In Search Of The Razor's Edge

When I was 18, I read W. Somerset Maugham’s TheRazor’s Edge, and reading that impressive book at that impressionable ageis a bit like setting a particularly ferocious cat amongst pigeons withparticularly severe hypertension afflictions. Larry Darrell’s peripateticquest for the Meaning of Life influenced me enormously, but less its spiritualgoal than its nomadic nature. I had always been a travel junkie, but at age 18, TheRazor’s Edge put the lust back into my wanderlust.

And a very specific species of lust at that. Darrell’s travels were borneof - and set in - the spontaneous spirit of the Jazz Age, when carefree soulslike our Larry could pack a couple of toothbrushes, wander the planet at will,and chalk it all up as life experience, to come in handy later when they settleddown to that office job midway through their thirties. That was my ideal visionof youth - to hop about the globe, spend months at a place to soak it in, takean odd job that would just enable me to survive and save enough for the nextleg, a passage on a steamer to Yokohama. (Why Yokohama? It’s a mystery. I knowlittle about the place except that steamers possibly dock there. But it’salways been Yokohama.)

Much growing-up is done between 18 and 23, and at that infinitely wiser age,I have learned the hard way that Darrell’s version of the romance of travelwas, quite a while ago, taken away to a deserted alley to be shot at dawn. Likeour friends of the Too-Left and the Too-Right, I have also learned to cope withmy loss by pinning the tail of blame squarely on the ass of globalisation.However, unlike our friends of the Too-Left and the Too-Right, who pin that tailfor everything from corporate malfunctions to curdled milk, I think I have acase.

Exhibit A, ladies and gents of the jury. A crucial ingredient of romance is asense of wonder, and that is emphatically blown to hell when the world hasshrunk enough to be included in a cosmic pea soup. Even before we can spellOuagadougou and Saskatchewan - and for some of us without SpellCheck, that maybe never - we have seen these emporia of exotica on the DiscoveryChannel, bursting with the health of glorious Technicolor. Marshall McLuhancalled it the global village, and who ever heard of taking a vacation or ajourney of enlightenment all the way to the other end of your village?

With this shrunken world, and with globalisation stuffing so many wallets fitto split at their seams, more people travel more. Tourism, we are informed inIATA seminars, has become an engine of globalisation almost as potent as trade,and so many tourist authorities lap it up that their wards rapidly becometrapped in their images, tailored carefully and singularly to please and appealto that fickle animal: The International Traveller.

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Few places illustrate this better than theStratford-upon-Avon of today. Harold Bloom once called William Shakespeare theinventor of the human; Stratford tries to be the inventor of Shakespeare,attempting to piece together parts of a life that, even in his time, was onlysketchily known. At Stratford, the Shakespeare hard sell does not muck about andwaste time; it starts immediately with what is always the very first experienceof a tourist in a new town - finding accommodation. Stratford-upon-Avonians arean enterprising lot, willing to have their vacant guest-rooms work for them, sothe town breaks out into a rash of bed-and-breakfasts, each named after a workof Shakespeare's. We picked a lesser-known play, Cymbeline (in brightgamboge: "What most of us want when away from home is another home"), butany other would have offered an experience cut from the same cloth. Thankfully,though, the marketing campaign does not descend into complete tackiness; thereare no "Hamlet Omelettes" or "McBeth Burgers" on thebreakfast table, and there so easily could have been.

The two spots of greatest interest in Stratford deal with either end ofShakespeare's life. His birthplace, a half-timbered structure on Henley Street,is a magnificent study of period architecture and design, the interiorsrecreated with painstaking accuracy. It is not too much of a letdown to learnthat the house is only his supposed birthplace - much of that significance,after all, stems from what the imagination can make of such a fact - but it doesthen seem impudent to pin a specific room down as the one in which Shakespearewas born.

His final resting place is much more confirmed. The Holy Trinity Church,stepping right out of a Constable watercolour into a plot off Mill Lane, is aspicturesque an English church as ever adorned a mass-produced postcard. A sidealcove leads to Shakespeare's grave, flanked by the town council registers thatrecorded his birth and death. In his time, full graveyards were routinely dug upand the corpses therein burned so that the newly dead could be buried instead,hence Shakespeare wrote his own epitaph:

"Good Friends, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the bones enclosed here!
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."

Just as strongly discouraged as moving his bones is taking photographs oftheir sepulchre, a rule that would be easier respected had the authorities ofthe Holy Trinity not defiled the atmosphere themselves by slapping a gift shopright next to the entrance inside the church. The description of the HolyTrinity on Stratford’s official website has as much to say on the church as itdoes on the gift shop's miniature copies of the Magna Carta "in bothauthentic Latin text and a handy English translation for £3.50."

In between his birth and death was Shakespeare's shotgun marriage to AnneHathaway, a wife who bore him three children but whom he rarely saw for much ofhis life. Just by that association, the cottage in the hamlet of Shottery whereshe lived before marriage has become a part of the Shakespeare properties, andtourists tramp as regularly on the footpaths leading to it as they do on HenleyStreet. Inside the thatched timber-and-brick structure are the originalpanelling and open hearth in the living room, and a four-poster upstairs isgrandly known as the Hathaway Bed, even though Anne herself probably never sleptin it. The penchant for naming inanimate objects extends to the Shakespeare treegarden outside, but prepare for considerable disappointment. Apple trees bearapples, but these Shakespeare trees, instead of sprouting playwrights everyspring, are merely those that find a mention in his works.

When it thinks no-one is looking, Stratford does let slip its arras ofengineered Bardana; there is a charming English cricket field, where red-facedbutchers and bakers turn into puffing fast bowlers every season, a riotousbutterfly farm and an aura of quaintness that even seeps through the Marks andSpencer’s. But for the most part, Stratford is just much too busy trying topresent to the tourist all of Shakespeare on a single platter, ensuring that heneed never look beyond that main course to other entrees.

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And so to food, which, as any vegetarian who hastravelled to Tokyo and subsisted on French Fries at McDonald’s will grimlytell you, is no mean border-breacher by itself. It’s also one of the fewagents of globalisation to flow as strongly crosscurrent, against theWest-to-East flow, as with it - much to the joy of travel-agency millionaireswho have made their fortunes by selling European package tours to large Gujaratifamilies solely on the attraction of homely Gujarati food at every meal.

Not that the rest of us don’t benefit. On our way to the Isle of Skye, westopped for a night at Mallaig, a hamlet of about twelve and a half people onthe eastern coast of Scotland. Mallaig is a predominantly a quiet fishingcommunity that has had tourists - and attendant accessories like gift shops,bed-and-breakfasts and decipherable accents - forced onto it because it operatesthe ferry to Skye. The bed-and-breakfast was easy enough to find, but as earlyas 6 p.m., only one restaurant seemed even remotely interested feeding wearytravellers.

The powerful aroma should have kicked us in the pants the moment we enteredthe door, but it was only after looking at the menus that realisation sank in.Unsurprisingly for Mallaig, every item on the card - except dessert, and eventhere we may have missed a salmon mousse or a cod-and-jam tart - was a fishdish. All around us, wading with gusto into battered, fried, boiled, steamed,grilled or baked fish, were the good people of Mallaig. As affirmed avoiders ofseafood, we had blended into the populace about as well as Michael Moore in aballet troupe.

After our irritable waitress had returned to our table a third time anddecided on this occasion to plant herself firmly on the spot until we gave heran order, one of us tentatively piped out the question. Would you happen, ma’am,to be able to make us, if it’s not inconvenient, anything that doesn’tinvolve former denizens of the briny deep?

The ensuing silence could have been cut with a loaf of bread, and if the goodpeople of Mallaig did not actually turn in their seats to glare at us, it onlyspeaks well of their single-minded focus on their fish. The waitress stoodbaffled, but she quickly recovered, concentrated on a spot far in the distanceas she mentally inventoried her kitchen, and then uttered the sweetest wordsthat ever dripped with a broad Scotch brogue: "Well, I suppose we could do youa chicken curry with rice."

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It is one of the paradoxes of our age that even as ourworld compresses around us and we interact with more cultures than ourforefathers did in many lifetimes, we increasingly look for the familiar and thefeel of home. Did Larry Darrell yearn for rib-eye steaks and buttered potatoeswhen he got to Benares? Somerset Maugham remains silent on this, but readingbetween the lines, we gather not. Yet Mr Darrell’s great grandson, were hetoday to visit Hampi, ruined seat and power centre of the grand Vijayanagarempire, could find some Kannada food only if he were to cook it himself. But hewould hardly go hungry. Hampi’s matriarchs have not learned how to makefalafel and tagliatelle in their "home-cooked restaurants" for nothing.

Mr Darrell’s great grandson would also find it a far sight easier to get toHampi in the first place, and the sheer ease of travel - even in what brochureslike to call "the unspoiled countryside" - will hunt you down and catch upwith you, try as you may to avoid it. I speak from experience, because we did asmuch in getting from Hampi to Mysore.

At the bus terminus in Hosbet, the nearest town to Hampi, we were told thatthe bus would leave at 4 p.m. and reach Mysore in the dead of night at 2 a.m. Itwas still morning, the sun shone with pleasant warmth, and to three young men,it was the decision of a minute to plump for hitchhiking instead. Accordingly,we struck out for the highway, and barely half an hour later, we were in thecramped confines of a truck cab, sharing it with what seemed at the time likeenough people to make up a snake boat championship.

Barrelling south, the delicious tang of diesel and sweat in the air, itseemed like we would reach Mysore before sunset. But this particular truck wasonly going halfway, a problem that beset us throughout our trip. In a successionof state buses, lorries and local vans, we began to resemble the bee that, inthe famous riddle, flew incessantly between two nearing trains, ever halving thedistance to Mysore but never completely getting there, hitchhiking tilleternity.

Night fell and deepened. We had nodded off on a state bus whose floor wasseamlessly carpeted with peanut shells, approached complete strangers inrestaurants to determine if they were Mysore-bound, been kept awake by a loudRajkumar movie in another bus, stood with outstretched thumbs on an absolutelyunlit stretch of the highway in mortal danger from speeding cars, circled bypacks of angst-ridden dogs, and waited around in a village square at midnight,where we aroused so much suspicion that we were required to provide our namesand addresses to the constable on duty at the police station.

Come 1 a.m. and we were on a deserted ring road at Srirangapatnam, relativelyclose to Mysore and yet, for all practical purposes, at the other end of theworld. But here, finally, was hope! When we accosted a lone passer-by, and afterwe had convinced him out of his fear that we were about to mug him, he informedus that a bus to Mysore - directly to Mysore, no less! - was due in just 10minutes. Had the man not been in such an obvious hurry to safely make it home tohis kith and kin, we would have hugged him in jubilation.

Few fall harder than the jubilant. As the bus approached, such incrediblewaves of sheepishness swept over us that I half expected Little Bo Peep to tapus on the shoulder and sternly herd us home. For the bus that we sat sullenly infor the final leg of our grand adventure was none other than that 4 p.m. bus outof Hosbet.

***

But man is a creature with optimism built into hisbones, and the Larry Darrell ideal of travel refused to die. So I settled on atest case, intended to explore how far that ideal would work at all in our age.I ignored all the ominous signs at the outset of planning my trip, the mostominous being that I had to plan anything at all. Had Darrell been living today,we would never have had The Razor’s Edge. He did not have to apply forleave at his office, book air tickets months ahead to get them cheap, obtainconfirmations of hotel bookings and fax them to embassies for tourist visas,fill out overseas Mediclaim travel policies, issue mass emails that he would notbe contactable for three weeks, or assure his mother that he didn’t needwoollens in April and that he would be perfectly fine in a country where he didn’tknow the language, so would she please stop worrying and not ask him to callonce every two days.

As far as was possible without actually sitting down to design a timemachine, though, we attempted to be honest about it. We would travel about Spainunbound by itinerary, doss down only in the most Bohemian of lodgings, eat wherethe locals ate, and turn our backs on tourist traps and any establishments with"English spoken here" signs in the windows. We would, at least in parts,avoid the beaten path as if it were infested with plague.

In keeping with the best principles of scientific publishing, perhaps it iswiser to detail the results of this experiment with brutal frankness rather thantact and diplomacy. As a vacation, Spain was supremely enjoyable; as aDarrell-journey, it was an unmitigated disaster.

Arguably some aspects of it were our fault. We could have picked adestination not wholly integrated into the European Union, or perhaps even onewhere the inhabitants had no idea what the European Union was; deepest Congo,Outer Mongolia or Texas spring to mind. We could have resisted the temptation tobuy a "Lonely Planet". We could have scorned the allure of the bright lightsof Barcelona and Madrid, or even the slightly dimmer lights of Seville andGranada.

But the beast of the shrunken world would have proven ineluctablenevertheless. The most Bohemian of our hostels offered free Internet access.Trains perpetually ran full, so an itinerary crafted itself out of the necessityto book in advance. In Madrid, we navigated the city on neither English norSpanish, but on Hindi spoken to the Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants whopeddled trinkets on street-corners. In Barcelona, we were caught in a tidal waveof American collegians on Spring Break, seemingly determined to rid Spain ofalcoholism by drinking the country dry. The "Lonely Planet" that guided usto neighbourhood taverns with rustic Spanish cooking also guided others there.Even Teruel, a tiny town where we jumped off the train because it looked sodevoid of life and tourists, was prepared for us. Once we had been suckered inby its sham quietude, we were rapidly directed, along with other similarlysuckered tourists, to the local attraction - the tomb of a couple whose sordidlegend, according to the impeccably printed, multilingual brochures pressed onus, sounded suspiciously like that of Romeo and Juliet.

Teruel was merely the final straw; the entire trip, in retrospect, was almostcalculated, down to that translated copy of Vikram Seth’s "A Suitable Boy"in a Barcelona bookstore, to shake my faith in Darrell-journeys. The world, somebooming voice seemed to be telling me, has caught up with itself everywhere.Expect no reprieve, the voice continued, rather aggravatingly repeating itself,for everything will now be the same. It was clear that I was expected to tucktail between legs, return home, and write this essay a few years hence solelyand completely as a despairing rant against global culture.

And I would have too, if it hadn’t been for Montserrat.

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Lady Luck had walloped us in the shins everywhere else,so she pitied us and played for our team on this occasion. Montserrat is only anhour out of Barcelona, and it too is usually to be found under multiple layersof tourists and local families with bawling children. But we had unwittinglypicked a good day; perhaps Real Madrid had pounded Barcelona into the turf theprevious evening, so the populace was still either in mourning or recoveringfrom its hangover. Montserrat, consequently, was for once what it should ideallyalways be - a deserted little town, blinking in the sunshine, tucked safely awaybetween high, dauntingly rocky cliffs.

Montserrat is home to a monastery that, according to legend, dates back to880 A.D., founded because St. Peter had a few centuries earlier brought an imageof the Virgin there for protection. The building itself is modern, but it ismade of such warm, inviting stone that I could well imagine the joy offrostbitten monks, toiling up the slopes through knee-deep snow and thinkingonly of a bowl of hot soup before vespers, on arriving at the monastery.

Inside, all is cool silence. The monks walk through dim corridors with theunhurried tread of those who know that they are missing no meetings ortelevision shows. In a little chapel, off to one side, one young monk knelt andprayed motionlessly, watched by us partly in awe of his devotion and partly inshame at our voyeurism.