Chapter
FIVE
I FIRST HEARD ABOUT BILQIS, THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, IN A madrassa in Kerala. I was nine or ten years old, and we were reading the Qisas-el-Anbiya. The ustad was reading aloud the Malayalam translation of this medieval collection of stories from the lives of various prophets of Islam, of whom Suleyman was one. I was deeply struck by the wonderful brazenness of the women in the Qisas. Zulaykha trying to seduce Yusuf, Musa’s mother secretly keeping him alive though the Pharaoh has commanded that all infants be killed, and now Bilqis, the queen of Sheba, setting off to see Suleyman for herself.
My favorite teacher—Ra’uf ustad—loved telling stories. Unlike the other ustads, he cracked jokes and laughed easily and did not spend most of the time telling the girls in the class we were fitnas. Ra’uf ustad told us that when she arrived in Jerusalem in Suleyman’s court, the queen of Sheba was impressed by the pristine glass pavilion on which his throne was placed. Mistaking it for water, she lifted the hem of her skirts lest they get wet. In fact, Suleyman had the glass pavilion constructed to trick the queen into showing her legs. He had been told by djinns that she was a cloven-footed devil, and before he welcomed her into his court, he wanted to see for himself.
Years later, while traveling in Ethiopia, I came across a coda to this encounter between the queen of Sheba and Solomon. According to the Ethiopian epic Kebra Nagast, Sheba was a territory in what is now Ethiopia, and its Queen Makeda visited Solomon after hearing about his greatness. She won over his heart with her beauty and wisdom, and he tricked her into sharing his bed. They conceived a child, who went on to found the old Ethiopian empire of Aksum. Historians believe that the queen of Sheba could have belonged to what is now Ethiopia or one of its neighbors, Eritrea or Yemen. After all, one of the presents that the queen brought Solomon was frankincense, which grows only in this region.
But sitting in the madrassa all those years ago, when I heard of the queen of Sheba mistaking the glass pavilion for water, I was reminded of another story, another king. Dushasana, from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, visiting his cousins, the Pandava brothers, in their fancy new capital of Indraprastha. Dushasana too is tricked by a glass floor so pristine that he thinks it must be water and steps gingerly, causing another queen—Draupadi—to erupt into the laughter that will launch a long, bloody battle. Growing up, I was surrounded by the swirl of these ancient stories, and my head was the first melting pot I knew. At school, I learned the names of the great explorers of history—Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Columbus—and the dates on which they arrived in the lands they set out in search of. But in my head, the stories of prophets evicted from their cities and desert mothers in search of water and princes exiled from their kingdoms and monkeys leaping across oceans were also stories of travel and adventure.
It seems to me remarkable that we have, if only via myth, the story of a woman traveler from Africa before the beginning of the Common Era. She was a queen, a woman of great power and agency, which she used judiciously. Her confidence and curiosity are writ large all over the various versions of the story. According to the Hebrew Bible, she came to test Solomon with hard questions, and according to the Kebra Nagast, when Solomon, hatching a convoluted plot to trick her into sleeping with him, makes her promise not to steal anything from him, she informs him crisply that she is wealthy and has as much money as he does. None of these versions detail much about her journey to Jerusalem, which must have been arduous and uncertain. In fact, in one version of the story, it was djinns who transported the queen instantaneously to Jerusalem.
Can religious and mythological tales be considered travel records? Aren’t they just stories? In his introduction to Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, Tabish Khair makes a strong case for considering epic poetry and religious texts as a form of travel writing. Travel, Khair points out, seems to mark the beginning of all major religions, from the exile of Ram in the Ramayana to the Buddha’s wanderings after leaving behind the palace to the wayfarers of Daoism to Moses’s return from Mount Sinai to Muhammad’s journey before the revelation. The mixture of fact and fiction in such stories offers an early prototype of travel and travel writing, he writes, because through these narratives, the storytellers are discursively mapping their own selves against the other, home against the foreign.
Indeed, in the way the queen of Sheba observes Solomon and as the Old Testament describes it, “the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cupbearers, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the Lord,” we see this discursive mapping of the self and the other. Herself a wealthy monarch, the queen of Sheba is taking stock of the difference between her and Solomon, and she is willing to give Solomon his due while taking her own.
Perhaps what delights me more than anything else is that the queen of Sheba’s journey is a counterpoint to the monomyth that Joseph Campbell wrote about in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which every myth follows the template of a hero’s journey that involves a man who journeys away from home, encounters monsters and temptations, and returns home with a prize. The queen of Sheba has all the prizes she wants at home—she is wealthy, she rules over her own kingdom, she has the love and loyalty of her people. What she is motivated by is curiosity.
As a child, I thrilled to imagine the queen of Sheba’s travels because she was a woman. But over the years, I have come to think that what’s truly subversive about her journey is her curiosity. Her desire to know, to understand, to see for herself is entirely different from the desire to capture, to defeat, to bring back a trophy.
Travel history insists that most ancient travel took place for war and trade, for securing prizes in one form or another. The first travel writing in recorded history is a story of military exploits. Herodotus, a Greek man, born in what is now Turkey, traveled all over the eastern Mediterranean and well beyond, documenting the rise and fall of the Persian Empire in the fifth century BCE. Right at the beginning, he informs the reader that he is writing a record of events so that the Greeks and the “barbarians” may receive their due. He called his account historia—little did he know that he was inventing a field of study (history) and a genre of storytelling (travel writing). Even today, both the field and the genre bear this Herodotean legacy of pitting one’s imagined community against the “barbarian” other.
•
Here’s another traveler: a man from Syria on his way to Europe, where he hopes to tell his story and win over the authorities there. He has fled Damascus and has been wandering since then from place to place talking to whoever will listen. Many have helped, but there has also been great hostility toward people like him. He has been beaten and arrested and evicted. Can you blame him for setting his sights across the seas? The men in the capitals of empires have so much power over people like him. So even though he knows all too well the prejudices against his faith, he hopes that maybe he will get a fair hearing, in another land. Or maybe he is thinking of future generations and what he owes to them as he sets out on this long and perilous journey. The ship he sails on makes a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean, braving fierce winds, sheltering off the coast of Turkey and then Greece. But as they leave Crete, the ship is caught in a storm so dangerous that even crew members try to abandon the ship. To keep the vessel afloat, they have to throw out all their food grain. The ship is wrecked just as the shores of Malta come into view. The man and his fellow travelers swim ashore. In Malta, they wait months till they can find a ship to take them to Rome. Eventually the ship arrives in Syracuse. For two years, the man makes his case, talking to whoever will listen to him. But Rome has no use for his story, and eventually Paul the Apostle is arrested and beheaded by Emperor Nero’s soldiers.
History is often like a carousel, in which the same movements take place again and again, with different protagonists. In Paul’s time, the first century of the Common Era, it was the Roman Empire that controlled the roads and handed out permissions for travel. As a result, the Roman upper classes in the first two centuries of the Common Era are the first tourists of history. In the eighteenth century, it was the British who inaugurated modern tourism. Today, U.S. citizens are prolific travelers, thanks to a passport and a currency that opens most doors. Empires enable travel—both materially, by controlling roads and airways, and spiritually, by giving permits and permissions. And then the world rearranges itself to suit the empire’s travelers. So prolific were the Romans in their recreational travels that the Greek writer Pausanias produced a Greece guidebook aimed at the Romans. It is also during Roman times that the tradition of the Seven Wonders was established: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Egyptian pyramids, the statue of Zeus, and other remarkable sights came to be imbued with that “must-see” quality that we are now so familiar with. And of course, the Romans complained. Here’s Seneca’s Tripadvisor review about the place where he stayed in Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul:
I live right over a public bath. Just imagine every kind of human sound to make us hate our ears. When the muscular types work out and toss the lead weights, when they strain or make believe they are straining, I hear the grunting and many additional unpleasant sounds . . . Then there’s the drink-seller with his various cries, the sausage-seller, the cake-seller, and all the managers of the restaurants, each hawking his wares with his own special intonation.
But what about those who didn’t leave any written reviews or records? During the same period that the Roman Empire rose and fell, modern-day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia were the site of the ancient Kingdom of Aksum. It was one of the great kingdoms of antiquity, on par with ancient Persia or Rome. Strategically positioned at the crossroads of mercantile routes that connected the East African coast to the continent’s interior, Aksumites traded with Rome, Egypt, South Arabia, the Middle East, India, and China. We know very little about Aksum even though it developed a written script known as Ge’ez. The ruined palaces and tombs at Aksum, like many of the imperial ruins in the Global South, have not received even a tiny proportion of the reverence and scholarship and tourism that has attended Greek or Roman ruins, creating a nesting doll of missing histories.
And so as a child growing up in India, I tucked away the story of the queen of Sheba. The more I learned in school, the more improbable she felt. It wasn’t simply her journey that felt improbable; it was her wisdom and courage and curiosity. At school we learned of how the Enlightenment brought the spirit of scientific inquiry to Europe and then the world, after long centuries in which so much of nothing happened that it was known as the Dark Ages. We memorized the sea route between India and Portugal, the way it curved around the Cape of Good Hope, before da Gama discovered us, our pepper and cinnamon. Byhearting was the verb we made up for committing to memory Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” or Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” which we recited in diction contests. After school, I hurried home to bolt down a late lunch, threw my yellow makkana around my head, and speed-walked to the tiled two-room madrassa next to our local mosque. Often I was late to class and slid quietly onto the last bench, joining my voice to the chorus of my classmates reciting the Fatiha. But one rainy day, Ra’uf ustad saw me trying to sneak in and asked why I was late.
“I stopped to eat lunch,” I told him.
“Ah, lunch, very good, very good,” he said, as he walked up and down between the rows. “What did you eat rice with?”
“With sambar and cabbage thoran,” I said.
“But no pickle?” he asked. A frisson of energy went through the sleepy afternoon classroom. Where was this conversation going?
“Yes, there was pickle. Lemon pickle.”
“Let me tell you a story about pickle,” he said, sitting on the table at the front of the classroom after casting one eye upward to make sure he was not under a hole in the roof through which rain leaked in during monsoons.
“Once upon a time there was a king in this very Malayali land who saw a strange sight. He had just finished a delicious dinner and was eating his payasam when he looked up at the sky and saw the full moon split into two. The next day, he called his ministers and astrologers, but none of them knew what was going on,” Ra’uf ustad began. “Any of you ever seen the moon split into two?”
“No!” we yelled obligingly. Gratefully, my classmates closed their notebooks and Qur’ans and unpropped the elbows on which drowsy heads were resting. We were no longer in a leaking madrassa; we were in the court of a long-ago Kerala king. The king, known as Cheraman Perumal, looked up at the skies every day and brooded. Had he imagined the moon cleaving? Luckily for him, a few days later, a small group of Arab merchants arrived in his court. The Perumal asked them about the cleaving of the moon. Respectfully they told him, this was a miracle performed by their prophet. “What is this prophet you speak of?” the Perumal asked. And they told him of a man called Muhammad in a city called Makka who spoke of one God. There were many who didn’t believe him, and when they asked him to prove this one-God business, this soft-spoken man had prayed and then split the moon into two.
I must go see this Muhammad for myself, the Perumal decided. So when the monsoon winds started blowing west and the Arab merchants sailed back to their land, he went with them. Across the Arabian Sea he sailed and across the desert he took a caravan until he finally arrived in Makka and saw the prophet for himself, as the queen of Sheba had done centuries before in another city, with another prophet. And there in Makka, the Perumal became the first Muslim from the Indian subcontinent. There is no God but God, he said, and he decided that he would take this message back to India. “Okay, everyone, why are your Qur’ans closed? Open to Surah Al-Qamar and let us read what the Qur’an has to say about the moon getting split.”
“But, ustad, I have a question,” said Amina as she raised her hand.
“What is it?”
“What about the pickle?”
“Oh, yes, the pickle. We forgot about the pickle, didn’t we? So when the Perumal arrived in Makka and met the prophet, he realized that he did not have any presents for him. Is that some way to go see a great prophet? The Perumal was ashamed of himself. He was, after all, the king of a great land. What would the prophet think of the people of Kerala? Then he remembered that he had some ginger pickle with him. You know how we pack pickles when we go on long journeys so that we will always have something to eat with rice? Even kings do that. So he took his pickle and gave it to the prophet. And the prophet accepted it graciously and shared it with his companions. Each one took a sliver of pickled ginger and ate it.”
“What kind of pickles did they have in Arabia then?” Sayyid asked.
Ra’uf ustad paused to ponder the question while giggles rose in the class. Sitting on the back bench of the classroom, I could tell he was tempted by the question. He was a born storyteller, and it was always a battle between fact and plot. To tell what he knew or to embellish and embroider. I knew the pull myself. What stories he could tell of those foreign pickles he knew nothing about. The things they pickled in those lands. The djinns that loved those pickles.
“I don’t know,” he finally admitted.
Many of the stories I heard in my childhood fell through the cracks of record keeping. There was also a vagueness about where they began and where they ended. They began once upon a time and melted into larger story spirals unspooling away into the future. The Indian literary critic Ayyappa Paniker has written about the fundamentally different approach of Asian narratology in privileging the spatial over the temporal. While he is careful to offer the caveat that this is a generalization that comes with all the limitations of generalizations, Paniker notes that historic records in Asian cultures tend to locate events in a flexible and elastic movement of time, while carefully assessing the geographic specificities of the story. As a result, he points out, “the shadow of a parable” looms over many Asian epics and folktales. Places are described in detail with attention to ecology and context, but since the stories are not moored in dates and times, they fail the history test. Compared to the history of the Western explorers who discovered India, with dates meticulously documented in history textbooks, the myths and stories of my childhood felt flimsy. The aura of holiness that surrounded some of these stories also lent itself to this vagueness. If a story came from the Qur’an or hadith or had some kind of religious connection, I learned not to ask too many questions. These stories were meant to be believed with eyes and ears closed. To ask where they came from or how they were told was to suggest that your faith was not waterproof. And so as these different frameworks collided against one another, the melting pot in my head broke into a thousand fragments, and I, like millions of other schoolchildren, learned to classify some stories as history and others as hearsay.
•
Sometime in the early 2000s, a few schoolchildren in a small town in Kerala called Pattanam, about twenty miles away from where I had grown up, were playing in a backyard when they started finding shards of pottery. Some of the shards caught the eye of a local schoolteacher, who got archaeologists involved. The clay used in some of the pottery was identified as volcanic soil, the kind found in the region of Mount Vesuvius. Archaeologists are now trying to pinpoint if this infraordinary town (Pattanam literally means town) could actually be Muziris, an ancient Indian harbor that is said to have been washed away during a medieval flood. When I visited the archaeological dig, there were mounds and mounds of pottery shards in a small house that was slowly transforming into a museum. Leaning on her shovel, an archaeologist told me that the pots were probably the amphorae in which the Romans kept olive oil during the long journey across the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea.
Long before Columbus set out in search of Indian pepper, Muziris, a mysterious city on the western coast of India, was trading pepper with Rome. The Apicius, the most ancient European cookbook, calls for Malabar pepper in many of its recipes. Before it was swept away in the flood, Muziris was one of the linchpins of the maritime trading network that connected the Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Operating entirely on seasonal monsoon winds, this network connected Rome to China by the beginning of the Common Era. The timing of monsoon winds meant that Muziris was conveniently located as a resting place on the navigation route, a place to shelter from the rains and repair ships till the winds switched directions. Naturally, Muziris became an emporium, where traders from different parts of the world met and poked at each other’s wares. “Primum Emporium Indiae,” Pliny the Elder called Muziris in his Naturalis Historia.
Muziris is fascinating of course, but I could not help wondering how I, growing up about forty-five minutes away from this ancient town, had never heard of it until now. I had spent the years of my childhood judging these small towns, rolling my eyes at their provincialness, fantasizing nonstop about escaping, and now the joke was on me. Merchants from Rome and Mesopotamia and China had stood on streets near me and bargained with one another. How is it possible to be so ignorant of one’s own history? Growing up in Kerala, the artifacts of this muti-oceanic mercantile voyage were littered all over my childhood like clues. The kanji we drank in the mornings, the wok-shaped cheena chatti in which my parents cooked vegetables every day, the way Malabar Coast Muslims pronounce the third syllable of the word Ramadan with a soft velar l sound, an archaic pronunciation from medieval Arabic that has since been lost in the Arab world but persists in southern India. Despite this bread-crumb trail left behind by medieval travelers who arrived regularly on our shores, when we learned about explorers and navigators in school, we learned about Vasco da Gama and Columbus. Even now, having given myself this rickety homemade expertise in peeking under the rugs of travel history, I feel the gaps left by this autotopagnosia. To know one’s history and geography is to know oneself.
There are at least two small towns in Kerala, sitting side by side, that vie for the title of Muziris. Pattanam is one of those towns. The other is nearby Kodungalloor, famous for its temple, which is dedicated to a fierce goddess. After visiting the freshly dug archaeological pits in Pattanam, my husband and I wandered around Kodungalloor, eating egg puffs and samosas at its many bakeries. Right off the main busy street stood a mosque reputed to have been built in the seventh century. It was a working mosque, and as we wandered around its premises, a bunch of schoolchildren filed out of the madrassa, giving us searching glances.
Legend has it that after Cheraman Perumal converted to Islam in Makka, he started his journey back to Kerala with one of the Prophet’s companions, Malik bin Dinar, a young Persian man. But along the way, the Perumal fell sick and died and was buried in what is now Oman. Malik bin Dinar continued the journey, returning to Kerala to build a mosque and fulfill the Perumal’s dream. If the legend is correct, he built the mosque in 629 CE, which would make it the third mosque to be built in the world, after the ones in Makka and Madina. Could this be that mosque? The mystery sat lightly on the mosque as we walked around quietly.
It is impossible to know for sure because the mosque has been rebuilt and renovated so many times that its architectural style is a syncretic mishmash. Most of its elements date back to at least the eleventh century. It is also possible that the mosque started its life as a Hindu or Buddhist temple before it was repurposed as a mosque, demolished by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and eventually rebuilt in a more modern style. Some of the oldest architectural elements such as lamps and wooden pillars seem to be borrowed from temple architecture. This mosque was a mosque before our notions of what a mosque should look like crystalized. It is a mosque full of maybes.
Years later, I heard about a long-lost Arabic text called Qissat Shakarwati Farmad, which had then just been translated into English. The title loosely translates as the story of Emperor Farmad. Farmad is none other than the Perumal, with the Malayalam consonants transformed into medieval Arabic. It details the story of an Indian king who witnesses the moon being split and dreams of Prophet Muhammad and travels with a group of Sufi pilgrims to Makka and accepts Islam and spends five years learning with the Prophet and marries a local woman and dies on the way back but his companions manage to reach Kerala and build the first mosque. There is no mention of pickles in this text, but when the prophet’s companions ask him about Farmad, he tells them that he is a visitor from the land of pepper and ginger.
I think of this story, kept alive through legend and communal memory, every time I eat ginger pickle. I imagine how sailors and explorers throughout the history of travel must have carried pickles with them—they are a handy way to preserve meat and vegetables for long periods at sea or in deserts, and an even handier way to taste the flavors of home while far away. The pickle is the most convincing part of the legend for me. The ginger pickle is the moon split in half.
In the eighteenth century, Captain Cook would persuade his sailors to eat sauerkraut in order to combat scurvy while circumnavigating the world. As a result, Cook did not lose a single sailor. This was a breakthrough: it was common in the early days of European exploration to lose as much as half a ship’s crew to scurvy.
But as far back as the fourth century, the travelogue of Faxian, a Buddhist scholar, mentions that Chinese sailors carried ginger to combat a disease that, from his description, sounds like scurvy. This is especially notable because vitamin C deficiency does not cause scurvy until after a full month of deprivation. In other words, those sailors were at sea for more than a month. Ibn Battuta, who visited China in the first half of the fourteenth century, described the junks he saw in one of its harbors: there were wooden tanks on board, on which sailors would cultivate ginger during their voyages. Crumbs of information such as these are crucial for remapping the history of naval exploration and freeing it from the European explorer-discoverer narrative.
At around the same time that the legend claims Malik bin Dinar was building the mosque in Kodungalloor, the Chinese monk Xuanzang was traveling to India. He was one of thousands of Chinese pilgrims who traveled to the Buddhist holy places in India, most of them taking the Silk Road through Central Asia and then returning via maritime routes through Southeast Asia. According to Stephen Gosch and Peter Stearns, authors of Premodern Travel in World History, the Buddhist monks from China are among the most adventurous long-distance travelers of the first millennium CE. Many of them were scholar-monks, and they were not just paying respects to the Buddha; they were learning Sanskrit and collecting Buddhist texts for translation into Chinese.
By the time Xuanzang was ordained as a monk at the age of twenty, most of these texts had been translated, but in a move that will be familiar to overachieving students everywhere, he decided to consult the primary sources in order to avoid any mistakes that might have crept into the translations. So he crossed the mountains into India, visited the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and then traveled to Nalanda, the ancient Indian university, where he was welcomed warmly. He stayed in that immense complex of lecture halls and monasteries and libraries for sixteen years before taking the scenic route back to China.
Thus, contrary to the notion of the Dark Ages, the medieval era is rich with travel. Caravans full of gold and salt were moving through Western Africa. Polynesians were sailing the Pacific, establishing a vast confederacy of island kingdoms that traded with one another. And in Asia, the Arab merchant, the Chinese sailor, and the Buddhist scholar had managed to link six thousand miles, stretching from Basra to Guangzhou. By the early ninth century, Arab and Chinese ships were regularly sailing between these two harbors. Arab traders controlled the global supply chain of spices, textiles, and other “Eastern” commodities from China and India, moving them through Middle Eastern cities like Aleppo and Cairo before continuing to Venice and elsewhere in Europe. Many Arab merchants were also slave traders, who traveled from the Persian Gulf down the coast as far as what we know today as Mozambique or moved between the kingdoms of West Africa and the North African coast.
The Muslim and Chinese empires and the trading routes they established set the stage for one of history’s most famous travelers: Marco Polo. One might think that the man credited with being the first European to reach China would be an ambitious explorer, with a plan and a map. In fact, Marco Polo was an adolescent who went on a trip with his father and uncle. Years after he returned to Europe, he narrated the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner, who wrote it up for posterity. It is extremely possible that this ghostwriter may have taken several liberties with Polo’s story. Historians speculate that the stories of Christian miracles and the mythical animals of the East were products of the ghostwriter’s fertile imagination. It is also possible that Marco Polo’s travelogue was significantly altered by the numerous scribes who copied it afterward.
Having said all that, we do know that Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254, into a family of merchants who specialized in the maritime commerce between Venice and Constantinople. His father and uncle returned from a trading trip east with a remarkable story about meeting the Kublai Khan, who gave them a passport-like document to travel through his territories and beyond. Upon their return to Venice, they were eager to go back east and make their way to China, this time taking adolescent Marco with them. They sailed to Jerusalem, after which most of the rest of their journey was by land, possibly through the Anatolian heartland and then up the Persian plateau. Narrowly escaping highway brigands and taking advantage of the caravanserai network established by Muslim kings and left mostly intact by the Mongols, they rode through Central Asia, crossing mountain ranges and deserts, finally crossing into western China in 1273. In Kublai Khan’s employ, Polo traveled to far-flung provinces and reported back to the Khan. The China we glimpse through Marco Polo’s eyes is a China of mansions and bridges and pleasure boats and hotels and paper money made from the bark of mulberry trees.
Marco Polo is colloquially considered the first European to reach China. Historians usually hasten to add that this may not be true: It is possible that Europeans arrived in China as early as the classical period. Polo was merely the first to leave a record. But if we set aside the question of whether or not Marco Polo was the first European to reach China, there is a more interesting question: Why is it an achievement to be the first European to reach China? Who is that an achievement for? We rarely hear about the first Asian to reach Europe or the first African to reach the Americas. But the first European to reach China and the first European to reach India by sea and the first European to reach the Americas? Their names are household names, not because this is a major achievement, but because of the European investment in the idea of the first European to reach these “other” places.
This is why we hear so much about someone like Marco Polo, who happened to be in the right place at the right time for European writers to seize on his chronicles of being a European abroad, but we hear so little about the delegation of thirty Africans who traveled through Spain, France, and Rome in 1306, six years after Marco Polo’s travel stories were published. They were sent by the Ethiopian king Wedem Ar’ad, who was hoping to create a pan-Christian alliance to stem the growing infiltration of Muslim rulers into his continent. This delegation of Orthodox Christian Ethiopians called on rulers in Spain, visited Pope Clement V in France, and then paid their respects at the churches of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome, eventually sailing home from Genoa. In the next few centuries, the Ethiopian kings consolidated their power, built a remarkable network of churches, established an alliance of protection with the Coptic Church in Egypt, and shored up an Orthodox Christian bulwark against the Muslim empire. Their monks and diplomats would travel to Europe often, in search of Christian relics and artisans to bring home to what they considered the headquarters of the Christian Church.
Their obscurity is especially remarkable considering that Europe, at this time, was already trading in Black bodies—the thirty travelers of 1306 who came of their own volition and agency, representing their powerful African Christian emperor, clearly considered themselves to be on equal footing with the Europeans. If the Industrial Revolution had started in Khartoum or Addis and if African countries had become colonial powers ruling over Europe, doubtless we would have history books about how they discovered Europe.
Instead, what do we have? Here’s Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writing about the culturally rich and transnationally active world of medieval Ethiopia: “Encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten. They were awakened by the Portuguese, who, turning the southern promontory of Africa, appeared in India and the Red Sea, as if they had descended through the air from a distant planet.”
The Portuguese are also often credited for waking up India. On May 21, 1492, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama arrived on the shore of Kerala after a long and tortuous journey via the Atlantic Ocean. Five months later, Christopher Columbus would make landfall in what is now the Bahamas and proudly declare that he had found India. So at least da Gama can be credited with having arrived in the right place. In fact, he had stopped in the port of Malindi, in modern Kenya, to pick up an Indian sailor who helped him navigate to the South Indian coast. Da Gama’s ship was part of the spice race, which, as Amitav Ghosh writes in The Nutmeg’s Curse, was the space race of its time.
Certainly it was a dramatic moment for da Gama and the Portuguese empire and Europe. But the Malabar coast was used to arrivals and departures. In fact, according to the anonymous author of the Roteiro, translated as A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama 1497–1499, when the ship arrived at Kozhikode, da Gama sent a convict ashore to find out more. The first European to step on an Indian shore was the convict Joao Nunez. He was greeted by two Tunisian merchants, who welcomed him warmly, speaking in Castilian and Genoese: “The Devil take you! What brought you here?”
•
Having been spoon-fed all the pabulum about Western colonial powers waking up Asian and African countries, nothing quite prepared me for my first sight of Lalibela, the rock churches in northern Ethiopia. My friend and I arrived there during the pilgrimage season of January 2019, when the Orthodox Church was celebrating Christmas. The eleven underground churches of Lalibela, built in the twelfth century, are Ethiopian Christianity’s greatest monuments.
All of them are monolithic, each carved out of a single massive block of red volcanic rock. Connected to one another by underground paths, most of which are now closed off for safety, Lalibela is a vast complex of rock-hewn cathedrals, monasteries, and tombs. Legend has it that after visiting Jerusalem, King Lalibela had this complex built as a faithful homage. Our guide told us the king wanted his people to have an Orthodox Jerusalem so they could be spared the arduous travel to Palestine. Or maybe, like kings everywhere, he wanted to build something big, something that would keep his name alive for centuries.
For two days, we walked around the churches, in a daze of wonder and awe, alongside the thousands of pilgrims who crowded into these mystical underground spaces with us. We hadn’t planned on being there during the Ethiopian Christmas. Pearl and I, traveling from my North American winter and her Australian summer, had chosen the first week of January to travel together because it was one of the only times in the year that our holidays from work coincided. It was also a convenient time to leave our children in the care of our spouses. Knowing that we would be visiting Lalibela during the Ethiopian Christmas, we imagined a busy time. Nothing prepared us. As our taxi climbed the hill up to town, we saw hundreds of pilgrims, dressed in white, many of them barefoot, walking up the hill. The driver of our taxi pointed to the buckets of water at intervals along the road. For many locals, it is an honor to wash pilgrims’ feet, he said.
That night, the sleepy town we had arrived in transformed: thousands of pilgrims set up tents and cooked over campfires on the streets of Lalibela. A pilgrim market sprang into life, selling rosaries and shawls and monk’s robes and goatskin portraits of saints. Over the course of the next few days, our paltry tourist itinerary intersected with this magnificent influx of pilgrims from around Ethiopia and beyond.
Lalibela’s churches are marvels of subterranean engineering. Some of them are freestanding, while others are carved into the volcanic basalt. This was church before our notions of what a church should look like crystalized. One of the churches, Bete Giyorgis (House of Saint George), is shaped like a cross, like many European cathedrals. Except that since our first view of Bete Giyorgis is looking down on it, as a bird would see it, the huge cross looks as if it is embedded into the ground. It is an invitation to kneel and kiss the earth, fulfilled magnificently in architecture.
King Lalibela wanted his homage to Jerusalem to be perfect in every way, so the churches contain replicas of Christ’s tomb, the Ark of the Covenant, and other potent symbols. There is a waterway called Yordannos running through the complex to symbolize the river Jordan. Even the tunnels connecting the churches are symbolic—the early Christians of Jerusalem used tunnels to go to church in secret. So the king insisted that the rock churches too should be connected by an elaborate system of tunnels. Murals line many of the walls of the underground churches. In the darkness of this subterranean world, the angels and saints in the murals merged with the shadows and silhouettes of living, breathing humans, as if we were all part of one grand story.
Sometimes that story was all too human. In each church, the line of pilgrims would wend its way to a priest sitting near the altar and he would offer the cross for kissing. A kiss at the top of the cross, a kiss at the bottom, a touch of the cross to the forehead. Hundreds of kisses every hour. Some of the priests looked bored and long-suffering. I have seen that look before, I thought to myself, and then in a crowded church where pilgrims who had been fasting all day were sitting on the floor waiting for Mass to begin, I remembered. The glazed eyes of the priests reminded me of station managers in New York subway stations handing out transfer tickets on the days when the train is not working. It didn’t matter. The pilgrim does not go on a pilgrimage to have a special moment with the priest. In fact, the ritualism of the moment was exactly the point. To lose oneself in a crowd. To walk the beaten path. To wait and to be bored. Perhaps what separates the tourist from the pilgrim is not the reasons for their travel but the satisfaction that the pilgrim finds in what frustrates the tourist.
After my friend and I visited Lalibela, we hired a driver to drive us several hours west, to the town of Bahir Dar. We drove through red canyons and plateaus blistered by the sun, on roads of bone-crushing roughness, eventually arriving in the much greener Nile valley.
In one of the little towns we drove through, our driver, Wondessa, stopped near a shack and ran out to buy a bundle of leaves. He chewed on them for the rest of the trip, facing off with dust-covered long-distance buses and yelling at schoolchildren along the way, pausing abruptly to donate money and kiss crosses at roadside altars. “This is chat,” he said when I asked him about the leaves. “It gives me strength.” Chat, a mild stimulant, is legal and immensely popular in Ethiopia. Certainly it seemed to improve Wondessa’s mood as he dropped us off on the shore of the Blue Nile, so that we could ferry across to a cabin site overlooking the Blue Nile Falls.
Perched almost on the shoulder of the waterfall, the cabin site, which is a collection of huts and tents, sits next to the river as it gathers force rushing toward the falls. The Blue Nile Falls is early in the course of the Nile River, before it flows into Sudan and meets the White Nile (which originates in Uganda).
“It used to be better,” I was told when I gushed about the 360 degrees of sky and water and birds and trees and stone that met my eye from our tent. Bele, one of the guides who worked at the cabin site, shook his head despondently and told me about a dam upstream that had been altering the flow of the river. “Fifteen years ago, all this used to be river,” he told me, indicating the cliff on which we were sitting. The river had been shriveling, as the planet overheated. He pointed to the banks on the other side where some children were playing ball. “That is where we would bring cows to drink water.”
“They are no good,” he told me a few minutes later when I admired the footwork of one of those kids as he nimbly jumped from rock to rock to catch an errant ball. “The Ethiopian football team is very bad,” he added sadly.
In Bele, I recognized a fellow grumpy. In his general glumness about the world, I recognized my own natural instinct to expect the worst. People are terrible and the world is an absolutely miserable place. This baseline skepticism means that grumpies are useful at history. They rarely have illusions about human motivations. So of course, when I said something about how everyone we met seemed excited about the new Ethiopian prime minister, Bele sat down to explain to me all the tensions simmering under the current moment of hope. Yes, the new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, had promised far-reaching reforms, yes, the peace with Eritrea, yes, there were women in the cabinet, but also—decades upon decades of distrust. The ethnic tensions had not gone anywhere; they were waiting underneath, gathering force. The previous government had enriched itself and its own ethnic group. Their spies were everywhere, and they still occupied all the important positions, he told me. Bele was in no mood to forgive the rich kleptocracy that had managed to grab all the foreign aid. When he was younger, Bele went to Sudan to work. The government there was much more proactive compared to the one in Ethiopia, he said, gesturing with his hands as if to indicate all the missing hospitals and schools and bridges.
Less than two years later, I remembered Bele and the toughness of his pessimism when civil war broke out in northern Ethiopia. Lalibela itself would become the site of multiple battles between government-allied forces and rebels, and prime minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, would preside over a gruesome military offensive against the northern state of Tigray, killing many thousands of Ethiopians. At the moment, there is no agreement as to exactly how many thousands.
“It is not easy to change things,” Bele told me sadly in 2019. “Look, this is the problem,” he said suddenly, pointing to a cluster of chat bushes near my tent. The oval leaves grew abundantly around the river. Ethiopia should have been cultivating food; instead, there was too much chat, and too many people sat around and chewed chat, Bele told me. “I hate it. It ruined my generation, and now it is ruining the young ones.” He was hoping the new prime minister would ban the stimulant.
Abal, who owned the cabin site, rolled his eyes when he overheard all this. “Chat is good stuff,” he told me, and, gesturing at the book I was holding, he said, “You will be able to read three books in the same time.” The young Ethiopians who were using chat needed it to stay on top of their studies, according to Abal. He shuddered when he thought of how they suffered. Universities were cruel places that made you read books and take exams. And the dam upriver was going to create jobs, improve water supply, increase Ethiopia’s standing in Africa (show Sudan a thing or two), and bring more tourists, he told me.
“How will it help tourism?” I asked him.
“See that waterfall?” He pointed to the one right next to the cabin site. “Every Saturday at eleven, when the tour buses bring the white people, the local government opens the dam. So there is more water in this waterfall then. Like, four times as much. And the white people feel like they have seen something great. Blue Nile! Africa! Wow! They take photos for fifteen minutes, and when the buses leave at eleven thirty, we close the dam and everything goes back to normal.” He laughed. “Sometimes if my guests are very, very good and they are going to leave before eleven, I call up my friend who works in the powerhouse and ask him to turn the dam on.”
At lunch the next day, two charming German backpackers who were traveling around Ethiopia for a few months shuddered when I told them I was from Brooklyn. Please no more, they begged; Leipzig had now become Hypezig thanks to all the Brooklynites moving to Germany in search of health insurance and cheap rent. Next week when I got back to Brooklyn, I’d start physically blocking people from moving to Berlin, I promised them.
Stefan is shocked to hear that I would be back in Brooklyn so soon. “That is so short time to fly all this way.” He smirked. They were both backpacking in East Africa for three months. “And maybe after, we don’t know yet.”
I felt a protective pang for the measly two weeks that I had carved out between childcare and work. My friend Pearl was texting her children in Sydney as we spoke. When we were adolescents in India, staying in a hostel with a 7:00 p.m. curfew, we would lie in bed fantasizing about all the places we would travel to. We would try out place names to feel them on our tongues: Singapore, Kilimanjaro, Valparaiso. Money, we knew, would always be in short supply. But we had no idea that time was not a bottomless ocean. Our time had finally come, and there was so little of it.
I wanted to tell Stefan how much more precious our travel was because there was so little of it while also saying something deep and cutting about how it must be nice to be young and male and European and spend months bumming around a Third World country while resenting those who wanted to move to his city in Germany, but also, and this might have seemed irrelevant but it was not, did he know that the queen of Sheba was probably the first traveler in world history, and I wanted to say all this in six or seven words so that it could feel like a punch line, boom, something he would forever remember with gratitude even as he curled in shame and died. But I also wanted to shake Stefan by the shoulders and tell him: Keep going. Turn those three months into six months, a year, do it now before the ocean of time shrivels into a tiny bathtub. Because if you are lucky, your time, too, will become precious.
But his eyes were glazing over and maybe mine were too—by now, somehow we were chewing chat, or “Ethiopian green salad” as Abal called it. Lunch had given way to a coffee ceremony as his friends dropped in, each carrying his or her bundle of chat. As Abal passed around thimble-sized cups of rich black coffee, he gave each of us, his guests, a little bundle of chat. “It’s your first time,” he said. “Next time won’t be free.”
Abal and his friends reminded one another about the backpacker from the year before who got a bit too fond of chat. “Can’t I just stay here for the rest of my life, eating injera and chewing chat and drinking coffee?” he’d asked Abal. They imitated his glassy eyes and his slow drawl.
“Be careful, or this will happen to you; that’s why the first one is free,” one of Abal’s friends told us. He took pity on us and showed us how to chew chat slowly and judiciously by wedging a small stack of leaves into the side of a cheek and chewing on it bit by bit, releasing the bitter juices while also chewing some peanuts to blunt the bitterness.
“If I start talking of how amazing this place is and how we could just stay here for the rest of our lives, drag me out of here and put me on the plane home,” I told Pearl.
“Same for me.” She nodded.
Somebody put on music. More friends dropped in. Every now and then, a beloved song came on and all the Ethiopians in the tent sang along and swayed. The tent itself was swaying, and the floor seemed to be moving languorously. Even Bele was chewing away, so I asked him about his anti-chat principles. “I have a sinus problem today. This will help open my nostrils,” he informed me coldly.
Yet another German backpacker arrived and took off the most enormous backpack I had seen. He had met Abal’s brother in town on his way to the cabin site and the brother had sent Christmas money to Abal, so he could give it to their mother, so she could buy a rooster for their Christmas feast. Six hundred birr in crumpled notes. I remembered my uncles then, so many of them working in Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Dubai during my childhood, sending home money through a friend of a friend of a friend who was coming to Kerala for his annual visit.
It was interesting, this familiarity I felt toward Ethiopia. The guidebooks suggested a place foreign and remote, a proud people, grand monuments in a state of sad decay. But instead of the promised exotic frisson, I felt the kinship of a fellow Third World country. The little towns that operated like hucksters, the way history sat on skin like an itchy scar that must not be scratched, the obsession with dams. And of course, there were many Indians in Addis, many of them working in schools and hospitals.
But even beyond this—and now the floor was certainly dancing—there seemed to be some long-lost genetic connection. The man I saw on the ferry who looked like he could be from a village in Kerala but turned out to be Ethiopian. The woman on the plane who asked me in Amharic for my phone charger and, when I didn’t understand, upbraided me for not speaking my mother tongue. The shape of that nose; the expression in this pair of eyes.
There has been a small community of East Africans in South Asia since medieval times. The Siddis, as they are known, arrived as merchants and sailors. Many of them are also the descendants of enslaved people—the Arab and the Portuguese slave trade brought thousands of Black people from the hinterlands of the Swahili coast to the South Asian subcontinent. But the Siddis are a distinctive community, and supposedly there has been little racial mixing between them and the South Asian population. With very little to go on except a gut feeling, I wondered if the mixing of peoples is much more widespread than we realize. “What do you think?” I nudged Pearl. “Wouldn’t these faces fit right into Kerala?”
“It’s like those Bollywood movies, where long-lost brothers find each other when they accidentally see each other’s birthmarks,” she replied.
“Yes, exactly!” I was so pleased she got it. How lovely it was to come up with a little theory and then have it scientifically confirmed so quickly. I felt such an upsurge of affection for Pearl, for this brilliant idea we had to travel together, for the girls we were and the old women we would become.
“Isn’t this the bestest coffee you have ever had?” she asked.
“It is. You know, we could just stay here, couldn’t we? For the rest of our lives?”
“Absolutely. We will regret it if we leave, alle,” she replied.
•
Against the vacuum created by Europe’s fascination with its own hero’s journey, one medieval man stands out: Ibn Battuta, beloved of travel historians everywhere. As a young man in Tangier in North Africa, a frontier town of the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta had set out on a pilgrimage at the age of twenty-one. One might wonder if this was not a very tender age for a pilgrimage. But, according to Ross E. Dunn, author of The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, the hajj in Ibn Battuta’s time was almost always more than a journey to Makka and home again. Rather, it was a rihla, a grand study tour of the great mosques and madrassas of the Islamic heartland, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and civilized men. Thus the hajj in that era was more akin to the Grand Tour that European aristocrats undertook in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than to the ten-day pilgrimage that we know today. It was also a ritual migration, often involving a caravan moving through the steppes of northern Africa toward Makka, collecting thousands of pilgrims on its way like a rolling snowball. Many pilgrims might have had other aims—trade or study or diplomacy—but the hajj was the overriding theme.
Looking at Ibn Battuta’s career as a traveler, I wonder if he was propelled at least as much by a quest for adventure as any spiritual desire. It was not unheard of for a hajj journey to take two or even three years in those days, but Ibn Battuta would take twenty-four years to return home. He would marry six women along the way; visit Alexandria, Cairo, and Damascus; and, after performing hajj, instead of setting off home to Morocco, he would take off toward Basra and Isfahan and Baghdad.
Wouldn’t you? Imagine being footloose and twenty-one years old and tasting the world on a platter and knowing that you can do so much better than going back to dusty little Tangier where the same old lawyer job your father and his father had done for decades is waiting for you. Instead you could be a medieval Muslim cosmopolite, caravanning off to different destinations, confident of finding hospitality and employment in any of the many newly established centers of Islamic civilization in the farther regions of Asia and Africa. The hajj brought home to Ibn Battuta that he was not just a Moroccan lawyer; he was a citizen of Dar al-Islam, the geographic and cultural span of the Islamic world. Just as Marco Polo had the good fortune of belonging to a Venetian mercantile family, Ibn Battuta lived at a time when people like him moved through the world freely and prosperously. Why would you go home?
I moved to the United States at the age of twenty-four for graduate school. My “statements of purpose” and scholarship essays were full of high-minded ideas about media and culture and education. But the truth is, I just wanted to see the world. It was all I dreamed of: being elsewhere, moving through anonymous crowds, seeing things I had only read about, being far away from the things I knew. I had no place in mind; any place would do. What were the chances for an Indian woman like me, my passport bearing the stigma of the Third World, traveling the world? An international education was my pretext, and how well it worked. Just as Ibn Battuta possibly acted more religious than he was, I pretended to be more ambitious than I was. Just as he joined the caravan of pilgrims and merchants on their way to Makka, I joined the annual caravan of international students floating toward the East Coast of the United States. I came to New York, not because I wanted to be here specifically but because it was not home. Here was a place someone would give me money to be in. Across the seven centuries separating us, I can easily sympathize with Ibn Battuta as he finishes his third hajj in Makka and, still feeling restless, sets his eye on India, the court of Muhammad bin Tughlak, the wealthiest Muslim king of the time.
The rihla of Ibn Battuta has no specific destination. At each place he arrives, Ibn Battuta figures out where to go next. He has very little loyalty, turning against previous patrons when it suits him. He is not trying to win any prizes for his country or discover new lands; he is just a Moor unmoored. So, though he is often compared to the explorers who became famous in the Age of Exploration (Columbus and da Gama and Vespucci et al.), his journey is quite different from their ambitious voyages. Ibn Battuta is a vaynokki of the world.
It was on a diplomatic mission for Tughlak that Battuta arrived in Kerala. On the Malabar coast, he survived a shipwreck and a near-drowning. The adventures of Ibn Battuta in Kerala, but also pretty much everywhere on his travels, are a litany of troubles. He survives brigands, kidnappings, wars, shipwrecks, pirates, starvation, and disease. He stares death in the face so many times in his narrative that I lost count when I read it. And he is not a brave man! His rihla is full of honest detail about trembling with fear, begging for mercy, getting ready to meet his Maker, and then somehow surviving yet another danger, in some cases almost comically. At one point, he writes, the men who were directed to kill him forgot to, alhamdulillah, onward and upward.
This was the standard lot of the medieval traveler—danger, that is, not the escapes. Famously, the word travel is etymologically related to travail, which in turn has its origins in the Latin noun trapezium—a three-pronged metal device that ancient Romans used to torture prisoners. Today, for us, travel is a reprieve from the travails of work and daily life. But in those early days, travel was fraught with travail. Medieval roadways were infested with brigands while pirate ships trolled the high seas. In The Medieval Invention of Travel, Sharon Legassie points out that “in the Middle Ages, travel was nasty, brutish and long.” When setting out on a pilgrimage or a trading journey, medieval travelers could look forward to weeks and months of slow and life-threatening travel, which often meant that they were effectively severing domestic ties for the duration of their journeys. By the time Ibn Battuta returned home, his infant son and his parents were dead.
•
I missed my own little family intensely throughout the two weeks I spent away from them. Whenever I saw families, I felt a pang. In every market, I looked for souvenirs for my husband and daughter. I woke up in the middle of the night so I could call them and hear them chatter about art class and composting and how annoying the subway was being. Longing for the people I loved lay close to my skin like a thermal layer, generating its own heat. Right on top of that was frustration—why couldn’t I just enjoy my measly two weeks without feeling this pointless homesickness?
On my last day near the Blue Nile, I went out for an early walk. By circling the cliff, I could get to the front of the waterfall. Bele had loaned me his trusty bamboo walking stick, and I used it to pick my way up and down the muddy riverbank. Already I could picture how different it would be in a few years or decades: the ticket booths, the vendors, all the paraphernalia of development and the overflowing garbage bins in its wake. I thought of the women I had seen ten minutes ago, a long line of them, carrying pots or dragging livestock, walking miles and miles to the weekend market across the river. So many of them would find much easier work in the tourism industry. There would be a chain hotel where the cabin site was now. And the people of this village would become that strange stratum of modern society that is known as “locals.” So much gained, so much more lost.
But who was I to judge the tourists who had not yet arrived? The riverbank was a slippery slope and I picked my way carefully. I had booked the cabin site online, traveled here in a comfortable car, paid dollars for bottled water, and now here I was pretending that I was a traveler, not a tourist. It’s insidious, this desire to set one’s own tourism story apart from that of other tourists.
Before I could begin a proper guilt trip, I found my way to a flat dry rock in front of the waterfall, and sat on it. It would be hours before the tour bus came, so the falls were at a quarter of their potential. I considered taking a photo, but just couldn’t be bothered. Who needs one more waterfall photo? Especially that of one-fourth of a waterfall. Instead, I watched the white water plummet into the green river before it flowed down to Sudan and Egypt all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
I noticed the birds then. A bunch of birds were flying into the waterfall and out of it and into the waterfall and out of it. They were too far away for me to make out colors, but I could tell that they were a few different kinds. Big birds and small birds, birds with incredible wingspans and tiny birds that kept fluttering against the blue sky as if they were barely staying afloat. I sat there watching them, trying to decipher them. What were they doing? Were they drinking water? Were they bathing? Were they hunting one another? It was such a silly way to get anything done—flying in and out of a waterfall. Did everything have to be a stupid mystery today? And just as I had this ridiculous thought, I understood—oh, they were playing.
Of course they were playing. The fun of it made me smile. Imagine what a daredevil racecourse the waterfall must be if you are a bird. What a pleasure it must be to feel the water pour over your tiny body. What a joy to test its power and weight against your tiny bird bones. I had always thought of curiosity as a human impulse, but it was, in fact, an animal impulse. We inherited it from the birds, this need to see for oneself what the world was like. What an ancient thrill to be inside a tiny body feeling the cold, the wetness, the heaviness, the light, Jerusalem, Makka, Lalibela. And for about half a moment, the world was water and I was a bird.