by Tahir Shah
The Songlines first appeared more than twenty years ago. It was the book that made British travel writer Bruce Chatwin a bestselling author. And it is the book that established him as an oddball genius, a giant of the travel genre, and a writer whose works commented on the human condition as much as they did on the lands which passed beneath his feet.
During his short life, Chatwin published only a handful of books. Some were fact, others fiction, and all were a blend of both. They were the kind of books that many people had waited a lifetime to read: pithy, lyrical, and capable of easing the reader down through layer after layer until they hit raw metal, a mirror in which they saw themselves.
The Songlines is Chatwin’s masterwork. I remember the day I first saw it.
I was standing outside a bookshop in Nairobi, staring in at the window display of titles I couldn’t afford. A man sidled up, nudged me in the ribs, and jabbed a thumb at the hardback book:
‘That’s a cracker,’ he said.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only got enough cash for lunch.’
The man nudged me again.
‘Go hungry,’ he said.
I handed over my money and entered a world where the sharpest realism touches far-flung fantasy. Since then I have carried the book with me on almost all my journeys. It’s always there, at the bottom of my bag, a trusted friend that can be opened at random and can pacify me in moments of solitude.
My copy has been through the Namib Desert and the Sahara, across the Amazon, twice, over the Himalayas, and through the Madre de Dios cloud forest in Peru, where I was almost tempted to trade it for an exquisite macaw-feather crown. It has been a pillow, and a fly-swat, and entertainment in a small Ethiopian village when I had the runs, for days. And, it was one of two books I was permitted in my cell during the weeks I spent in solitary confinement in a Pakistani prison.
The Songlines is about the Australian Outback and the Aboriginals, who, through history, have roamed the vast, desert region, walking softly on the Earth. It is a journey of sorts, and a catalogue of meetings with ordinary people and eccentrics, each of them making do in the furnace of central Australia. It is about the essence of humanity, the lust of a nomadic existence, and about rejecting a world of materialism, a world that Chatwin must have suspected he might soon depart. While writing it, he had already been diagnosed with HIV.
Chatwin’s career began in the art world. He used to say he picked up the skill of writing detailed descriptions while working at Sotheby’s, where he had been made the youngest partner in the firm’s history. It’s a skill that resonates through all his writing, no more brilliantly than in this book. The initial character descriptions in particular are works of art.
The Songlines kicks off with Chatwin meeting Arkady Volchok, an Australian of Russian heritage, whose father was a Cossack. For Chatwin there was nothing so irresistible as a person found in a habitat that was at odds to the one from which he had come. He was of course a character for his collection, as was Arkady, who was surely an extension of himself. The people he collected were woven into his books, and described, turned into the light, and described again. None of them do very much in The Songlines, except to spit out a few succinct lines of words; but their appearance is enough – gems glinting for our delight.
No one fascinated Chatwin more than polymaths, people with a diverse range of knowledge and experience. He was one himself, of course, as was Theodor Strehlow, the character whose book Songs of Central Australia first activated his interest in so-called Songlines. Strehlow was an anthropologist of Austrian extraction, who had spent years in the Outback, and was adopted into an Aboriginal clan, the elders of which had entrusted him with their secrets. In his youth, he had been schooled in the Aboriginal dialect Aranda, as well as in Classical Greek, Latin, German and English, while raised at a Lutheran mission: all of it food for Chatwin’s vivid imagination.
Strehlow recorded the native Australian concepts of Songlines, and Dreamtime, and he mapped out a kind of blueprint that may have been a template for all primitive man. Chatwin was hooked from the start, and must have found in Strehlow’s work, as his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare puts it, ‘a structure on which to hang not only his nomad theories, but more or less everything else in his notebooks…’
Then, a little over half way through the narrative, the reader hits just that – a long italicised section labelled ‘From The Notebooks’. It’s something that even divides diehard fans of the Chatwinesque: a collection of aphorisms, ideas, and obscure details of culture and history. For my money, it’s the icing on the cake, the treasury of a short but brilliant life of observation. The section reflects Chatwin’s essence. It covers a world of obscure destinations – Kabul, Omdurman, Yunnan and Timbuktu. And it shines a beam of light onto aspects of human belief from which we have become distanced or removed.
Since his death early in 1989, Chatwin has been feted for his good looks, his love of distinguished company, and for his personal life. An enormous amount has been written on him, not least by his official biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, whose warts-and-all life story is two inches thick.
Sometimes you get the feeling that Chatwin is famous for being famous, that people are so caught up with him as an icon, that they forget to read his books. They pore over his private life, tracing his long-lost love affairs, and searching for skeletons in closets that I believe would best be left alone. Or they waste their time in dissection – trying to work out where the fact comes to an end and where the fantasy begins. For me, that’s all nonsense: Chatwin ought to be remembered instead as the pre-eminent storyteller, the raconteur, the man whose prose has perfect rhythm, and whose books walk the fine tightrope between fact and fantasy.
The Songlines works so powerfully, because in the native Aboriginals of the Outback Chatwin found himself. He was drawn to their gentle interpretation of the world, and to the way their dreamtime ascended far above the black and white world in which our own lives are sometimes confined.
Literary reviewers may have attacked Chatwin for over-romanticizing his subject, but they were not the only critics. The Aboriginals themselves felt short-changed by the way they were depicted in the book – fodder for Chatwin’s theories on nomadic life. And some found it odd that for a book on Aboriginal belief, the author spent such little time actually with Aboriginals, and so much with the wacky cast of immigrants who people the Outback.
As for my own travels with the book, the most touching moment came in Senegal. One night in the capital, Dakar, I was sitting in a café waiting for the sun to go down. The heat was terrible, and the place was packed with femmes de la rue parading themselves, hoping to attract a fresh infection-free clientele. I was alone, and ferreted The Songlines from the bottom of my bag. The waiter slapped down a glass of café noir and looked at me sideways.
‘He came here once,’ he said.
‘Who did?’
‘That man?’
‘Who?’
‘The blonde one,’ he said, pointing to the author photo on the back of the book.
‘Chatwin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Yes I did.’
‘Do you remember the conversation?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘What did you talk about?’
The waiter looked out at the road, and wiped a hand across his mouth.
‘We spoke about silence,’ he said.
He wafted away. I opened The Songlines at random, and my eyes found a Moorish proverb favoured by Chatwin:
‘He who does not travel does not know the value of men.’
ELEVEN
Chefchaouen
A WAITER IN FÈS first directed me to the small town of Chefchaouen, nestled in the foothills of the Rif Mountains.
I had praised a bowl of delicious harira, the wholesome soup Moroccans love to eat through the winter. He told me that the recipe had been prepared by his family for eight centuries at their hom
e in Chefchaouen.
‘If you go there,’ he said, his eyes welling with tears, ‘your heart will dance with delight.’
The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up. I set off from Fès next morning, drove north across the agricultural heartland, through forests of cork oaks, and up into the Rif.
Northern Morocco couldn’t make for a sharper contrast from the deserts of the south. There were small rocky fields, scattered with cactus and sheep, wizened men perched on donkeys, their wives in conical straw hats, orange groves and farmsteads, and translucent winter streams.
The first view of Chaouen, as locals call it, sends a tingle down the spine. It sits cradled between two summits (from which it gets its name, meaning ‘two-horned’), above the Oued Laou Valley, gleaming white in the blazing afternoon sun. Entering it, is like stepping into a lost piece of Andalucian Spain. Chaouen was built as a secure citadel for the Islamic faith, a bastion from which the Muslim refugees pouring out from southern Spain, could regroup and plan their assault on Portugal, the rising power. It was founded in 1471 by an Idrissid prince, Cherif Moulay Ali bin Rachid, and was populated largely by Andalucian Muslims from Granada.
The town’s architecture, cuisine, and its unlikely Mediterranean feel are results of its curious Spanish heritage. Until 1920, when Spanish troops occupied northern Morocco, Chaouen was cut off from the Christian world. The invading Spanish found a time capsule of their own culture. They heard spoken a form of tenth century Catalan – a language brought by the Andalucian Jews – which had died out on the Iberian peninsula four centuries before. And they found Granada leatherwork, pottery, and other crafts long extinct from their native Iberia.
Chefchaouen provides a welcome break from the profound grandeur of the Imperial cities of Fès, Mèknes and Marrakech. It tends to feel more like a big walled village than a town. The streets are steep and cobbled, shaded by trellises erupting with clematis, the houses whitewashed or rinsed with indigo, their doors studded, their roofs tiled with terracotta. As you stroll up and down the alleys of the medina, what strikes you is the tranquility. It’s as if the outside world is still out there, somewhere, but you have broken free.
The first thing you notice is the absence of cars. There are almost none at all. Without them, the air is clean and crisp. Visitors amble about over the cobbles with a glazed look in their eyes, sustained by the thought they have discovered a little-known Moroccan jewel. They tour the fifteenth century kasbah, clambering along the battlements, examine its rank dungeons, and marvel at the Grand Mosque with its spectacular octagonal minaret.
Chaouen is popular with visitors from Spain, who come to peer into the looking-glass of their own history. There’s not a sense though that the town is overrun with tourists. Instead, there’s a sleepy innocence, a feeling that the locals are happy to share their world. And, of course, the visitors snap up bargains at the multitude of shops and stalls found throughout the medina. All sorts of merchandise is on sale, from the Andalucian-style pottery with its characteristic glazes, to the wide conical hats with wool bobbles worn by the women in the Rif.
There are rugged mountain tapestries, too, and stalls awash with musical instruments – ouds, goat-skin tambours, and giant metal castanets. And in the narrow passages veering steeply down the hill, you can find delicate homemade jewellery on sale, woollen sweaters, boxes inlaid with camel bone, and rock crystals cut from quarries in the Rif.
In the heart of the old town is the plaza of Uta el-Hammam, lined with trees, paved with pebbles, and the perfect place to flop down and watch life. The cafés there vie for your attention and your business, waiters fanning menu cards at passing visitors. The food on offer ranges from succulent pastilla (a savoury-sweet pie made with chicken or pigeon), to mouth-watering tagines, such as lamb stewed with apricots, to couscous served with seven vegetables, and harira, the robust winter soup which is a meal in itself. There are western delicacies too, especially dishes from Spain, such as paella, tortilla, and grilled fish caught in the local river.
In the labyrinth of backstreets that make up the medina, there are a wide number of small hotels and hostels, most of which fall into the ‘affordable’ category. There are one or two larger hotels, too, such as the Parador, which has a pool and bar. Elsewhere alcohol is not widely served, for Chaouen is regarded as a holy city of Islam. But some drinkers are prepared to forego their tipple, in the light of another vice.
The Rif’s rugged landscape has always been a hardship for those who farm the sheering mountain slopes. Few crops flourish there, few except for marijuana. The illicit crop may explain why there are so many imported foreign sports cars trundling on the open roads in the north, wealth gained from kif. On the drive up from Fès, I stopped in the middle of nowhere to relieve myself, and staggered into the undergrowth, only to realize it was an ocean of marijuana plants five foot high.
The upper floors of some cafés in Chaouen are smoking rooms for those with an affection for the weed. Although illegal, smoking kif seems to be tolerated. But visitors would be extremely unwise to take away what they could enjoy in the town.
Outside one of the smoking haunts, I came across a baby-boomer from San Francisco who had followed Jimi Hendrix to Morocco, as a groupie back in the summer of ’69. He was tall, a little hunched and spoke very slowly, as if the forbidden fruit had taken a severe toll. He held out his arms.
‘Welcome to Paradise,’ he said, lighting the end of a joint. ‘The home of Free Love.’
The pace of life in Chefchaouen is so serene that you forget about the pressures of checking email and chatting on a mobile phone – for me the test of a town’s true charm. Whether you venture there as a place to relax and regroup, or as a starting point for hill walking in the Rif, Chefchaouen is the kind of place one stumbles upon very rarely. As I took to the road once again, and headed north towards the nearby waters of the Med, I thought of the waiter who had directed me to his home town. Chaouen was as wonderful as he had described. And, just as he promised, it made my heart dance with delight.
TWELVE
Colonial Clubs of India
TO STAND AT THE CROSSROADS near Mumbais Haji Alis Tomb is to witness a slice of modern India at its most vibrant.
Giant-sized billboards loom down over the seething traffic, alluring the nouveau riche with the latest in must-have fashions and all mod cons.
Down below, reclining primly in their chauffeur-driven cars, this new self-made class do their level best to block out reality, a realm thats never more than a pane of glass away. They seem immune to the incessant hooting, the droves of beggars, the eunuchs, and the street hawkers, all of whom glide through the gridlock like sharks hunting prey.
Spend a little time out in Mumbais human stew, and you feel yourself being poached alive. But salvation is at hand – to a privileged few at least.
A stones throw away from the traffic jam, theres a gentle haven of calm, a throwback to another time – a world that couldnt be more incongruous if it tried. Drive in through the solemn silver-painted gateposts, and you enter a kind of fantasy island, albeit one adrift on turbulent seas.
Inside, there are sprawling verandas cooled by ancient swirling ceiling fans, manicured lawns, and waiters dressed in starched white shirts and little black bow ties. There are crustless sandwiches as well, and scones and lemon tea, chit books, jam tarts, and miniature brass bells for summoning the legions of staff.
A bastion of propriety and good form, The Willingdon Club is part of a legacy which dates back to the earliest days of the British Raj. Its a lost shard of a world in which old-fashioned values diehard. In a country more often regarded for its own blend of perfected chaos, The Willingdon, and other clubs like it, are run with almost military efficiency. Membership is valued as the epitome of social status, the dividing line between old wealth and the rising nouveau riche.
In the heyday of colonial rule there were many dozens of such clubs, found across the subcontinent, the Far East, and Africa.
Established for the droves of bureaucrats who powered the colonial machine, they were as ruthless in their rules and membership requirements as any club on Pall Mall. Their drawing rooms were where colonial policy was thrashed out, and where the Rajs secrets were circulated among the privileged elite. It was a domain in which the old boy network thrived, one reserved for British gentlemen alone.
During the Raj, each club catered to a specific social strata. A tradesman or low-ranking bureaucrat would never have aspired, for example, to membership of Calcuttas exalted Bengal Club. And, membership for top-notch clubs had waiting lists so long that applicants often perished from consumption much before they ever came up for membership at all.
When the British set sail for home after Independence, sixty plus years ago, there could have been few who would have imagined that the colonial clubs could endure. After all, they were a symbol of decadence and, of course, of the despised British rule.
But endure they have.
Almost every major Indian city has at least one club. Mumbai has half a dozen, Delhi has several, as does Chennai, and as do the hill stations like Simla, Darjeeling and Dehradun.
The most snobbish and historical of all are the clubs in Calcutta, the capital of India under the Raj until 1911. The sniffiest of them all is the Bengal Club. Founded in 1827, with waiting lists that run into decades, its ambience has to be experienced to be believed. The highlight is the ‘Reynolds Room, a salon whose walls are adorned with murals inspired by the painters life work. Its great rival is The Tollygunge Club, known by all as ‘The Tolly, an oasis even now of decorum and stiff upper lip. Laid out over a hundred acres of former indigo plantation, once owned by Tipu Sultan himself, the clubhouse is more than two centuries old.
With the financial explosion gripping modern India, the clubs are a sure fire way for the old elite to set themselves apart. Basking effortlessly on the white-washed verandas or, playing bridge in the card rooms, the landed gentry manage to assert their social status by membership to a closed world. Its the perfect way of distancing oneself from the growing swathes of society who are cash-rich but culture-poor. Membership subscriptions arent usually cheap, but its not about money. Its about being approved.