There are motels in America's south where you are likely to be greeted
not with "How are you?" but "Kem Cho" or "Kya Haal hai?" and the owner
is likely to be a Mr. Patel, says acclaimed American travel writer Paul
Theroux while talking about his new work which takes the inveterate
globetrotter to one part of the world he has so far not visited - his
own country.
"At least 80 percent of motels in the deep south -
be it South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississipi or part of Louisiana -
are run by Indians, likely to be a Mr. Patel.
"Indians moved up
from running convenience stores, gas stations, which you call petrol
pumps, to motels - one off and then chains. I asked one of them 'how?'
and he replied 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family)," he
said at a session titled "Wanderlust and the Art of Travel Writing" on
day three of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2015 Friday.
But Theroux noted that the Indians do not run restaurants.
"I
asked one why, and he said that if you run restaurants, you might have
to taste the food you make, and it might have meat," he said.
Theroux
said the idea for the book, likely to be out next year, came when he
was writing "Last Train to Zona Verde" about Angola and discovered most
of the African slaves sent to America came from there.
"I have
travelled across Asia by train, from Cairo to Cape Town, from North to
South America on trains and also around China, around the Mediterranean,
to most of the islands of Oceania, but the south of the US was one
place I never visited and wrote about," he said.
Reading an
extract of the forthcoming book, he said he was in Tuscaloosa in Alabama
in October, where he met an old woman to whom he noted he was a
stranger and she replied "There ain't no strangers here" and guided him
to the place where he wanted to go.
"I returned several times in
the next year... the south has me in an comforting embrace or a
frenzied, unrelenting grip," he read out from his work.
Theroux
also revealed he first visited Jaipur in 1968, while on way to taking a
job in Singapore, and then in 1973 and quipped that looking at the
audience and its general age, most of them would have not been around
then.
Brigid Keenan, who kicked off the discussion, noted she was
not a fit person to participate in such a panel since she hated travel
and was scared of air travel but had no option since she was married to a
diplomat and had to give "glamourous dinner parties" in various
countries where the only vegetables were potatoes and cabbages.
She
said she was born in India and lived here till she was eight and
returned here as an adult and read from her books "Diplomatic Baggage:
The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse" her various droll adventures
including fathoming Indian newspapers and their misuse of words like
mishap "which in Britain would mean upsetting a teacup at a vicarage tea
party" but in India was used to describe horrific accidents.
"We learnt pulses rise did not mean romantic feelings increasing but that lentils would cost more," she said.
Sam
Miller, author of the definitive guide to the Indian capital "Delhi:
Adventures in a Megacity", read out from his subsequent "A Strange Kind
of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes" about his earlier visits to the
JLF, while William Dalrymple, who had introduced the session and spoke
about the genre of travel writing which is older that novels noted it
was now decreased but the quality is now consistent, read out from "From
the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium" about the
vanishing Christian communities of the Middle East about an Orthodox
priest he met in Sinai who virulently cursed all other Christian
denominations and Freemasons.
"He said all US presidents had been Freemasons except John F. Kennedy (Catholic) and look what happened to him!"
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at [email protected])
