Book: TRAVELS IN THE OTHER PLACE
Authors: Pallavi Aiyar
Published by: Tranquebar
Price: Rs 599
Pallavi Aiyar’s book is a collection of personal essays covering selected periods between the 1980s and 2023. Written in a style that blends memoir with travel writing, Aiyar uses the metaphor of travelling to write about her experiences with books, illness, language, pedagogy and grief, among other things.
Aiyar is a globetrotter, having lived in what she calls a “geographic flux”, among various countries in three continents. But her travel began long before she actually set foot outside the country — courtesy books. In the first chapter, Aiyar recounts her travels as a young girl through Enid Blyton’s books when living in her neighbourhood in Nizamuddin, Delhi. The chapter on illness gives an account of her cancer diagnosis and her journey through the realm of the disease with honesty. Other chapters, including those on language, pedagogy, passportism, hair, and reporting, take her readers across the world to China, Indonesia, Spain and Belgium. The final chapter on grief brings the book to a geographical full circle as Aiyar returns to India to navigate through the aftermath of her mother’s death.
The book makes for an informative and engaging read. This is primarily because Aiyar’s writing remains warm and inviting throughout the book. In the chapter on cancer, for instance, she writes in a way that captures the rawness of her experience with the illness without the narrative tipping into sentimentality or self-pity. Aiyar skilfully merges the genre of memoir with that of the personal essay just as she does the personal and the political. This is particularly true of the chapters on passportism, pedagogy and hair.
Readers who grew up in the India of the 1980s and the 19990s will find much to relate with. From growing up reading books and trying to make sense of the exotic, Western food items in an era before the internet to memories of the school assembly and punishments for waywardness, there is much that will leave these readers smiling. There are humorous anecdotes sprinkled throughout the other chapters, such as her bewilderment when she wanted sugar but kept getting offered soup at a restaurant in China.
These anecdotes and incidents are punctuated by her musings on how travel changes a person, mostly for the better. This becomes a recurring idea that Aiyar re-establishes time and again through the book — moving through space, languages, books or illness forces one to take stock of what’s normal. This leads to greater flexibility, openness and acceptance.
The idea of travel broadening horizons might not be new when it comes to travel writing. But what makes Travels in the Other Place distinct is how Aiyar stretches the metaphor of travel to cover not just the act of physical travelling but also various aspects of living. While this metaphor works well in most cases, it seems slightly forced when it comes to the chapter on hair. This minor quibble aside, Travels in the Other Place is a book worth reading for its thoughtful and reflective approach to both travel and living.
