Travel, in an era gone by

"From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet" by Vikram Seth is a 1983 travelogue about the author hitch-hiking through China in his student days. Much of the book dwells on the journey rather than the destination—Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Starting from Turfan in the northwest province of Xinjiang (Sinkiang) in China, it culminates two months later, back in the author's home city of Delhi, India.

Chafing at the tediousness of an organised group trip for foreign students by Nanjing University, where he was a student, Seth stumbled on an opportunity to get permission to go to Tibet. Travel in China at the time, for foreigners, was strictly regulated and expensive. Seth writes that he obtained permission for “a song and a walk.”

'No family, no world have I

And nobody's love …'

'Ah! My chest is covered with wounds.

I am struck by the arrows of fate!'

— Awara Hoon', from Awara (1951)

One evening in Turfan, following a musical performance put on by a local troupe, Seth and his fellow foreign contingent were urged to perform. Seth sang the theme song from the Hindi film Awara (The Wanderer), which is hugely popular in China. On a walk the following morning, Seth stopped on impulse at a police station to attempt to get Lhasa on his travel pass. The officer and a friend (who had heard Seth's performance the previous night) and Seth get into discussing Indian films, Awara and its leads. Voilà! Seth managed to get a rare pass to travel to Tibet.

With air travel proving too expensive, Seth settled on hitch-hiking through western China to Lhasa that summer. Originally intending to fly home from Hong Kong, he decides to also then cross the Nepal border with Tibet and go home to Delhi from there. This is indeed “by a more interesting route” as Seth cryptically wrote to his family in a letter before departing.

On the road

In his interactions with locals in the places he travels, Seth reveals interesting particulars of China such as the fact that Uighur, the language spoken by the Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang region, was initially written using the Arabic script, but then changed to Latin script, before reverting to the original in a government turnabout. This led to families with the middle generation being unable to understand the writing of either their parents or their children.

Seth recounts the kindness of the many people he encounters, who help him out on his travels in China. An old Uighur shopkeeper, on learning Seth is from India, stitches a cap more firmly for him because he “will be travelling a long way.” A police officer in the town of Germu, while grilling Seth about complying with regulations, completely changes his attitude when he sees a family picture of Seth's and learns that he has been away from his family for years and was going home for the holidays. Seth feels that the people of China showed “a remarkable warmth to the outsider from a people into whom a suspicion of foreigners has so long been instilled.”

This is what forms lasting memories of China for Seth rather than just the monuments and scenery he sees: “One's attitudes towards a place are only partly determined by the greatness of its history, or the magnificence of its scenery. When I think of China, I think first of my friends and only then of Qin Shi Huang's tomb.”

In the midst of his travels, Seth ponders the point of his travels: “Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future…What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometime seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”

Seth acknowledges that he wanted to go to Tibet because of “the glamour surrounding the unknown.” Despite knowing little of the climate, landscape, religion, or history of Tibet, Seth attempts the journey, that too by the route less travelled. He finds a lift in a truck going to Lhasa, the only ride available to hitch-hikers and an option unthinkable for less hardy foreigners.

It is this part of the journey that is given most prominence in the book. Seth's companions are Han Chinese and one Tibetan, all jammed together in the front of the truck. Seth is forewarned of the ill-comforts of the impending journey–endless waiting if roads were flooded or buried in a landslide and extreme cold and sparse air up on the plateau, among others. He decides to stick it out and the companions' time on the road passes with getting to know each other, which surprisingly takes some time though they are, for the most part, sharing extremely close quarters. An excerpt from a poem written by Seth during a particularly arduous part of the journey captures this paradox.

“Here we three, cooped, alone,

Tibetan, Indian, Han,

Against a common dawn

Catch what poor sleep we can,

And sleeping drag the same

Sparse air into our lungs,

And dreaming each of home

Sleeptalk in different tongues.”

Crossing over

On the penultimate stretch of his journey, Seth traversed by foot from Zhangmu in Tibet to the border with Nepal. Crossing a stream in which a woman was washing clothes, Seth only realised he had inadvertently crossed the border when he was stopped by a Nepali customs officer emerging from the trees behind.

With so much emphasis on citizenship and the sanctity of borders at present, it is difficult to see that crossing a border can be just as unobtrusive as it was for Seth. In light of the refugees crossing into Bangladesh over the past three weeks, we may choose to remember that the border is exactly that, an invisible line, which makes little difference to the daily lives of those who dwell on the periphery.

“From Heaven Lake” is a story of travel in its most adventurous form–uncertain as to means and hopes of reaching the destination, expected hardships and unexpected rewards, and memories and acquaintances made along the way.