after week, our fruit share consisted of apples, a fruit that is rare and expensive in Kerala. Every Saturday, I sighed as we picked up yet another bushel of apples. I was tired of them but my father was not. He was mystified by this idea of getting bored. How can you be bored with good fruit? He ate all our apples and then started reading about different apple varieties.

It occurred to me then that my father has a wonderful sense of what the French call terroir. In Kerala, he is known to pick through several market stands to find the freshest kappa (cassava). He can spot a good bunch of kappa from a speeding car and will stop at roadside stands if the color and the shape catch his eye. He can tell by sight what kind of soil they were grown in.

Cassava is not native to Kerala. A product of the Columbian Exchange, it traveled to the west coast of India with Portuguese and Spanish colonizers, who encountered it first in Brazil. But today, soft and creamy boiled kappa is a beloved Malayali food. My father grew up surrounded by spindly kappa trees. When he finds good kappa, he will eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner till it is gone. The same with mangoes. When my mother’s mango tree blooms in April, my father eats nothing but mangoes for dinner. “This is how I get my vitamin C,” he tells us when we laugh at him.

In my family, we think of my father as someone with very limited tastes in food because he refuses to eat sliced bread, biscuits, candy, noodles, frozen packaged mishmash, anything out of a can. When I made my first cake out of a boxed mix, he took one bite and said guardedly, “It’s very good. Please don’t make it again.” While we prided ourselves on being adventurous for trying out various processed crap, my father has always stuck to kappa and mangoes and coconut chammanthi. Watching him enjoy these apples, I realized that what he lacked was not curiosity; it was the ability to pretend to yourself that bad food tastes good.

So much of travel can be about pretending. I should know, because for years, I have been pretending to enjoy the monuments I visit in various places. I have spent perfectly sunny mornings in museums that I do not care for, and I have sat in cute trolley cars and I have thrown coins into wishing wells, all for the sake of ticking off an experience on a list. I have especially tried hard to enjoy walking tours. There are always good arguments for doing new things, and, having made them all to myself, I am now beginning to see the case for doing only the things you are genuinely curious about. As I grow older, I hope to become more like my father, who caused much amusement by declining a ride by the White House (“Why? What is there?”) when we went to D.C. to visit my in-laws. When I told him my mother-in-law was offering to take him and my mother around D.C. on a guided tour of its monuments, he murmured sheepishly in my ear in Malayalam, “If the possibility of not going is not offensive, then that is the one that I would probably choose.”

In the years since, I have been testing out my father’s attitude to travel. When we arrive in a new place, I do my best to resist the iconic. For a people pleaser such as I am, this is difficult. Nevertheless, I try. When I hear of fun walking tours, I tell myself, Eminently avoidable. The truth, the frightening and liberating truth, is that nothing in the world is must-see or must-eat or must-do. It’s all eminently avoidable, isn’t it.

Instead, I shop for groceries and daydream in urban parks, activities that I can enjoy without leaving Brooklyn, where I live. I skip the major monuments in favor of used bookstores and the small urban places of worship whose doors are usually propped open. But of course, this too is a fantasy—that by skipping the tourist trail, we can become travelers or even locals. It is only one slippery slope away from the iconic to the ironic.

My father’s aversion to monuments is not a principled position against tourism. He is not trying to be a tourist, but he is also not trying to not be a tourist. Unlike Claude Lévi-Strauss, who famously begins his memoir, Tristes Tropiques, with “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe—and yet, here I am, all set to tell the story of my travel expeditions,” my father does not dislike tourists. He does not notice them because travel as a form of self-improvement has not registered in his imagination. He loved what he loved—the halal street-food vendors, the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park—not because they were important but because they pierced through his indifference. In fact, he would be mystified to find himself in a book about travel. “Why?” he would probably ask. “What is there?”

I have tried hard to emulate this philosophical balancing act but with little success. Something has corrupted me too much. Over the years of saying no to things and refusing to try out other people’s adventures, my father has managed to retain his triangularity in a world of round pegs with well-rounded to-do lists of travel experiences. Whereas I have said yes too many times.

I recognize myself in Dean MacCannell’s 1976 classic The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he declares that the tourist is the key to understanding modern social structure. “Moderns somehow know what the important attractions are, even in remote places,” MacCannell writes, calling tourism a “miracle of consensus” that works like a loop. While institutional mechanisms such as tourism agencies and travel guidebooks sacralize tourist sights, tourists respond by ritualizing the act of visiting these sights. He quotes the sociologist Erving Goffman, for whom “modern guided tours are extensive ceremonial agendas involving long strings of obligatory rites.”

This religion of tourism, its holy books and its rituals, is deep within me even when I strike out on supposedly non-touristy paths. I am like the Jewish atheist in the famous joke who recoiled in horror after his son went to Catholic school and reported back about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: “Son,” he responded, “there’s only one God and He doesn’t exist!” My aversion to tourism is a kind of faith in its power. Nothing in the world is a must-see, I told myself, while slowly roasting under the Roman sun in a two-hour line to step inside the Colosseum. Nothing at all, except here I am.

Why can’t I simply shake off this faith in seeing places and things? As MacCannell writes, “the position of the person who stays at home in the modern world is morally inferior to that of a person who ‘gets out’ often.” Traveling enables the modern to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to live. Perhaps you, too, have been told by some superior friend to “live a little” when you declined to go on a half-baked weekend trip. It is as if our everyday life is a pointless exercise and only when we travel do we reach our full potential. In fact, we are told, not only does travel make us better people; it makes the world a better place: a win-win. Travel has been sold to us as the ultimate horizon-expanding, mind-broadening, self-improvement experience.

In reality, of course, for many of us, travel has rarely been an uncomplicated pleasure. And as the climate emergency in which we are living moves toward its peak, it is getting harder to claim that travel is an uncomplicated good. Even the most hardened of us cannot ignore how travel is changing ecosystems, how travel has rendered so many places in the world into Disneyfied versions of themselves.

You know this already. I do too. Nevertheless, my inbox is full of cheap-fare alerts. Every day I am tempted by $300 New York City–Mallorca mistake fares. I will find ways to rationalize a stay in a luxury hotel that is slowly destroying the natural and cultural environment around it. Because of course I am not like other tourists. I deserve to travel because I am me, the right kind of traveler. Just as modern tourism is a parody of itself, anti-tourism too has become a parody of itself. And we can always convince ourselves that tourism is, for many Third World countries, the primary source of income. So many people count on our tourist dollars and dirhams and rupees.

Both these high moral grounds—tourism is terrible for the world, tourism is the best way to change the world—are terribly hard on the knees and shins. Having lost my footing on both again and again, I am more interested now in the low moral ground, which is located somewhere between absolute apathy and an obsession with purity. It is the place where one makes compromised choices and lives with some regrets and celebrates small victories, while muttering to oneself.

It’s been years since that month my father spent in New York City against his wishes. Every time I broach the topic of another visit, he shudders. The flight is long, his patience is short. But I want to take him apple-picking upstate. If he comes again, we will definitely go to the Grand Canyon, I assure him. “Even the Grand Canyon is not the Grand Canyon,” he told me once, laughing heartily at his own joke. While I waited for his laughter across the oceans to subside, I remembered my favorite Cavafy poem, one that struck terror into me when I was younger and dreaming about other cities:

You shall not find new places; other seas

You shall not find. This place shall follow you.

And you shall walk the same familiar streets,

And you shall age in the same neighborhood,

And whiten in these same houses.

The winter months are too cold; the summer months are too hot; fall is when my parents go to Dubai. “Come to New York in spring,” I tell my father. “The weather is perfect, with flowers everywhere.” But April is when the mango tree in my mother’s garden blooms and sends ripe fruit pelting down on my parents’ perennially bruised car. If he comes in April, how will my father stock up on vitamin C?

“No,” he always responds. “You come here.”