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Discovering a country’s true character is all about reading between the lines.

By Lisa Moore

ART: CHARLOTTE OH

Twenty years ago, I went to India for three months with a high school friend. I took Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie to read on the airplane, and I had Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain in my knapsack. I knew before I even opened these books that the authors’ voices would be grafted onto whatever I saw in India – and that whatever I saw in India would be grafted onto their novels. It would be hard 20 years later to tell the two experiences apart.

The Magic Mountain is a fat, heavy book. A young man about to start life as a bureaucrat goes on a journey. Sequestered in a gothic mountain landscape, he comes to think of death and time and space in new ways and is forever changed. I was about the same age as Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, when I set out from Newfoundland on my first trip across the Atlantic.

I love seeing the red sun in the window on a transatlantic flight after the kind of disorienting, dreamful sleep from which you can only jerk awake. The sun isn’t rising or setting; it’s like the red bouncing ball that marks the rhythm over the lyrics on a karaoke screen.

Sleeping passengers slouch all over their seats – a paperback lying open on a chest, a pacifier dangling from an infant’s wet lips, black satin eye covers, slack-jawed abandon. Here and there, the diffuse circle of the reading light glows from above, making the passenger look like a varnished oil painting. Reading a novel makes the infinite measuring tape of time spool back into itself with a snap. Hours are devoured in an instant.

The voice in Rushdie’s novel was so new for me, full of fantasy and history, brash and garrulous, bursting with run-on sentences covering caste and colour, politics and romance. Later, hiking in Kashmir, my friend and I were invited into the courtyard of a school to listen to the children sing, their breath visible in the frigid air. Their pure, clear voices made me think of Rushdie’s protagonist, whose grandfather had cried in the same freezing temperatures because – having travelled to Germany for his studies before returning home to Kashmir – he was “unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve.”

Then I read The Magic Mountain in a wooden shikara on Dal Lake and later on a bluff overlooking a beach in Goa, where tourists played volleyball. And I read it sitting on the warm, white marble of the Taj Mahal. Looking up, I watched a man lay flat on the yellowed grass beneath a blue tarp. He slowly levitated, his toes poking straight up, and floated about three metres in the air as someone ran under the tarp to prove that nothing propped him up. He floated back down, and I returned to my book.

I’d gone to India with some idea of seeking spiritual enlightenment. Now I wonder if one place is more spiritually endowed than any other. Travel alters a person so radically that it can provoke a kind of spiritual change.

When I’d finished The Magic Mountain, the front cover was gone, the spine was broken, the book had come apart into several chunks and some of the pages were loose. I threw it in a wastepaper basket in my room. After I checked out at the front desk, the manager came up to me with the book in his hand. “We don’t put books in the garbage in this country,” he said. He asked me to sign a waiver saying that I had thrown the book away and he had my permission to retrieve it. He was enraged and I was ashamed.

When we travel, Mann said, space takes on the properties of time. We forget ourselves, our relationships and all the other things that root us to our home. And like most journeys, there’s no going back.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Lisa Moore is writing her second novel. Her first was the Giller-nominated Alligator.

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