A beautifully written travelogue of Shivaji’s and Lobo’s three-week long journey to the Indonesian islands of Flores and Sumba, this narrative is a caA beautifully written travelogue of Shivaji’s and Lobo’s three-week long journey to the Indonesian islands of Flores and Sumba, this narrative is a captivating account of unknown, almost sleepy villages with obscure names such as Ruteng, Bajawa and Wae Rebo and their curious, but warm hospitality.
We follow the pair as they move from one village to other, seeking out new people, the low-brow, the virtual untouchables for tourists splurging on a luxurious vacation abroad, and discover a world of ingrained genuine warmth among those impoverished yet generous people. That was the surface experience, yes. But the real beauty of this memoir lies in the pair’s genuine curiosity and love for the people, their histories, their cultures and customs, which, peeled layer by layer, reveals a complexity beneath the deceptive simplistic stereotypes that most tourists easily fall for. And in that, they expose themselves to nature in all its beauty as very few do – getting close to the threatening Komodo dragons, getting to the top of Mount Kelimutu in Flores while drudging through the rain, watching the lakes of five colors, taking part in the immensely important ritual of burying the dead in Sumba, and most importantly, making unlikely friends – vegetable sellers, farmers masquerading as guides, two sets of warm brothers on motorbikes – friends who showed their care for the duo long after they’d gone.
Instead of visiting known landmarks and tourist destinations, the pair plunged into places with miserable accommodations, sometimes unpalatable food, a threadbare economy and the necessity of putting absolute trust in complete strangers – and yet they saw through this outward destitution a real richness that only the truly generous could bestow.
Told with such heart-warming honesty, compassion and curiosity, the work is radiant with, despite the pair’s many moments of gloom, annoyance and discomfort, a rare objectivity and genuine concern for humankind in general, which comes out beautifully through the even humor with which the most difficult moments too, are described. They are not just travelers, they are unconventional people seeking to inhale and embrace a side of human life no tourist usually wishes to pay their holiday expenses for. Little observations of not only physical details, but also insinuations, glances, body-language and nuances that are taken into account with a generous dose of light humor – not for the sake of vicarious detailing, but as a means to decoding cultural nuances – are what elevate this work to the highest level. We see the natives not just in a positive light – we learn of their past bloody histories, their inevitable clan clashes, social and economic hierarchies, and we learn to interconnect the fates of Chinese, Indians and Indonesians living in the country through their histories, myths, legends and anecdotes.
As for other aspects – the work is extremely well-researched, almost doubling up as a travel guide to those two islands as well – the places and their customs are so well-described. At the end, there are a couple of maps tracing their journey, and some beautiful photos that further emphasize the beauty that they have encountered – the kids, the houses, the varying architecture in something so basic as huts – in short, an entire civilization hidden from the eyes of a conventional tourist heading for Bali’s crystal beaches.
Peppered with agreeable literary/art references such as Octavio Paz’s poetry, Bretcht, oblique references to Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, the non-conformist, avant-garde and controversial Beat poets, the legendary Vonnegut, other literary figures unknown or lesser known to the rest of the world, artist Nona Garcia, I was still only getting used to the beauty with which these were incorporated in a travel memoir – when I was strangely surprised and overjoyed to see a reference to Gramsci and “cultural hegemony” and anthropologist-structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss, in a travelogue, of all places. Now, that’s something really rare.
And the caterpillar – like the duo, I too shall remember this work with the image of a caterpillar in my mind. I had gazed hard at the unusual cover before I began my vicarious journey. Now I understand its significance. At first, I found it empty – just a haphazard placing of images – now I see it as a pastiche of a complex culture.
As a final note, this one isn’t for people hunting for quick reads, exciting/eventful journeys, epiphany-laden discoveries of the mysteries of the soul or for those looking for exotification of natives – if anything, this work, through a richly detailed, picturesque and gradual (and often seemingly uneventful) narrative, only serves to show that not only are those faraway, impoverished tribes uncannily similar to us, but are, in some ancient, long-forgotten traditions of hospitality, kindness and care, far ahead of our smug notions of civility and civilization....more
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