We walked across one of the thirty-seven bridges linking the left and right banks of the Seine—it was to become my favourite, the magnificent golden Pont Alexandre III. As we started up the Champs-Élysées, arguably the most beautiful avenue in the world, I remarked to Tom that I had been here before.
‘Let’s do this differently then,’ he said and held me firmly by the shoulders. He looked searchingly into my eyes, ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Not really,’ my brain proffered but politeness prevailed and instead I said, ‘Sure.’
‘Close your eyes and let me guide you. I’ll tell you when to turn, when to stop, when to cross the road.’
I looked at Tom, then looked at the wide 2-kilometre-long avenue lined with shops, cafes, restaurants and teeming with people. I looked back at Tom incredulously.
‘Trust me,’ he said. It struck me that I had already placed my faith in him by agreeing to go on the hitch-hike and following his lead—and we had survived more than one sticky situation together.
We must have looked a strange sight: me, eyes squeezed shut and hands held out for balance, and Tom, firing urgent instructions as we weaved our way towards the Arc de Triomphe, that stands at the western end of the Champs-Élysées—peculiar perambulatory partners. Halfway there we swapped positions and I led Tom the rest of the way, faltering at first but slowly gaining confidence. At the time I was intent on the exercise, absorbed in not stumbling; it was only much later, during the bus ride home, that I realized that during that 2-kilometre walk Tom had subtly handed over the reins to me, and I had taken them.
Up until university I had had a very sheltered childhood—the same school and the same friends, the same six-week annual summer holiday to England. It was time for the frog to hop out of the well. It was early days but I was on my first unsupervised journey and I was finding my own way.
We spent the rest of the afternoon climbing Montmartre all the way up to the gleaming basilica of Sacré-Cœur, one of the highest points in Paris, offering a breathtaking panoramic view of the city. On the way down we stumbled across a tiny Salvador Dali museum, tucked away at the end of a cobbled street. It housed some of the lesser-known works of the eccentric artist, especially a number of his whimsical melting clocks—both alluring and grotesque. It was an opportune reminder of the passage of time and the need to meet the rest of our group at the appointed hour.
An hour later I found myself standing underneath the ‘Tour Eiffel’, the iconic iron lattice tower that forms the tallest structure in Paris and is also the most-visited paid monument in the world. And for good reason. We’ve all seen pictures of it but when you are standing underneath it, looking up at its triangulated wrought-iron frame rising up to a massive 985 feet, you can’t help but feel overcome by its grandeur. At night this grandeur is enhanced with a golden glow that emanates from powerful yellow sodium lamps positioned at the base of the tower.
From the turn of the century, 20,000 sparkling lights have been superimposed over the golden lighting which bring the tower to life every hour on the hour for five minutes from sundown to 1 a.m. Because each of these lights has been installed individually, they flicker on and off at random, simulating sparkling stars. It is quite simply magical. I have felt dwarfed before—I’m all of five feet two inches and I come from a family of overachievers—but the humility you feel when you are confronted with the sublime, be it natural or man-made, is one that everyone should experience.
All that glitters
I settled back into my seat on the bus home, exhausted but happy. My mind turned to the essay I had to submit on the impact of Darwin on the writing of history; I also had to remember to pick up fresh milk for my coffee the next morning. As I turned my face away from the city of lights and readied myself for the journey home, Tom’s sleepy voice wafted up to me, ‘It’s always been a dream of mine to run naked through the sand dunes. Have you ever been to Africa?’
And so a year later, in the spring of 1998—when Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ was topping the UK charts—Tom, Alison (an American student in her first year at Balliol) and I flew to Spain, where we spent two weeks backpacking around Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, Seville and Granada. We then took a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to cover the short distance from Tarifa in Spain to Tangier in Morocco, a ninety-minute journey at the most. My memories of that holiday alone could fill the pages of this book and are impossible to do justice to in a single chapter but I will try to share some of the highlights.
Picture a hut made out of hardened clay, its roof consisting of dry vegetation—straw of some kind in all probability. There is no furniture inside the hut, only a couple of sleeping mats, a stove and a few extra clothes hanging on a line. The hut is in Mohamet, the last remote Berber settlement before the ever-expanding Sahara. It belonged to Abdul, an indigenous nomad who had agreed to be our guide on a four-day-three-night camel trek into the 3000-mile sweep of desert.
Berber hospitality
This is where Tom, Alison and I spent the night before we began our intrepid adventure. We ate on the floor by candlelight as the village was not electrified—a feast of tagine (stew) and couscous after which Abdul told us stories of growing up in the desert over glasses of ‘whisky berber’ (sweet mint tea). Because we didn’t know any Arabic he spoke to us in French and very broken English. We decided to sleep early and set off at dawn, intending to get five or six hours of trek in before it became too hot.
Tom and Alison were experienced travellers, well equipped with sleeping bags which they promptly climbed into and fell asleep; I had not had much occasion to sleep outside of a bed and so had no sleeping bag. I lay on the floor of the hut, watching the one remaining candle burn out, the wax dripping down its sides to form a little puddle at the base. There must have been a breeze because the yellow flame was dancing, casting shadows on the walls, making them seem alive. And then I realized that the walls did not seem alive, they were alive—teeming with hundreds of insects. They were everywhere.
Some were shiny and beetle-like, scurrying up and down the walls intent on their nocturnal missions; others were larger with long furry appendages stumbling about drunkenly. My gaze was drawn to a particularly icky sort: a dark brown fellow with short antennae and two pairs of membranous wings, hanging upside down from the ceiling directly above me. His big bug eyes set wide apart seemed to be trained on me and, as I stared back in horror, he unfurled his translucent wings as if in slow motion, ready to take flight . . . Just then the candle flickered desperately, grew faint and went out, leaving me in a darkness that was claustrophobic in its completeness. You guessed it—I didn’t sleep a wink that night.
It was still dark when Abdul called to us from outside the hut, ‘Viens recontrer tes chameux.’ Come meet your camels. Tom and Alison were thrilled and ran out without hesitation. I was unimpressed—we have camels in India. I had sat on them enough times on school trips to Rajasthan and once during a wedding in Udaipur. In fact I expected to be relatively unmoved during this entire excursion, having grown up surrounded by what my Western friends no doubt thought were the style and affectations of ‘the Orient’. So I played it cool—much like the previous evening when we were choosing our headscarves for the journey.
Abdul had held out scarves of all colours that we were to fashion into turbans to protect our heads from the sun and prevent heatstroke. Tom and Alison had sensibly chosen white, a colour known to absorb less heat than darker hues. Now, I grew up in Delhi where temperatures as high as 48 degrees Celsius have been recorded; I wasn’t about to let a little desert calefaction faze me. So I chose one of my favourite colours, a deep navy blue.
Two minutes before sunstroke set in
When I emerged, Tom and Alison had already mounted their chosen steeds, Arfa and Ixa. Which left Humpy Thing for me. And Humpy Thing was unlike any camel I had seen back home. Firstly he was huge—over 7 feet long from nose to tail and probably about 9 feet high from the ground to his hump. And his hump was gigantic. Ther
e was no box to sit on like there is in India, in fact there was no cushioning at all save a well-worn rug thrown carelessly across his back. My confidence faltered as I tried to clamber on as gracefully as I could. It was impossible to sit comfortably and try as I might I simply could not get my legs around his massive hump. I ended up perched precariously, clinging on to a small rope extending from his swanlike neck. When dawn broke, our procession lurched forward.
Sahara sojourn
As I held on for dear life I sneaked a peek at Tom who was atop Ixa, reading from 1001 Arabian Nights and looking tremendously tranquil. We rode for five hours until the sun was directly above us, beating down mercilessly. There was not a cloud in the sky or a tree to provide even a sliver of shade. It was like being slowly cooked in a giant oven. The rhythmic sway of Humpy Thing, my lack of sleep, and the intense heat were making me dizzy and before I fainted dead away I called to Abdul to stop. Tom helped me down from my perch and Alison ripped the ridiculous almost-black turban from my pounding head. I let them put a damp cloth on my forehead and give me small sips of water to drink. After a few minutes I felt strong enough to open my eyes.
Humpy Thing was watching me with his large dark eyes fringed by impossibly thick eyelashes, a necessary protection from the dust I would later learn. There was an expression of stoic resignation in those eyes but behind the phlegmatism there seemed to lurk a hint of amusement, a mischievous sparkle. It was probably my sunstroked mind playing tricks on me but I could have sworn my camel was scoffing at me. So much for my foreign fortitude!
Humpy Thing
Our Sahara sojourn lasted four days and three nights and was one of the most challenging, breathtaking and memorable holidays of my life. We fell into a pattern of riding from dawn to about 11 a.m. and then from around 3 p.m. to nightfall. If the days were searing, the lack of humidity caused the night-time temperatures to plunge to freezing. We ate sparingly—tagines and biscuits mostly—and partook of our limited supply of water prudently. Yet we ran out of water by noon on the fourth day, six hours from our final destination. I am fortunate never to have felt a hunger or thirst that wasn’t self-imposed but in those six hours I felt a disabling sense of anxiety bordering on panic.
Soha of Arabia
Tom cheerfully declared that the human body can survive three full days without water but that, unsurprisingly, did nothing to ebb my unease. It was only when we were back in Mohamet and I had a glass of deliciously crisp ice-cold H2O in my hand that I felt calmed.
Looking for a Starbucks
Perhaps the most afraid I have ever been was when I needed to go to the loo one night. We had camped in a field of sand dunes piled up in mounds and ridges as far as the eye could see. I decided to walk behind a couple of the larger ones for maximum privacy. When I was done I retraced my steps expecting to see the others after I rounded a particularly serpentine dune but instead I was confronted with another dune. I looked to my right and then to my left but in the dark all the dunes looked identical. I was instantly and completely lost in a sea of silvery sand, phosphorescent from the luminous moon, its cresting waves frozen in time. There was no way of knowing which direction I had come from and the danger of aimlessly going around in circles was very real. I recalled Abdul’s story of an American tourist who strayed too far from his camp and got disoriented. He was only 350 metres from the camp when he was found four hours later—an hour too late. Thankfully my reverie was broken by the sound of Abdul’s voice calling my name. I answered gratefully, blinking back tears of relief, and shortly after we were reunited. From then on every time I had to answer the call of nature I made Alison come with me. Survival trumps privacy any day!
At night when we slept, the threadbare rug atop Humpy Thing, which saved my posterior from second-degree friction burns during the day, served as my mattress. As a child in Pataudi, I remember we would move our mosquito-netted beds into the courtyard when it got too hot. This was before we had air conditioners installed. We would sleep underneath the stars and try to discern various constellations. My name, Soha, means ‘star’ in Arabic, specifically a star in the Great Bear and I cannot look up at a starry sky without trying to find me. As I lay on the sand in the middle of the Sahara, feeling lost and vulnerable to the elements, I looked for my namesake in the sky and there it was—small but bright and burning fiercely. I felt anchored and reassured.
On our third and last night I had fallen asleep staring at the infinite expanse of the universe, wondering if we were really all alone in it or not. Either way it boggled the mind. I don’t know what woke me but I opened my eyes to find Abdul leaning over me, his face inches from mine. He was grinning down at me and I could count the brown stains on his two front teeth. ‘What do you want?’ I asked sitting up to put some space between us. Abdul continued to smile broadly. I looked for Tom for assistance but realized that his sleeping bag was empty and he was nowhere to be seen. I felt panic rising within me. How could we have been so foolish as to entrust our lives to a complete stranger, to allow him to lead us, defenceless, into the middle of a completely uninhabited region. He had obviously murdered Tom and was about to have his evil way with me.
‘Viens avec moi,’ Abdul whispered. Come with me. Not a chance, I thought to myself looking for Alison. I could see her blonde hair spilling out through the zip of the sleeping bag but I couldn’t tell if she was moving, breathing. Abdul got to his feet, gesturing to me to follow him. To this day I don’t know why I obeyed; perhaps I wanted to appear compliant until I could uncover some sort of weapon to overpower him with. It would have to be one that could subdue but not kill because the latter would leave me all alone in the middle of the largest desert in the world—not the best plan. We climbed together to the top of a sickle-shaped dune and I looked at my Berber guide, awaiting further instruction. He was staring straight ahead, beaming like a Cheshire cat. I followed his gaze: It was Tom, running full speed between two dunes, arms held high over his head—naked as a newborn baby!
Tom had had a dream that most would have dismissed as crazy but he made it happen. He showed me that dreams didn’t have to be futile. He helped me expand my horizons. I was eighteen when I hitch-hiked to Paris with him, but I was not new to travelling. Even then my passport carried visas for the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, Singapore among others . . . France too. But each of those trips had been orchestrated, supervised, sanitized. Travel is meant to take you out of the familiar and into the unknown, out of your comfort zone into murky waters, out of your cocoon into a new and exciting world—it is meant to be an education. You learn about new cultures, ways of living, eating, loving, ways different to yours; about yourself, your limits, physical and mental, and your openness to new ideas.
What then is the best way to travel—and must it involve risking one’s life by dashing across busy motorways and/or exposing oneself to potentially venomous insects as you lie shivering on the floor of a strange man’s hut while waiting for the sun to come up? If we can assume that a primary life goal for most people is to have adventure, then yes, it is important to let go—of schedule, of comfort, of trepidation. It may not always be fun, but we seek the perspective that distance and change can give.
We travel because we know we will come home and when we do, home is the same but we are changed and that changes everything. When I look up at the night sky from my terrace in Mumbai today, it is not mundane and boring, but full of infinite possibility—it is after all the very same night sky that filled me with wonder in Africa.
Travel has taught me many valuable life lessons but the one that is most pertinent is of acceptance. I am following in the footsteps of superstars and reprobation is an ever-present risk. It is not unusual for me to feel inadequate, to feel frustrated, to feel that no matter what I achieve, in comparison to my parents, my brother, I will always fall short. But when you are standing on the edge of the spectacular Grand Canyon for instance and looking into its plunging depths, containing over two billion years of geographical
history, you cannot help but feel diminished by the world.
The majestic Grand Canyon
There is so much out there that is bigger than you, stronger than you and that will endure long after you are gone, it inspires you to accept your flaws, your mortality and the fact that not everything will bend to your will. If you really want to know what grounds me—a modern-day princess from a tremendously famous family—it is this awareness.
In 2009 I found myself back in Paris, dressed in bright orange janitor overalls, broom in hand, attempting impossibly complicated choreographed dance moves with Shreyas Talpade for a film called ‘Chemistry’ (a film that was such a heady cocktail of bad writing and amateur direction that, true to its name, it spontaneously combusted pre-release). As the song lyrics—‘You and me, Babyyyy, we got chemistreee, you and me’—blared over the Champ de Mars, I watched the choreographer and his assistant perform the steps we were to duplicate.
After being turned away from the Louis Vuitton store in Paris
Inured by years of experience, they seemed oblivious to the crowds of tourists stopping to take in the spectacle. When it was time for the shot I got up to take my position in front of the camera. In my line of sight there was an Indian family, their backs squarely to the Eiffel Tower, one of the seven new wonders of the world, taking photographs of us instead. To my right there was a group of backpackers poring over a city map and arguing over where to go next. How lucky I was to have once been one of them, I thought to myself as the music kicked in. And not just Paris or Morocco—I had since learnt how to cook pasta in a rented villa in Tuscany, had buckets of soapy water chucked at me in a traditional hammam in Istanbul and watched two lions copulate an arm’s length from me in a national park in South Africa.
My eyes came to rest on a couple embracing under the Tower: The girl was wiping away her tears whilst the boy looked visibly relieved and somewhat overwhelmed. It was obvious that he had proposed to her, and she had accepted. As Adil, the choreographer, counted in the beats . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . . and I summoned up the terpsichorean inside me, little did I know that five years and six months later, in July 2014, I would be back in Paris in that very spot under the Eiffel Tower, watching Kunal produce the most perfect ring in the world and ask me to be his wife. But that is the subject of another chapter.
The Perils of Being Moderately Famous Page 9