On Maui, my days
were broken up evenly:
mornings devoted to
writing, evenings to
exploration. I did what
all tourists do: gawked
at the beaches, tried
my hand at surfing,
hiked into a volcano,
and sipped a mai tai at
sunset. But my novel
was taking shape at the
same time, and I could
not ignore the similarities between
my own surroundings and the subject
of my book. Both Kashmir and
Hawaii are renowned for physical
beauty—the black sand beaches of
the latter are as magnificent as the
ice-covered peaks of the former.
Moviemakers evidently agree; I
cannot count the number of films that
have used Kashmir and Hawaii as
their backdrops. And as for tourism,
the survival of both places depends
on a constant flow of vacationers
clamouring for aloha or kashmiriyat,
as the case may be. And this is to say
nothing of their strategic military
importance, which, I should add,
often conveniently overlaps with the
interests of film-makers. Pearl Harbor
(2001) and Yahaan (2005), despite
their varied locales, could come as a
box set.
History, too, bears out the parallels.
In 1893, the last native monarch of
Hawaii, Queen Lili‘uokalani, was
imprisoned in her palace by a group
of American businessmen and forced
to sign a document of accession that
handed her kingdom over to them.
She spent the rest of her life seeking
international recognition for her rule,
but died without success. In 1959,
Hawaii became the 50th US state,
just twelve years after Maharaja Hari
Singh signed his own document
of accession, which relinquished
Kashmir to India and set off a wave
of violence that, all these
decades later, shows no
signs of abating.
In The Far Field, Shalini
falls in love with the beauty
of Kashmir’s landscape,
and it blinds her to certain
ugly realities of the region.
I’d always intended to
write a novel criticising
the casual traveller’s
tendency to ignore what
is inconvenient.
But to my dismay, I
discovered I was not
above such seduction
myself. All it took was
one perfect Hawaiian
sunset, or two palm
trees against an empty blue sky for
me to lose sight of the fact that this
place, like all others, was built on the
back of disaster and cruelty. Such is
the insidious power of beauty. It is the
anaesthetic that allows people who
should know better to sigh, shake
their heads, and speak yearningly of
“paradise”.
But warning signs are everywhere
for those who care to look. Drive
along the coastline of Maui, past a
charming plantation town, and you’ll
come to a beach that boasts some of
the most famous waves in the world.
Here stands a dilapidated yellow sign
painted in giant red letters: ‘This
property is under the jurisdiction of
the lawful Hawaiian government’.
The first time I saw it, I stared down
at those waves and remembered
that, just as in Kashmir, there are
still factions in Hawaii fighting
for independence from what they
consider an illegal occupying force.
A week later, I wrote a scene in which
Shalini sees a sign painted onto a
rock: ‘From Kashmir to Kanyakumari,India is one’. She experiences a
similar sensation of a set collapsing,
a discomfiting reminder that this
statement has come at a terrible cost.
And then she does what so many
wealthy, privileged travellers do: she
focuses on the beauty and allows
herself to forget the rest.
“A tourist is an ugly person,”
Jamaica Kincaid writes in A Small
Place (1988), and I cannot deny
that I have felt ugly in Kashmir and
Hawaii, just as I have in Malaysia,
South Africa, the UAE, Australia, and
Mauritius. So what is the right thing
to do? Stop travelling? Turn away?
Part of my attempt to answer that
question has been to write The Far
Field, a book I owe to Hawaii as
much as Kashmir. I don’t claim that
it is enough, but I do know it is better
than sealing oneself into a hotel,
blindly taking beauty for substance.
Was travel ever innocent? If so,
those days are done. To travel now in
good conscience, it must be, like
writing, an act of paying attention.
A way, at the very least, of bringing
a report back home, of countering
those wistful sighs with the firm
reminder that paradise has always
been an illusion.The Far Field, published by
HarperCollins in India is now on standsMadhuri VijayELLE.IN 77 JULY