“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

– G. K. Chesterton

I’m a reluctant traveler.

I left India because I had to. The best libraries, the latest research, the most influential centers of learning are in the West. You can’t “make it” in India – or even just do well enough – without some sort of credentialing from the West.

I would have been quite happy to stay in the lap of my family, if it hadn’t been for that. Family life in India is usually more sheltering than family life in the West, even if it too is changing rapidly these days…

It took me nearly ten years to get out, from the first feverish scrawl to a New York college when I was twelve…. to the stamp on my passport in Chennai.

But Chennai wasn’t home either. In India, I lived in Ooty, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and in several smaller towns I’ve half-forgotten.

In America, I stayed put, circling Philadelphia and DC for nearly two decades.

There were many reasons for that. In the first place, the contrast between how much cars were used in America, and how much they weren’t in India, made me so guilty about driving that I forced myself to take buses and trains when I could. Overtly, there were other more obvious reasons for not driving. But the psychological factor was this…

I wasn’t producing enough to consume that much fuel, I told myself.

The calculus of production and consumption kept me occupied for the next decade.
It had a useful result. I became a dexterous saver.

I saved…on nothing.
On ten dollars an hour. On fifty-cent raises.
A dollar here. A hundred there.
I weighed tomatoes in the grocery store. I squinted at weights on labels.

I saved anxiously, religiously.
Waiting for shoes to drop, for rainy days.
For some hole of perpetual anxiety to fill.

It was a malarial guilt bred from the mosquito swamps of the poor and the deprived and the hungry and the crowded and the dirty and the dying and the malnourished and the sick that cling to the dark half of this planet.

Those were the days when buying a cup of coffee would send me into a melancholic funk, comparing what it cost me to what it cost my brother in India.

I knew the comparison was somehow not quite legitimate.
I made it anyway. It made buying anything difficult for me at first.

After ten years, the anxiety waned. I began to see that my calculations missed something – I’m not sure what.

The guilt eased, but the habit of saving remained.
And now I had the money to spend, I no longer wanted anything well enough to spend it on.
I listened to friends talking about their travels and I wondered….why?

You could watch a trek in the Himalayas, white-water rafting, scuba-diving or anything else wrapped up in a comforter at home. The adventurers and the vagabonds didn’t have all that much to show for their time or money except a few albums of photos, souvenirs, a few wild stories, memories.
Ruthlessly, I calculated the costs and the benefits and struck travel from my list of worthy activities.

Bah, humbug. It was nothing more than a status symbol, the epicurean whim of those who had more money than sense.

It was treating your fellow man like a creature in a zoo you poked bananas to through the bars. It was voyeurism. It was fetishizing geography, exoticizing human beings, consuming places like commodities. It was a waste of money, of energy — yours and the earth’s.

I still think some of those things. Only not so confidently.

I still only travel with a business or family purpose of some kind. I take pictures, not of unknown heroes arching on stone horses, but of empty houses. I tell myself it’s work.

Streets of old houses. Facades. Interiors.
Bathrooms. Patios. Stairways. Steps. Tile. Masonry. I climbed thousands of steps in the medinas of Morocco, examining the colors and the work of the old tile. Is it really 17th century, or is it revamped? I fingered the dates on plaster friezes. I climbed onto the roofs of crumbling mansions and talked to contractors about renovation costs, while other travelers drank in the bars and cavorted on the beaches.

My beaches are nearly always empty and wind-swept. They have gulls or pink flamingos or crows. There are rarely bodies, dressed or undressed.

There are few people in my pictures.

I don’t take pictures of people, and I ward them off myself. I have a horror of being captured by the lens of strangers and pinned to their albums forever. Of being passed around in their homes with coffee and dessert. I loathe the thought. It seems barbaric. If you can’t tape a conversation legally without someone’s permission, how can you film them?

So my travel album is stark.

Pictures of cathedrals and towers and mountains all over the world can be found every where. Why should I add to the clutter?

Toward the end of my visits, I start asking myself what about this trip was so necessary that it needed to harness steel monsters, burning through oceans of fuel, roaring inaudibly night and day in the clouds?

I have no good answer.

Then I saw Chesterton’s lines. There’s some small justification in them for the traveler.
They make sense. But oddly. In the opposite way.

Traveling hasn’t made me that much more a stranger in my two homelands.
I’ve always been a stranger in them. My sharpest memories are off alterity, not identity.

Traveling makes me realize I’m not as estranged from my twin motherlands as I often feel.
It shows me how much more of both I have in me than I think.