The stone paved streets returned and a distant melody wafted towards us, plucked nimbly from a guitar we could not see. We followed the mosque’s eastern wall, where in its shadow, a group of young men sat smoking a bubbling nargileh and drinking chai with a pony-tailed guitarist.
Travel and Nostalgia
“Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi.
What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet
At home, in Shanghai, I have stuck 120 of my photographs to the living room wall. The pictures, now a little discoloured by the late afternoon sun, chart my overland journey, in 2006 and 2007, from London to Shanghai. The first is of the Thames on an overcast day. The next is of mountains and sea on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The photographs move quickly on, left to right, top to bottom, through western Europe, the Middle East, India, Nepal and eventually China.
Most are of scenery, sites, and the people Claire and I encountered en route, but near the bottom I have stuck a picture of myself, sitting on a train station platform. It is often the photograph that visitors comment on first, intrigued, perhaps, by the raw anger written upon my face.
The picture was taken in Gorakhpur, a city in northern India. Its railway station is the country’s largest broad gauge junction and is as close to the Nepali border as you can travel by train. Claire and I arrived there after a month in Nepal. Although we would eventually travel into China from Kathmandu, we had come back to India to meet my family, scheduled to arrive in Calcutta, 816 kilometres away, in a little over a week. Continue reading Travel and Nostalgia>>
