On reinvention
ONE OF THE BEST THING'S about travelling is that there are endless possibilities for reinvention. That you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you - always a good thing. In a distant place you can pretend to be somebody you're not. Pretend to be rich or poor. You can be enigmatic and distant. You can be quirky and funny. You can be eccentric (my favourite). You can be friendly and polite or you can be insolent and imperious. You can pretend to be a writer or an evolutionary biologist or even (if you wish) an accountant. Nobody knows anything about you: your family background, which university you studied at, whether you've lived in the Middle East or the Caribbean, or the fact that you have an embarrassingly expensive pair of wooden headphones at home.
In travel you can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you please. And the great thing is that you can start all over again when you arrive somewhere new. One of the things that works to my advantage in this 'reinvention game' is my race. Yes, I am English but my parents are from Pakistan. The travellers I predominantly see are European, American or Japanese. This means that people here have no prepackaged preconceptions about me. I am mysterious. Enigmatic. I walk down the brothel strewn streets of whispered massage parlours like a ghost, an apparition, a spectre. I think to myself 'they don't know me'. And it is true they don't. So when I stroll into a high class restaurant and say 'Hi good evening. A table for one please' in my urbane feranji accent they are flummoxed. I can be who I want to be. Reinvention becomes that much easier. Playing chameleon that much more fun.
On travel writing
EVERYBODY THINKS THAT TRAVELLERS are bold trail-blazers with spunk in their blood, mettle in their pluck and an appetite for derring do. The guilty truth is more prosaic: we are the laziest people around and have managed to convince everybody that this 'bumming evasion' exercise that we have embarked upon is some elaborate scheme to 'find ourselves'. The truth is (most of us - and I am not referring to 'tourists' as they belong in a totally different class) most travellers are itinerant voyeurs with misplaced romantic notions. That is why a travellers worst nightmare is not the secret police or disease or smatterers but rather the prospect of meeting another fellow traveller. If we were truly honourable and honest, for then we should greet our fellow traveller with a hearthy embrace and a swooning smile. But we don't. Instead we look at them suspiciously, avoiding them at all costs, lest they rumble our little secret. A secret that they are aware of for they harbour it too. Most travel writing is a superfluous exercise; a thin and transparent monologue that goes: 'Heh guys! look at me! Look at me! Look what I'm doing!' A form of posturing. Your average travel writer and traveller and tourist for that matter is nothing but a self-interested, mendacious, licenced bore. Look at me look what I'm doing!
And me? Well there is something called curiosity is there not? And also an aimless joy is a pure joy - is it not? And what about those dreams of a foreign land, of temples, of yellow-robed monks, crowded bazaars - the bazaars of life. All of life is there in microcosm: birth, life and death. You are a visitor, albeit a nosy one. An utter stranger amongst these busy people. And do you know what the best bit is?
Nobody knows who you are.
