From Heaven Lake: a journey with Vikram Seth

Book title: From Heaven Lake

Book author: Vikran Seth

Some books we buy and let them sit on the shelf for a while, not because they are boring, but because it keeps our excitement alive longer, the excitement of not knowing what happens in the story… I learned about this book from the Book Review section of my daily newspaper. A travel book on Tibet, wait a minute… I quickly added the book to my Goodreads To Read shelf. Then added it to the list of books I gave my local bookshop to bring from abroad. After a wait of forty days the books came. And it took me more than a year to finally start reading it. All this time I did not forget about the book, rather I was thinking when should I give myself the pleasure to get lost in a beautiful paperback and let it carry me to the plateau of Tibetan high lands, adorned with prayer flags…

Finally I am reading the book, in no special circumstance. But once I am onto a few pages of the story, I might be riding the bumpy road with the student Vikram Seth, the driver Sui… I might have trouble breathing the thin air of high altitude… such is the author’s ability to transport you through words.

The author was studying in China, and one summer vacation he joined an excursion to Xinxian. Being the kind of traveller who loathes guided tours in scenic spots with hundreds of others and listening to this and thus history… he quickly felt bored and looking for an opportunity to free himself from the tour group. One thing led to another and he managed to get himself a travel permit to visit Tibet, something so rare at that time. Thus started the journey… from heaven lake…

It is unlike today’s journey where we book a tour online at the ease of home, roads are curved everywhere and we communicate our whereabouts to our family so easily.. But one thing hasn’t changed to this date, the difficulty of getting permits. I could feel the frustrations of Seth when he was woken up at midnight to register as a foreigner, interrogated for an exit permit from Tibet, and so on and so forth.

If someone wants to get inspiration for hitch-hiking—it is this. The man has hitch-hiked to Tibet from Xinxiang. And from Tibet to Nepal. When there was no road, he just hiked. And the journey was not at all smooth as today’s travel vlogs often show. The truck clatters, the weather changes dramatically, the roads vanish thanks to the flood, and what about humans? Well, they have their limits as well. Reading about Seth’s journey in a truck with other hitchhikers feels at one point empathetic, and then I just laugh out loud at the misery. Three people sleeping in the truck car, sharing one blanket, cold seeping out of the windows… the kind of stories that are hard to survive, but become fond memories once time has passed. The people also tolerate each other better once the hardest time is over, often becoming friends after going through the same hardships together.

Here are some quotes from the book that give one idea about the writing…

I do not think that I will be able to tolerate the limitations of group travel much longer. I have already committed myself at Turfan, but at Urumqi I will simply refuse to be shown the sights. Seeing fewer monuments will not distress me. 

I lie on a rock by the shore, and read very slowly, pausing to digest it with segments of orange.

‘When I start reading, I lose all sense of time. Good books, good movies… are my obsessions.’

For Sui, the scenery of this unpopulated terrain is only occasionally captivating, as when under some transitory slant of light an unusual gold touched the evening hills.

On mountainous stretches he steers with a sensitive adeptness that is enjoyable to watch.

As I listen to the sound outside, it strikes me that although I know a certain amount about the language, literature and history of China, I am appallingly ignorant about the song, the lullabies, the nursery rhymes, the street games of children, the riddles; all the things that are most important in the childhood of Chinese people. Yet without such things one cannot understand the wealth of references made to a common past, the casual assumptions of shared experiences that lie behind conversation in any language.

There is enchantment in flowing water. I sit hypnotised by its beauty—water, the most unifying of the elements, that ties land and sea and air in one living ring.

‘In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.’ Tasteless, it accepts all tastes, colourless, all colours, reflecting the sky, refracting the white stones of its bed, dissolving or suspending the solid and minerals over which it flows.

These things now affect me more powerfully than I could even have imagined: small blue hedge flowers of a type I recognise but cannot name; lantana bushes; sal forests; water-buffalo; trucks copiously ornamented with religious symbols and hopelessly overloaded with worldly goods; bands of red chillies spread out to dry on the ground and on rooftops;

Not all travel books appeal to me this way. Sometimes the judgement of the author ruins the journey for me. It happened to me with Erika Fatland’s books. But Vikram Seth’s writing and criticism suited me very well. He gave a wider account of the journey, shared a great deal about the people surrounding him, and did not make the mistake of assuming the government propaganda as native people’s own thoughts. The Indian author had been critical of both the regimes of China and India. In one place he compares if he would be happy being born in China, where one may not speak his mind all the time. He decides he would like to be born in India, unless he was born in the one third poorest population of India. That… was a powerful thought. Man does not, of course, live by bread alone, but with so little of it he can hardly be said to live at all.

I will probably not visit Tibet, not the way it is now, with guided tours and crowded monuments. But if I were to take a train on the Tibetan plateau, From Heaven Lake would be with me. Some random pages opened while I gaze at the high peaks, having an imagined conversation with Seth, and sip butter tea from time to time…