It’s a week before Christmas and I’m not at my cheeriest best. I’ve stuck a tiny pine tree with shiny baubles on my office desk, watched my share of Christmas plays and heard my quota of the season’s carollers. But as the journey of this year crawls to a close, my wellspring of positivity feels parched; a certain weariness has set in. I found resonance of this emotion in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi , an imaginative retelling of the Christmas story’s wise men’s travels. They trudge over “ways deep” and “villages dirty”, “towns unfriendly”, and “cities hostile”, convinced all along that “this was all folly”. Until, that is, the light breaks at the end of their dreary tunnel, and they witness the birth of Jesus — a moment profound enough to re-filter the tiresome journey just past, to now say they would “do it all again”.
It’s such seconds of epiphany that seem to make long journeys worth their while. One of the most intuitive travel writers of our times, Pico Iyer, pens in his essay Why I Travel , of that quiet transformation that creeps up on him every time he sojourns beyond his comfort zone. After 20 years of avoiding the war-torn terrains of Sri Lanka, Iyer finally ventures in; three years after a ceasefire had managed to maintain a semblance of peace. “What am I afraid of?” he questions at the trip’s beginning. Not much else besides snakes and heights, he answers then.
Through the tour’s course, he faces pythons, leopards and wild elephants, climbs a rock face 1,300 precipitous steps high, dodges guerrillas and witnesses the “teardrop island” erupt again in patches of violence. At the close of this “compendium of his nightmares”, Iyer finds wisdom dawning within him in the stories of his driver, the people he introduces him to, and their everyday trysts with danger. His private fears shed with the realisation that for most of the “six billion neighbours in the global village”, his “day of terrors had been just one more day among ten thousand such”.
Sri Lanka unwinds itself in similar fashion for Samanth Subramanian in his latest book about the nation’s three-decade war This Divided Island . In two of the earliest episodes in the book, compressed histories of the nation come to him through drivers who careen him around town with running commentaries of the war’s history of destruction. In Colombo, a blogger drives to the beats of Led Zeppelin and traces a violently colourful trail of the city’s bomb blast spots, while later, in a rickshaw, a journalist takes him through Colombo’s subtlest pop culture signs of permanent scarring. This trope of driver-narrator-epiphany-bearer comes to its fullness in Romesh Gunesekera’s most recent novel, Noontide Toll .
Gunesekera’s protagonist is Vasantha, a van driver, who along his journeys has episodic conversations with everyone from lovers and generals to priests and exiled Tamils, to paint the story of a nation heaving back into normalcy. Of course, the journey is painful, and weary, but how else to ride the road from the past into the future, he asks. And that’s the message I take with me as December dwindles and the New Year dawns: “Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us, let us journey to a lonely land I know. There’s a whisper on the night wind,” wrote poet Robert Service. Like the Magi, may we be guided into new journeys.
