'Travels In The Other Place' book review: Journeys beyond geography

How does travel affect us? Beyond the physical, surface-level elements that come with travelling, being in a place far removed from our own backyards alters our being. Pallavi Aiyar’s Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts seeks to examine precisely this. Tapping into her experience as a foreign correspondent and someone who has lived and travelled in several countries, from Japan to China, Indonesia, Spain and Belgium, among others, Pallavi’s latest is rich with anecdotes and insights. While her earlier works, such as Orienting: An Indian in Japan, Punjabi Parmesan or even her debut, Smoke and Mirrors, are a mix of reportage and analysis, her latest is an intermingling of worlds – within and around her.

Neatly organised into eight ‘acts’, the book looks at travel not merely across physical geographies but in “the other place”. The other place could be a childhood filled with books, ‘the kingdom of illness’ as she calls it, in language, pedagogy, passportism, reporting, grief, and yes, hair. She examines a gamut of questions that pertain to a sense of belonging and identity.

As someone who grew up in the Eighties, Pallavi’s travels into the world of words and reading began with Enid Blyton. She reminisces about what reading did to an Eighties child and contrasts it with how her own boys took to (or didn’t always take to) reading.

It is apt that she begins with the chapter on books and reading, before we are handheld into travels of other kinds, into “the other place”. “There is an unsullied purity in the anticipated (and remembered) version of a place that is rarely experienced when one is corporeally there,” she writes.

The ‘act’ on illness is a gentle and moving read, the time when she was diagnosed with cancer. Without being maudlin, Pallavi takes the reader through her appointments with oncologists, biopsies and chemotherapy. In fact, she brings a certain wit and a lightness of touch to her writing about “the kingdom of Cancer”. She draws solace from the Japanese sakura, the cherry blossoms that bloom every spring. What makes the sakura profound is not their beauty as much as their brevity, she observes, likening her breast to ‘sakura’.

Pallavi also travels into the world of language, fraught with questions of identity. The author talks about the language of Bahasa in Indonesia, which had “soaked up loan words from divergent cultural milieux”, and the language policy of China, and her adventures with ‘pinyin’, the official romanisation system that’s used in that country. Looking at language and how countries like Indonesia, China, Belgium or Spain work around it, and then looking at India, she writes about how India “eschewed a national idiom”.

While taking pride that the multiplicity of tongues strengthened the country, and having all along believed that a single language as a national language was not for India, her engagement with other languages in other countries makes her critically examine India’s language policy, and imagine a future for India, in which Indians shared a language that was neither English nor Hindi. She realises that when it comes to languages and nations, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

The chapter on hair is both a personal and journalistic take at once — Pallavi takes you down the rabbit hole of the wig industry, right from how discarded and given-away hair is collected in India, where it ends up, and how China is the largest exporter of human hair and synthetic hair products, quoting from Emma Tarlo’s book on the topic, Entanglement.

Pallavi neatly weaves the hair trade story with the politics of hair itself. She recalls how a Sikh classmate came back to school with hair shorn following a school break in the aftermath of the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. Hair coverings and the politics of the hijab also come under Pallavi’s fine comb. “Hair is complicated. Covering it has stood for choice and identity as often as it has for oppression and coercion,” she writes, asking if the hijab is a choice or an imposition.

Politics aside, the author also brings in her personal journey with wigs following her chemotherapy. “It’s a revelatory place to travel in, hair,” she observes.

One of the most poignant chapters in the book is the one on grief. Pallavi loses her mother, the famed news presenter of the Doordarshan era, Gitanjali Aiyar, and writes movingly not just about her loss but also about the kind of impact her mother had made on a generation of television viewers. She quotes fan mail from DD viewers – a student in Std III from what was then Bombay writes: “I do not go to sleep till the news is over, especially when you read the news,” harking back to a simpler time, with none of the choices and distractions of today.

Pallavi recalls how her mother shared little handwritten notes during her cancer journey, dropping them into a ‘Jar of Happiness’. Two years after her mother passed on, she has learnt all about grief and come to understand that “love illuminates the grief into something akin to beauty.” Travels in The Other Place is eminently readable and thought-provoking, written in a manner that calls for journeys into one’s own self.