An awesome journey

BIRD of passage travelogues can be either crass and funny like Bill Bryson's or agonised and flagellant like Naipaul's. Pramila Jayapal is nearer to Naipaul and is of the Salmon Spawning genre, a non-resident mother returning to her natal place to give birth, albeit accidentally. Thanks to that accident, the male reader can at least echo Jayapal on the banks of the Ganga and say: "I understood the wondrous in life".

If you get three quarters of the way through Pilgrimage wondering what Jayapal has in common with Naipaul - apart from their diasporic concern to tease out the roots of their Indianness - await the last part. As a highly successful whiz-kid investment banker, Jayapal, when she returns to India after 25 years of being brought up in foreign parts, affects the demure Bharatiya nari disguise and her writing assumes the ho-hum of a United Nations report. She does a re-run of the Paul Burton Secret India tour, woman wading through the naval-high sea of spiritual jargon, when not walking on the water of trendy NGO projects that will galvanise the yearning (yawning?) massess to March to Better Tomorrows. It is the Rawal of Badrinath who strips off the disguise and forces Jayapal to jettison her mask and marshal her true regional identity.

What any traveller to Kerala notices is how feminine are the ladies who wear their hair open except for a loose knot. Is this a subliminal sign that they are more free than their sisters in tightly bound pigtails? Ironically the author (a Palghat Nair who learns Hindi so that she can appear more Indian) ends up demonstrating the cultural vigour of the Malayali and the creative prowess of their women. Throughout the book she holds back her liberated western lifestyle, perhaps feeling a little guilty that she can enjoy a two-year scholarship with her foreign husband (from 1995) writing reports on the poor via the latest laptop.

They go to Silent Valley, Lucknow, Kausani, Mau and Leh witnessing the "juxtaposition of wonder and horror" side by side, Jayapal dutifully putting on her Professor Basham kid gloves to gloss over the cultural distortions of karma and caste. It is "sad", she tells us, that 23 million women are the victims of "selective abortion and passive murder." (She cannot use the word "appalling" because she is writing defensively of India for the citizens of Uncle Sam). Similarly she cannot face the non- Gandhian truth that thousands of jawans are posted in Ladakh, so she pares the figure down to "hundreds". this split persona she openly acknowledges. What she does not seem to be aware of is the strength of her bi-polar vision. Why feel ashamed to be a world citizen, brilliant at what you do, and apologetic at enjoying privileges you have earned?

It is fascinating for a male reviewer to note how differently a woman writes of her treks over the Kuari Pass and in the Markha Valley. Women seem much less triumphalist and flag waving does not seem to occur to them. Her book is subtitled "A Changing India" and how very true this is. She talks about "harijans" and "video coaches" both terms having been consigned to the compost pit. India is changing at an alarming rate and her idyllic tryst in Gujarat with Dada's Swadhyaya followers seems hard to reconcile with the antics of today's minority bashers in the State.

The author confesses to escaping from societal short-comings by taking recourse to her "intellectual luxury shelter." This and the safety net of a bolt hole in Seattle. It is when the safety net collapses and she has to face the grim reality of having her child in Varanasi that the real Kairali Jayapal emerges, with her hair down, as it were. In "Diary of a Birth", she cuts loose from the multicultural pleasantries designed to offend no one and unleashes a torrent of savagely focussed fury. The pen becomes a blow torch in her hand and strips the paint off the lackadaisical attitudes of north India's sloppy narcissistic medicos. The reader is swept along by the cascade of incandescent response, her writing reaching a King Lear - like crescendo of elemental rage and despair.

As she battles to have her pregnancy against all odds, fate now chooses to deliver a series of hammer blows. Indian Airlines refuses to hold the flight that would have taken her to the safety of Mumbai. (She had been delayed by a students riot and her driver had to buy black flages to guarantee their car safe passage to the airport). The mindlessness of government agencies, however, is not confined to India. Later when her highly vulnerable premature son is born U.S. Immigration demands she return to the U.S. immediately on pain of losing her green card. All bureaucrats stand exposed as anti-life.

The Badri Rawal had chided Jayapal for the Indian habit of not saying what she really thought. Now she shows her universal maternal side that simply refuses to accept defeat. A local mother also with a premature baby turns to prayer but Jayapal, with total commitment, applies concentrated energy. Miraculously her son survives.

From the bloodless prose of an executives report, Pilgrimage is transformed into a superbly controlled outburst of a tigress defending her cub, an astonishing dip-lay of writing talent. Godmen, who wiseacre about life, pretend to know it all, but it is only when you read a book like this you understand that a man can know only half of what life is about. After Jayapal's gutsy account of cherishing the unborn, I feel I have witnessed the greatest miracle of all, life emerging from the matrix; a journey, I suspect, too awesome for the pen of Bryson to behold and to polluting for Sir Vidia's psyche to contemplate.

BILL AITKEN

Pilgrimage: One Woman's Return to a Changing India, Pramila Jayapal, Penguin, p. 265, Rs. 250.

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