Letter from Paris

(Once again, these blog posts are out of order.  This should actually have been the first post.  Please pay attention to the dates at the tops of these posts)

June 15, 2012

  On an impulse, I bought a ticket to Paris. A friend of mine has been living here for a year so I decided to visit her. Visiting her was just an excuse. Subconsciously, I wanted to travel alone; to test my mettle; to see if I could get around France by myself.

I was here four years ago, for four days at the end of a whirlwind European tour. I was a little sick then, and Paris seemed like a big noisy blur. The food seemed ordinary, perhaps because my traveling companion had no appreciation for it and insisted on going to the cheaper places. Or perhaps because we were staying in the St. Michel area, full of tourists.

But this time, it is a different story. The friend I am staying with is busy with her studies, which turns out to be a blessing in disguise, for I am all alone, wandering the streets and noticing things I did not notice before.

The very first morning, I awoke naturally at 5 a.m. I could not figure out my friend’s stove—I spotted the valve on a vertical pipe you had to turn on to get the gas flowing but I could not fathom what was wrong with the burner. So after waiting for three hours, I headed to the café next door.  Superficially, the place seemed like a diner back home but quickly I began to notice subtle differences.

The waiter, a towel flung over his shoulder, asked “Café?” as I entered. He was single-handedly serving the tables, even occasionally pulling the broom and dish pan out from behind the counter to give the place a sweep, working with such alacrity that I could only marvel. American service was the best in the world, I had always thought.

I was wrong.

When I said “thé?” in response to his query, guessing the word for tea, which, in Spanish is “te,” he brought me a teapot with hot milk on the side. The water was just the right temperature, the milk frothy and rich and in that moment I understood why the French feel frustrated with the rest of the world.

French sensibility dictates that things have to be done just right.

I notice this everywhere now.

I walked next door to the boulangerie that first morning and bought myself a croissant, something I never eat at home because of the carbs. But the thing was light and fluffy, not heavy and rich like American croissants and it just melted in my mouth. I decided to bring home a salmon and avocado sandwich too, a long thing that, when cut, became two sandwiches—a CEO from Subway must have come to France and decided to fashion his product after the French idea—and it too was a thing of artistry and perfection. The bread was not chewy like some of Bay Area’s best French bread like Semifreddi’s, but soft, and, once again, light. 

A waiter in another restaurant, this time near Napolean’s tomb, explained it to me this way, “Bread doesn’t make you fat; it fills you up and has very few calories. It depends on what kind of bread you eat.” 

So we discussed supersizing and American food versus French food. American food was big, he explained, French food was served in little portions. He was right of course.

The dinner and lunch courses everywhere are a sensory treat, the food cooked to perfection. And the French walk a lot, speeding through Metro turnstyles as if they are on rollerblades.

My waiter declared with some flair, “I propose to you a Panacotta for dessert.” And when I left the tiramisu half eaten, he pointed out that the French would never imagine leaving a plate of food uneaten, nor would they ask for a doggie bag. 

I felt guilty.

I am beginning to understand what France is all about. You get the sense of living inside a great civilization in which there is style and history and identity. Where you don’t have to give a tip because waiters get salaries. Where the façade of every official and academic building is engraved with the motto “Liberty, Egalite, Fraternity,” the legacy of the French Revolution.  Where the way people hold themselves in spite of the economic downturn, you sense pride and grace.

It is the way people treat one another that distinguishes the old world from the new, I suppose. You get that sensibility in India; you get it among the Maya in Mexico and Guatemala. And you get it in France.

During a boat trip on the Seine, a man on board had a medical problem so we docked by the riverside. The ambulance boat came. The paramedic ran to the road to wave the ambulance van onto the pier; the police arrived in a tire-raft kind of a speed boat. It was all done so efficiently and so cheerfully! Afterwards, the policewoman, who looked like the boss of her crew, kissed the chief paramedic on both cheeks the way the French do. The French have a sense of style, an etiquette and a way of doing things. No wonder they frown upon the rest of the world.

You see that kind of etiquette in personal interactions in India too.

I decided not to do the touristy thing this time but to sit in cafes like Hemingway, and in more recent times, Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker staff writer.

With such illustrious traditions, how could I not be a writer in Paris?

As I sit alone in the cafes or t'he Luxembourg Gardens where old men—and an occasional woman—play a game of boules, I experience the kind of poignancy I have not experienced before. Being alone here is beautiful. I am much more alert and observant. My isolation makes me feel sensitive in a way that I am not with company. I notice a vacuum beside me; I miss the person who is not there. I am forced to appreciate everything just a little bit more. The life around me seems fuller and richer. 

In the past, whenever I have heard people talk of making a “bucket list,” of seeing certain places before they died, I have wondered what the point was if you were going to die anyway. Would you remember what you saw in the afterlife? 

Was there an afterlife?

Now I realize that it not about seeing places but about the adventure of getting there. I have only gone on one organized tour in my life and I hated it. Traveling on my own, on the other hand, teaches me to be brave, to observe and learn and explore. What is the point of that, you might ask?

The point is that I can use the lessons I learn this way in my journey through life. After all, I am not dead yet; I might yet live for decades. 

I am Gulliver, I am Sindbad

July 15, 2012

When I was a little girl, I loved adventure stories. There was a Marathi magazine named Chandoba, which means "moon," and in this magazine, I discovered a faraway, magical world. The first time I read about Sindbad, I was mesmerized. The magazine had colorful illustrations and I remember one in which Sindbad had fallen into a well full of human bones.

Later, I discovered Gulliver and the Lilliputians too.

I was a dreamer and what I dreamt of was traveling to faraway places. Why is it that some children dream of leaving their homes, and others want to stay close to the hearth? My own children do not wish to go away. Perhaps because they went camping even before they were out of diapers; they traveled to Canada, India, and Mexico at young ages.

Whatever the reason, I dreamt of leaving home. Later, as an adolescent, I read Somerset Maugham. I remember a novel in which a young man travels to Malaya, Zanzibar, and Singapore. I believe he comes to a sad end. In my mind’s eye, I see him standing on the deck of a ship, watching a tropical sunset. I wanted to be that young man. I wanted to get on a ship and travel across the seven seas. The trouble was, there were no stories of seafaring girls. Sindbad was a man; Gulliver was a man; Robinson Crusoe was a boy; Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were boys too.

So I wished I were a boy. I acted like a boy too. I paid no attention to my looks; I did not put on makeup or jewelry. My brain, my courage, and my competence were what I wanted the world to acknowledge.

When I embarked on my solo travels across France recently, I felt confident, self-assured. When I searched for role models from literature, however, I could not come up with anything inspiring. I read Hemingway’s Movable Feast, a book about his life in Paris as a young   writer, but we had little in common.

Today, when people think of women traveling solo, they think of Eat, Pray, Love. Even though I haven’t read the book, judging by the author interviews I have heard on NPR, the message of the bestseller is quite clear, a woman adventuress cannot be complete without a man to round off the happy ending.

That the journey could be an end in itself, that one might find, at the end of a voyage, not love for a man, but love for oneself, is not seen as an appealing idea. This is sad because the truth is, no man or woman can ultimately fulfill us; ultimately we have to find inner peace, inner love, inner happiness.

For me the moment of such self-awakening came in St. Jean de Luz, a picturesque town in the Basque country of France. I had gotten used to the French routine of visiting the Boulangerie in the morning to buy a croissant and sometimes a Chocolatine, and then sitting at the café next door with my Kindle and my small Gateway computer.

As I sat there one morning, watching the locals get a café before work, a strange sensation overcame me. It was happiness. Not the kind of happiness I had experienced when, long ago, my husband had told me that he had fallen in love with me, or when I had gotten word that I had been admitted to grad school at U.C. Berkeley.

Rather, it was a feeling of completeness. All throughout my three week travels, people had been watching me as I took my place at a single table at a bistro or a salon. Occasionally, I had felt a pang. Not because I was lonely, but because people thought that I must be lonely.

At a restaurant near the Invalides in Paris, I was talking to a couple at the next table when I explained that I was visiting a friend of mine in Paris. The woman said, “Oh, good! I thought you were all alone!” I felt she had slapped me in the face. So much so that I did not tell her that, in fact, the next day, I was embarking on a solo journey across the country.

Why do people assume that being alone is a less than desirable state? When in fact, in many cases, it is better to be alone than to be with the wrong person? Do people do so to justify their own marriage or partnership?

I suppose I must have internalized the exchange with that insensitive woman, for, as I rode trains, walked into strange towns with my bag, or checked into a hotel, I imagined that people were wondering who I was and why I was by myself.

It was in St. Jean de Luz that I finally lost that feeling. I just did not care what people thought.  I realized that if they were looking at me at all, which probably they were not, they were simply trying to place my ethnicity. For throughout my travels, no one had identified  me as Indian, assuming that I was Spanish or Italian or Iranian. More importantly, I simply did not care about people’s judgments. I felt contented, complete, blissful. For I could write. I could read. I could observe. I could pick up conversations with strangers. At the last moment, I could decide to travel to San Sebastian, Spain. I could stroll up the hill hugging the Bay of Biscay to watch the sunset and wait for the miracle of the Green Flash to occur.

Back in my hotel room, I could write my blog. I could browse the web to decide my next destination, and, thanks to Google Translate, send messages to hotels for last minute reservations. Sometimes I did not even know where I was going to spend the next night or what train I was going to catch.

That was the exciting part. My travels were a far cry from Overseas Adventure Travel, where everything is planned, where the adventure is only in the name. I fulfilled my desires spontaneously, without having to negotiate them with anyone.

I was free. I was in a surrealistic dream. I was floating, unseen, unheard, alone. And because I was alone, the world was my oyster.

And the world embraced me. In my freedom and solitude I was able to love the world in a way that I had never loved it before. And the world came to love me. Never once did I lose my temper or felt despair. For, at every turn, guardian angels showed up to assist me. Every time I needed help, someone came to my aid, whether it was just to talk to me or to show me the way into town.

Why did this happen? Because I had sailed my ship alone across the seven seas. I had become Gulliver and Sindbad. I had fulfilled my childhood dream.

The trouble with being Gulliver or Sindbad of course is that you feel compelled to set off again, no matter how perilous your last journey.