NOV 8 — Reading can take you places and I am not talking about sharing the adventures of the author as you turn the pages of a travelogue or memoir. Yes, sometimes reading can send you to the travel agent’s!
I remember the first time that happened to me: I had just read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and saw a copy of his other book “A Cook’s Tour” in the bookshop. This was before the Discovery channel show of the same name starting showing here but I wanted to read more of Bourdain so I bought it.
The edition I bought showed him standing in front of a Bayon temple face in Siem Reap... and just like that, I wanted to go to Cambodia too. This was more than seven years ago and everyone was kind of discouraging of the idea. “It’s dangerous... the landmines, the bandits.”
But I went anyway. And I had a great time. It was no four-star holiday and we stayed in a guesthouse which was pretty basic but it was fantastic. And yes, I saw the Bayon temple with the enigmatic faces which I first spotted on the cover of Bourdain’s book.
The next time that happened with a book was Janet de Neefe’s “Fragrant Rice: My Continuing Love Affair With Bali”. A review copy landed on my desk and I just kind of ignored it for a month or so.
Then one day, I opened the book and soon found myself totally enchanted by the story of this Australian-born woman who first came to Bali with her family for a holiday. She returned a few years later and to cut a long story short, she married a Balinese and today she and her husband run two restaurants and a guesthouse.
The book is a combination of cookbook and memoir which also gives a foreigner an insight into the real Bali. De Neefe is also a fabulous cook and she also conducts cooking classes in Ubud where she lives now.
After the first Bali bombing in 2002, she decided to do something to help the people of Bali. Together with a friend, they conceived the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in 2004 and since then, the festival has really grown in size and reputation... and introduced more people to the beautiful island.
But it was her book which brought me to Bali and I stayed in her guesthouse! And you know what, I actually saw her once during my stay there. Talk about a book groupie eh? Maybe next year, I will go to the Writers Festival.
You just never know where reading can take you. Right now, I am reading Farish A. Noor’s “Qur’an and Cricket: Travels Through the Madrasahs of Asia and other stories.” I know what you are thinking, “You’re not thinking of visiting a madrasah surely?”
No, I am not. But the book is an amazing read. I think I learned (and understood) more about the politics of the region — Pakistan, Afghanistan and India — reading this book than all the news articles that are being churned out on a daily basis every day. There is a lot of heart in these stories from his journals. Some, like the Pakistan chapters may have been written in 2004 but the conditions described feel just as fresh today some five years later.
In the introduction, he writes that some of the journeys described in the book are internal ones: “Travel is as much an internal process as it is external, and one could argue that one has never really travelled across the world unless and until one has travelled across oneself.”
So yes, I may not be the traveller Farish was (and I am sure, is) but his travelogue has made me see things (the world really) with different eyes. I especially loved the chapter “Santri: Another Look at the Pesantren al-Mukmin of Abu Bakar Ba’ashir”.
Like many others after the Bali bombings, I too had bought into the idea of Ba’ashir as a monster. The mastermind behind the horror. But Farish will make you see the man and yes, suddenly “the other” is not so frightening after all.
Farish travelled to all these places as part of his academic research but luckily for us, the book is not an academic tome. Instead I would like to think of it as a guide to some of the places and people we often relegate to “the news.”
I have just a few more pages before the end of the book but I already know I will never think of the “difficult places and people” in the world the same way again.
And that, in itself, is a kind of journey isn’t it?
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