Literary Places

by Sarah Baxter

  The South West Townships, southwest of Johannesburg, were first created to move blacks away from the city and its white suburbs to areas separated by cordons sanitaires (sanitary corridors), such as rivers or railways. Soweto quickly became the largest black city in South Africa, deprived and angry. Rosa speaks of its ‘restless broken streets’ filled with the ‘litter of twice-discarded possessions first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black’. In Soweto, families try to get by in small, overcrowded homes surrounded by ordure, urchins and tsotsi (thugs), while enraged youths denounce the regime. In both real life and Gordimer’s novel, the situation erupted in 1976, when a ruling that the Afrikaans language be used in schools triggered the Soweto Uprising. The riots were violently quashed – 176 students were killed – but trouble continued on and off until South Africa’s first multiracial elections in 1994.

  Soweto, like South Africa, has moved on since. The huge township has areas of desperate poverty but also middle-class suburbs and millionaires. And where once only the bravest traveller ventured here, now it’s a Johannesburg must-see. Joining a tour is safest, and will take in key sites: the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, named for the first child killed during the 1976 Uprising; Vilakazi Street, where two Nobel Peace Prize winners – Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu – once lived; the graffitied cooling towers of the Orlando power station, now used for bungee jumping. There’s also a chance to see ordinary Soweto – to drink a mug of umqombothi (maize beer) at a shebeen, to join a hallelujah-ing congregation in a tin-roofed church, to browse stalls selling sweets and intestines and ingenious items crafted from trash.

  In 1991, the year after Mandela was released from prison and the year apartheid was officially repealed, Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘epic writing … of very great benefit to humanity’. Burger’s Daughter merges fiction and fact, using stories to help heal the real world.

  KERALA

  Which?

  The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)

  What?

  Lush South Indian state where love and tragedy brew amid the languid backwaters

  THE AFTERNOON is heavy, hazy, lazy; the viscid air, damp as an unwrung sponge, awaits the imminent squeeze of the monsoon. For now, it’s curry-hot, the sun beating indiscriminately on red ants and yellow bullfrogs, whooping coucals and long-legged lily-trotters. It glitters on the corpses of silver fish. It nurtures the mango and jackfruit. Then, finally, the sky cracks. The heavens empty onto Kerala. Under this deluge, the paddies, palm trees and plantations flush even greener. And the channels swell to their limits, no longer languid but deceptively angry. The sort of spate that might make bad things – small bad things, big bad things – occur …

  Indian author Arundhati Roy trained as an architect, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise. Because her debut novel, The God of Small Things, is like a 2D blueprint conjured into 3D reality. Kerala oozes off its pages. It’s less a book than a deep pool of colour, fragrance, heat, history and politics stirred by love and loss, sentences rippling like backwaters.

  The novel, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, takes place largely in the village of Ayemenem, shifting in time between 1969 and 1993 in a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing. It follows boy and girl twins, Estha and Rahel, who live with their mother Ammu and her family – grandmother Mammachi, grand-aunt Baby Kochamma – and whose lives are upturned when their half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, drowns in the nearby river. The waterways that attract so many outsiders to this dream-like patch of the subcontinent – touted by the Keralan tourist board as ‘God’s Own Country’ – become a deadly heart of darkness.

  The book is as sensorially delicious as one of Mammachi’s Paradise Pickles & Preserves. It is a mouth-waterer of banana jam, fresh coconut, hot parippu vadas (lentil fritters), cardamom and cinnamon, red fish curry, black tamarind. There are crows feasting on fat mangoes and fireflies flickering in the darkness. There are vibrant saris and tucked-up mundus. There are shanty huts leaning into the heat and colonial, teak-shuttered bungalows with deep verandas where it’s always cool. There is the ‘sicksweet smell of old roses on a breeze’.

  But The God of Small Things also draws bigger issues into focus. For around 3,000 years Indian society was shaped by the caste system. Among the world’s oldest forms of social stratification, this class structure divided Hindus into four main groups: at the top, Brahmins (intellectuals), then Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (labourers). Outside of this were the Dalits or ‘untouchables’, the lowest of the low. Members of different castes lived apart, drank from separate wells, could not marry, often would not touch.

  Although the Indian Constitution of 1950 outlawed the caste system and status-based discrimination, the old ways proved hard to shake. This long-standing hierarchy, which extended beyond Hinduism into wider society, persisted; unwritten rules continued to be upheld and individuals remained limited by their rank. Certainly in The God of Small Things, the caste system still determines what Roy calls the Love Laws: ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much’. For Ammu, a higher-class Syrian Christian, to be in a relationship with the handyman Velutha – a Paravan, one of the ‘untouchables’ – is not conscionable at all. When the ‘laws’ are broken, tragedy ensues.

  Ayemenem is a fictionalised version of Aymanam, in Kerala’s Kottayam District, where Roy spent time as a child. The village name (meaning ‘five forests’) refers to the woodland that once thrived here, alongside the Meenachil River. Now paddy fields cloak much of the area and frenetic, traffic-jammed Kottayam town has seeped towards the old village, injecting greater bustle.

  There are a few old Hindu temples to visit – the Vishnu-dedicated Sree Narasimha Swamy and mural-daubed Pandavam Shasta temples. However, you won’t find an exact replica of the novel’s ‘Ayemenem House’, though the building is not entirely made up. Roy borrowed parts of two family homes to construct her fictional nexus. Puliyampallil House and Shanti House stand on adjacent plots at the end of a path of rubber trees, along from the village school. Puliyampallil is a fine early-20th century home ‘with its steep gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat’, while Shanti dates from the 1960s. The river flows across the fields behind, towards Lake Vembanad.

  The ‘History House’, where the book’s most tragic events occur, is not on the other side of the river in the middle of an abandoned rubber estate. The real home of ‘Kari Saipu’ – aka Alfred Baker, one of a family of English missionaries who’d ‘gone native’, spoke Malayalam (Kerala’s official language) and wore mundus – is actually a little way away, in the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary. The Bakers developed the sanctuary in the mid-19th century, and it’s now a haven for Indian darters, white Ibis, Siberian cranes and other resident and migratory birds. The ‘History House’ bungalow is now part of the Taj Garden Retreat.

  In her novel, Roy laments how Kerala has kowtowed to tourist tastes: the heritage buildings that are now hotels, the hours’-long kathakali dances that have been abridged for impatient foreigners. It’s true that kettuvallam houseboats now tote visitors rather than rice and spice along the backwaters. But while boarding one of these restored-for-tourists vessels for a slow cruise has become a cliché, it remains the best way to see Kerala – the best way to spot its wonderful small things.

  SAIGON (HO CHI MINH CITY)

  Which?

  The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)

  What?

  Historic Vietnamese avenue evoking exoticism and espionage

  THE HEAT hangs thick as a shroud. Only the beer is cool. Sipping slowly, you gaze at the road, screwing your eyes against the flat, fierce sun – and against the passage of time. Trishaw bells are now drowned by waspish motorcycles; Versace and Burger King have replaced the silk stores and milk bars. But this old thoroughfare – with its vestiges of vintage grandeur, its constant ebb and flow – still feels like the epicentre of Saigon. A street where blo
od and secrets were once spilt over seven o’clocktails; where privileged outsiders chewed over the fate of a nation …

  The rue Catinat is one of the oldest streets in Saigon, and one that’s had many identities. Originally Sixth Road, in 1865 the French rechristened it Catinat after the warship that helped them conquer Indochina – an unsubtle reminder of who was now in control. After Vietnamese independence from France in 1954, the name was changed to Tu Do (Freedom) Street, and soon thronged with loose-living American GIs who took the freedom at face value. After the Vietnam War, the Vietcong titled it Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street – the name it still bears today.

  But it was Catinat when Graham Greene was working as a war correspondent in the city from 1951 to 1954. And it’s this incarnation of the street – opium steeped, battle scarred, on the cusp of change – that forms the spine of The Quiet American. Greene’s tale of world-weary British journo Thomas Fowler, his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong and the titular US government worker Alden Pyle is a love triangle, murder mystery and political parable set against the backdrop of the First Indochina War. Most of the conflicts between French forces and the communist Viet Minh occurred in northern Vietnam, but the whole country was affected, including far-south Saigon; including the glamorous expat enclave of rue Catinat.

  Greene’s Saigon is dangerous, languorous and vividly exotic. Beautiful girls cycle in white silk trousers, locals in ‘mollusc hats’ shoulder pole-slung baskets and fortune-tellers squat under trees with soiled packs of cards. It’s vermouth cassis, opium smoke and the constant dice clicks of games of quatre cent vingt-et-un. Today, rue Catinat/Dong Khoi isn’t so evocatively other. Big brands and sleek malls have moved in. But glimmers of the past remain.

  At the top end of Dong Khoi, on Paris Square, sit the red-brick Notre Dame Cathedral – ‘hideous’, according to Greene – and the Central Post Office, a handsome colonial relic with its barrel-vaulted hall and historic maps of South Vietnam and Saigon.

  Heading southeastwards down the street, past shiny banks and the occasional old building, you reach the Continental. Built in 1880, this classic hotel is where Fowler always has his 6pm beer on the terrace, and where he first meets Pyle; the bar is indoors and air-conditioned these days, though a handful of tables line the pavement. Greene himself used to stay here, in corner room 214, believing it best placed to observe the happenings down in Lam Son square. In The Quiet American, Lam Son (the Place Garnier) is where a deadly car bomb explodes. It’s also home of Phuong’s favourite milk bar, which Greene based on the real Givral Café – lately demolished to make way for the Union Square mall.

  Further down, at 8 Dong Khoi, is the dome-topped Grand Hotel. Dating from the 1930s, this colonial-style edifice had been converted into rented apartments during Greene’s tenure, and served as the model for Fowler’s room over the rue Catinat. After a substantial renovation in 1998, the Grand is now one of the city’s grandest; hard to imagine the opium smoke and black-trousered women chattering on the landings now.

  At 7pm, Fowler – like so many of Saigon’s burnt-out expats – would head to the Rooftop Bar of the Majestic. You can still do the same. The hotel opened in 1925 and remains the best place to be at sundown, to sip a cocktail and drink in the cool, unchanging breeze from the Saigon River.

  KABUL

  Which?

  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)

  What?

  Afghan capital and Silk Road city of ancient culture cut down by modern tragedy

  LIFE PICKS itself up, shakes itself off and continues at the bazaar. Despite the ever-present mess and menace, crowds still throng to the pastry shops, spice sacks and rails of knock-off T-shirts – even in times of turmoil, one needs to dress and eat. People flow around the bloody, hook-hung carcasses and the severed sheeps’ heads. They step around loaded wheelbarrows and the spewed pulp of pomegranates, oozing like entrails. They crouch on their haunches, haggle for phones and sit in cafés, sipping glasses of sweet black tea. They breathe in the smells of grilling lamb, diesel, dust and destruction – the intoxicating perfume of the ancient city and its current troubles …

  The Kite Runner is as close to Afghanistan as most of us will ever get. The Central Asian nation of harsh desert, breath-stealing mountains and tribal loyalties is one of the most dangerous in the world. But no government travel advisory precludes taking a trip there via the words of Khaled Hosseini, whose debut novel speaks of both the vibrancy of late-20th-century Afghanistan and the horrors that have torn it apart.

  Kabul has existed for around 3,500 years. Tucked between the mighty Hindu Kush mountains, it was long a strategic stop for traders toting their silks and spices between Europe and Asia. It became capital of Afghanistan in 1776.

  The Kite Runner begins in 1970s Kabul, the story of young friends Amir, a wealthy Pashtun, and Hassan, a poor Hazara, whose lives are shaped by loyalty, cowardice, ethnicity and political upheaval. Their passion is kite-fighting, the local pastime of choice, which sees boys – always boys – send their missives of bamboo and bright tissue paper into the skies to do battle with other fliers. The string is coated with a resin of glue and crushed glass, rendering it sharp enough to cut down an opponent; running to collect the vanquished kite from where it falls is the ultimate trophy.

  This early Kabul is a revelation. Not only is the air filled with playful, colourful kites, the city seems far from the extremist war zone its name conjures today. The Kabul of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s was surprisingly cosmopolitan and liberal in outlook. There were cocktails and short skirts; the foreigners browsing the bazaars weren’t soldiers but hippies, who flocked to the ‘Paris of Central Asia’. Hosseini was born in 1965 into this ‘golden age’ of culturally rich Kabul. He left in 1976 and was later forced into permanent exile in the USA.

  The events that shaped the author’s life also shape The Kite Runner. In 1973, the Communist PDPA staged a coup, Afghanistan’s monarchy fell, revolution flared and, in 1979, the Soviet military invaded. Thousands fled to Pakistan and beyond – just like Amir and his father, Baba. After nine blood-soaked years, the Soviets withdrew and civil war erupted. In 1996, the Taliban took control, at first a welcome relief from the infighting. But then the fundamentalist laws rolled in. Thieves were punished by amputation. The ‘un-Islamic’ flying of kites was banned. Adulterers were stoned to death – in The Kite Runner, adult Amir witnesses such an atrocity during halftime at a football match, when he returns to Kabul in 2001. After years of living in the USA, Amir says Kabul is like ‘running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute’. The city he remembers has become a husk roamed by beggars, strewn with rubble, ruled by fear.

  The Kite Runner ends in 2002 – after September 11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan. NATO officially ended its combat mission in the country in 2014, but the country remains complicated, the Taliban resurgent. So Kabul is dangerous – but life rolls on, as it must for those who have no choice. And boys may fly their kites again, over the rooftops and bomb craters, up towards the sun-scorched mountains. Flashes of colour against the dust and the debris, continuing the fight.

  HANGING ROCK

  Which?

  Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967)

  What?

  Sinister Australian formation where literature has created a new legend

  THERE IS the Rock – shrouded in mist, shrouded in mystery. It’s an anachronism in the bush, spewed from the earth’s belly but now rising from the plains like a man-made Gothic castle of towers and crenellations. At first the Rock seems empty, but really it scuffles and creeps: snakes coiled, wallabies hunched, grubs rifling the rotten bark, koalas and kookaburras in the eucalyptus trees. And something else. Something that haunts the inky hollows, something that seems able to stop clocks, chill bones and call young girls to their doom …

  Hanging Rock looms large in both the landscape and psyche of Australia. Rare and formidable, it is a mamelon, a mo
und of stiff magma that erupted, congealed and contracted around six million years ago, and has subsequently weathered to become ‘pinnacled like a fortress’. But Hanging Rock is more than a geological quirk. It’s become a national symbol of the strange, a place where anything might happen – thanks to Joan Lindsay’s classic novel.

  According to Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock came to her in a series of dreams, so vivid that when she woke she could still sense the breeze blowing through the gum trees and the laughter resounding through the hot air. It tells the story of a fateful boarding-school outing to Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day 1900. Four girls and one of the mistresses disappear without a trace, up-turning life at Appleyard College and sending ripples through the wider community. As the book continues, and the mystery remains unsolved, so the ‘shadow of the Rock [grows] darker and longer … a brooding blackness solid as a wall’.

  The Rock was a place of loss long before Lindsay’s novel. From the 1830s its traditional owners – the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung tribes – were eradicated from the area, either murdered, killed by disease or forced into Aboriginal reserves. Their ancestors had lived on this land for more than 25,000 years and felt deep connections with what they called Ngannelong; initiation ceremonies and corroborees were held here, important rituals that connected indigenous people to their creator-spirits. Yet in an instant those ancient bonds were severed by European colonisers who’d been here no more than 50 years. Hanging Rock had always been viewed as special, even supernatural; now it was laced with tragedy. The perfect setting, then, for Lindsay’s puzzling, terrible tale.