Pondering India

He pours the beers precisely, like wine, but in a frosty pint glass, only one quarter full. Its as if he wants us to taste and approve before he pours more. He sets the beer, label facing us to show the snowy flat peak of Kilimanjaro, passport photo of a giraffe in a circle below it, next to the glass on matching red Castle coasters, side by side. He does this three times. One for Annette. One for Mara. One for me.

He tests this capless black pen with which I write before he loans it to me. As I write, I wonder where the cap is. In the basket under a cloth napkin behind the bar from where the pen first presented itself before my eyes? Or perhaps it has its own passport photo, like the beer's giraffe, that allows it to cross borders to Kenya, Calcutta, Kathmandu, Koh Chang, California. Maybe the pen is counting on me to reunite it with its lover. Carry it like a barnacle on a whale a million miles to its destiny.

I just finished a book that was carried many miles to mine—Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. I expected it to be good travel reading to get my mind India-ready, like Life of Pi. I saw it in a two-story bookstore that had three shelves of English titles back in Basque Country. In San Sebastian it was competing with artistic spreads of pintxos for my attention. It lost. Like the probably fate of this capless pen, it was picked up for a moment before being returned to its station. Left behind. Stuck in one small corner of the universe, not to travel beyond. Not this time.

While it traveled many miles to my eyes, Beatrice and Virgil turned out not to be a travel book at all. Only travel reading in that it was read by a traveler at a time when a piece of that home of all homes called family journeyed to another continent to meet him. Surely, the book was just an unknowing barnacle in it all. Unaware of the whale's migration. Just as we humans live mostly unaware of the earth's rotation. Unaware that our planetary home is hurling through space. The book turned out to be about the Holocaust with animals talking under a tree like they were the animated pets of Samuel Beckett. About the Holocaust, and horror, and humanity, and writing, and art. Enough to make me fetch a pen from behind a beachside bar and express myself on paper. It's a far cry from my last beach book-The Aleph. Paulo Coehlo writes the stories of his journeys in epic terms with the simplicity of a number two pencil whose previous life was confined to filling in ovals. Yann Martel writes his in humble terms with a calligrapher's quill and pen. Each elicits different inspirations and emotions. Both set me to writing.

But my mind has mostly been on Lonely Planet's India, which is entertainingly written for a guidebook. The country seems utterly indigestible. Feels like I need a wall-sized map to begin to chart a course across it. But I do what I usually do. Make some highlights, mental notes, a few physical ones, and trust that the path will reveal itself when we get there. Surely a stream doesn't trouble itself and get into a froth because a waterfall is ahead. But despite my most Taoist of efforts, I am still not a stream. Just a traveler puzzling my way excitedly through our next continent, toes in the white sands of Zanzibar