The Heat and Dust Project
Author: Devapriya Roy and Saurav Jha
Publisher: HarperCollins, Rs250
In this travel book, a young urban couple takes off on a transformational journey across India on a budget of Rs500 per day, and meets myriad personas on the way, writes GAUTAM CHINTAMANI
Nestled between an ever-shrinking planet and an ever-expanding mind, the future of travel writing doesn’t seem to hold much promise, or so one would be compelled to imagine. After all, in the day and age of Google Earth, Google search, and a plethora of not only travel but also travel related content reviewing sites, what could possibly be written about travel that hasn’t been already #like(d)IJ Moreover, what could possibly come off a travel book where a young urban couple throwing caution to the winds takes off on a transformational journey across India, oh, and yes, on a budget of Rs500 per day for bed and boardIJ Well, for one an invigorating account of travel, but more importantly an insight into the hearts and minds of some young Indians who aren’t afraid of wanderlust or the eccentric choices that it forces upon them.
The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat is something more than an account of sightseeing or the people the two writers meet or even the stories they share. Mirroring the travel, which results in a journey of a lifetime, the book is also about the deep, and often permanent, changes that take place in the idea of living life itself.
Beginning with a desire to travel that seeped from a realisation just how unhappy Devapriya (D) and Saurav (S) were in a life dedicated to spending ‘busy hours over unimportant tasks’ in a consumerist world, they simply took off. Starting from Jaipur, D and S meander through Rajasthan to Gujarat, Delhi, Mathura, Vrindavan, Himachal Pradesh and finally Kolkata where they reconnect with an Israeli they had met at the initial stages of their journey. This book doesn’t play to the tenets of traditional travel. In a piece where he mourned the death of travel writing as we once knew it, Graeme Wood elucidated that travel writing is ‘a way of seeing the world through the eyes of one who has the time and the luxury to look at it directly, rather through the distortions of propagandists and wishful thinkers.’
The adventures of D and S are more about them in the places and situations they chose to explore as opposed to the place itself, something that is established right at the onset. The first night they spend in Jaipur sees the couple settle for a room with a dusty carpet and cobwebbed bathroom partly due to the rules of engagement and partly due to the fact that the other option had a toilet that could have been either paan or blood stained. Besides not spending more than Rs500 per day, both D and S are committed to not staying long enough at a place lest they sprout roots, which somewhere results in the hyperkinetic style of not only approaching the journey but also putting it down on paper.
This is what makes The Heat and Dust Project an interesting proposition as it presents a side of the travellers without a worry in the world and dedicated to the joy of self-discovery.
Divided into fascinatingly titled chapters, for instance, ‘How (Not) to Tell a City What You Feel for it: Delhi’, the narrative is strung by portions divided into Devapriya’s or Saurav’s experiences. The two bring their joint as well as independent views with their polar opposite personas and vocations — she is the author of two novels besides possessing degrees in literature and performance studies and he, an author in addition to being a commentator on energy and security issues.
That offers an intriguing understanding of how young Indians looks at themselves, the world and everything in between. As D explains in a chapter called ‘How to Write in Indian’, the average Indian is both global as well as opinionated and therefore it’s not surprising to see Saurav know as much about the ethnicity of Jews or Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower in the Israeli nuclear programme of the 1980s, as Zvika and Motty, the two Israeli brothers they meet in Pushkar. Both D and S appear to be prototypes of millions of young Indians who can be afraid and free at the same time.
The one thing that this book shows is how most of the people that the two authors meet seem to be following some sort of a script. So, be it a diamond merchant in Gujarat, the owner of a hotel in Paharganj, old college friends that reconnect, family members of a clan that operate a guest house in Pushkar or even the two Israeli brothers, who much like fellow compatriots before them are exploring the sights following standard conscription, no one seems to deviate from a plan and dutifully play their part in the grand scheme of things.
The ease of travel along with the frequency of everyday travellers have attached a veneer of straightforwardness to travel writing. But an inherent flaw of travel writing that Edward Said noted — seeing what one sees because it happens before them — still persists. Through the course of the book, that was almost five years in the making, the two get a better understanding of what’s within after seeing what was out there and at the end of true exploring, like TS Eliot said, they seem to arrive where they started and know the place for the first time.
The reviewer is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna Tweet Gautam @gchintamani