Starting from Mile Zero || Preety Sengupta

Starting from Mile Zero

 - Preety Sengupta

One of many beautiful images of a place visited comes floating out me - that of the confluence of two rivers.On a hilly edge of the high road there is a small shrine representing Lord Shiva: a lingam, a trishul, and a tapered flag fluttering in the air. A steep flight of narrow steps descends to a slippery landing. The place is Rudraprayag in Garhwal district, the rivers are Mandakini and Alaknanda - one dark, deep, deceptively calm; the other foamy, fair, playful. The two distinctive waters stay separate for some distance, then slowly merge to make a fuller flow.

For about two decades my life has concentrated on two things: words and the world. In other words, writing and travelling. Like the two rivers, these two activities are very distinct - one requiring solitude, concentration and being indoors; the other necessitating determination, patience and interactions with strangers all the time. Rather than think of these as impossible opposites, I prefer to accept them as the yin and yang which make a balanced whole. And truly, the two strands in my life do merge - when I write I am not oblivious to the outside, and when I travel I am able to explore the self.

From childhood, all my basic needs were always met and life was comfortable. Many of my interests - music, painting, dancing, acting, embroidery, batik, reading - were developed, and my aesthetic sense cultivated while I was growing up. For me the struggle was, and has been, emotional. Perhaps that need arose from having lost my father at a very young age. Being a girl deprived me of much freedom to choose, act or even think independently. The contradictions were clear from the beginning: a secure, affluent, life on one hand, and many restrictions on the other. I did write - essays and poetry - from a young age, and did travel every year, in India, with school groups and family members. I remained a shy and introverted person, even suffering from an inferiority complex. At the same time, there were signs that I was going to be different, defiant of superficial traditions. I think my mother realized that, and worried about it.

Without a doubt, I started acquiring a personality and became an individual after going to America. I was a student, alone in a new land, had to face many challenges, and had to survive. It was in America that I started growing up and making my own decisions. I never got into a lasting, money making career, but my way of looking at the world and its offerings expanded constantly. My first trip all alone was around the U.S.A., for three months, by bus. Perhaps it was from then on that I started, giving places and people, what I needed most -  understanding and love. And that was also the beginning of my absorption in travelling.

Owing to my acute homesickness for India it took me over ten years to feel at case in America. In the meantime, though, I had begun to travel. I worked for six months to support myself, then left  my job and travelled for the next six. It was unusual because I went alone. I did not Know anyone who wanted to go with me, and I did not ask anyone either. People had come to America to make money and no one was travelling - not in the 1970s anyway.

When I went to Europe for the first time it meant I was stepping into a non-English-speaking region. I studied French, read about all the countries I planned to visit, poured over maps, but I was still alone, naive, inexperienced and somewhat nervous. I crossed the English Channel by boat, reached Belgium at 3.00 a.m., and slept on a wooden bench in the small station for a few hours. When I woke up the station was swarming with people going to work, and children going to school. How odd I must have appeared to them. Later that day, in the medieval town of Bruges at the small tourist office, I happened to talk to an American student who told me that he was nervous to be travelling alone. It was as if his words revealed a secret to me. I realized that if men can feel afraid, then it was certainly okay for me - a young, petite woman - to feel a bit nervous.

As I kept travelling to more and more difficult destinations - Jordan, Syria, Myanmar, Cambodia, Tibet, Greenland, to name a few - I taught myself to be steady, to slow down, and to give myself five minutes before panicking! My confidence grew with each journey, and so did my determination to face the unknown. By now, for over twenty-five years, I have been travelling alone, without contacts or reservations or arrangements. I arrive at a place and hope for the best! As I’m fond of saying, I pray to the local gods and let them take care of me!

The decade of the 1980s was the most active for me as a traveller, during which I visited all seven continents on this earth. I went to country after country feeling immense joy, paying no attention to hardships and inconveniences. For example, being a vegetarian was a challenge, and I learnt to do with less food, or no food at all sometimes, and slowly forgot my particular likes and dislikes. After I had travelled from one end of U.S.A., Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand to the other, I considered myself deserving of a destination that still seems extraordinary to me. This is Antarctica, the massive frozen continent around the South Pole. I sailed on a ship from the southern tip of Argentina and marvelled at icebergs as large as a city, the many glaciers, the untouched snowy vistas, and many other wonders. I started speaking of my life as before Antarctica and after Antarctica, so special was this voyage to me.

After this, my attention was drawn to the High Arctic. I thought of that vast region as being at least half a continent, and resolved to go there. I joined an expedition to the Magnetic North Pole in 1992, to coincide with 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the western world. I wanted to do something special in my life in the name of some other adventurer. Also, I kept saying that it was going to be like embracing the whole earth, having gone to both Antarctica and the High Arctic. I may  have sounded like a mad woman but to me it was real, an expression of my intense passion for travelling. I did reach the magnetic North Pole, becoming the first Indian woman - as well as the first vegetarian! - to do so, and planted the Indian tricolours on its snowy domain. It was an extremely arduous journey and it took all my determination to endure the frigid cold - up to 70. But the hundreds of miles of pure whiteness and the late night light were simply fantastic. I was travelling by sledge on frozen ocean, and I have no doubt that some sort of Divine Presence watched over me for my safe return.

This was really the culmination of my efforts as a traveller for I could never accomplish a more difficult destination. But I did continue to travel, and I have been to a hundred countries now - some of them more than once, twice or even three times. I have not hundred. Quite the contrary, I have taken it rather slowly, always giving in to my love for places I visit. My focus has been the places themselves. I am always asked if I do not get bored being by myself. The short answer is “no”.

But there is a lot to be said about my being alone and how it has worked to my advantage. What I have called my pilgrimage to Jerusalem inspired me to write an essay which launched me as a creative travel- writer. Gradually, over the years, I have received several awards for some of my books, and that has been very satisfying. Because I am by essence of a place, and it does open up to me in some special ways. I see it with wonder in my eyes, and at the same time feel at home in it. It is as if I am at once an outsider and an insider; a pilgrim as well as a promoter. I forget myself.

But nothing is as easy as it sounds. While in many ways all people and races are very similar, each place has very different components, and it is as if different particles of one’s brains are required to be used in it! And then to be a woman! Ah, my problems are three-pronged: I am a woman, and I am an indian woman travelling alone. Add to this the status of being married. So even when they ponder about cheating or jeering at me, they also want to know why I am alone, or how I can leave my husband behind. They see me as an easy target and a bad, even loose, woman.

As a traveller. I am not given the right to complain, because to any of my tales of woe-physical hardship or loneliness or that peculiar treatment from strangers - listeners are prone to say, “Then why do you go at all?” The positive side of it - courage, determination, passion - gets eclipsed. Then there is the matter of being an Indian. At national borders one is treated like a suspicious character. When the Gulf War broke out I suffered for a year and a half, having gone to Tunisia a few months earlier. Needless to say, European and American border officials had many doubts about me and repeatedly asked me questions like, “Why did you go? Where did you stay? Who did you meet?” as if I was a spy. They were not prepared to believe that an Indian woman can simply be a traveller!

On a trip to Central America, Guatemala was bent on denying me entry, even though I had a visa and was living in America, saying it was because I was born in India. Suddenly, I had become responsible for all those Indians who use Guatemala’s jungles to go to Mexico to try to cross into the U.s. And yet; for an Indian woman travelling alone in India is the most difficult. But then, if I am a fool to travel, I am a passionate fool and I simply cannot give up journeying around in India, or anywhere else!

I am constantly asked about my best experience and my worst experience! I find the answer difficult, because generally I tend to wipe out the badd instances from my memory. When I went to see the seven countries of Central America, each day for nearly two months was really tough due to either heat, or long bus rides, or border crossings, and each night was sleepless due to too much fatigue or constant noise. It was really strenuous jaunt. But when I returned and was asked about it, I kept saying how terrific it had been. I had really forgotten what I had been through. Till today, that trip, as well as the book I wrote about it, remain among my favourites.

But real danger is not to be trifled with. I have been lucky to survive several near - misses. One was at Uluru, a mammoth monolithic stone, nine kilometers in circumference, in the red desert centre of Australia. It is a thousand feet high and climbing it is a test of physical strength and agility. At its peak you couldn’t see the ground. All one had was the light blue sky above, and a lashing wind all around. I felt suspended in the atmosphere. Trekking down turned out to be harder. At one point, my feet slipped and I started falling rapidly. I shouted for others to move aside and one Swedish woman, who did not understand English, stretched out her arm instead. That momentary support broke my fall and saved me from breaking a limb or a more serious injury. I thanked her, and she said (through someone else) that she wished to be born in an English-speaking country the next time around. For the time being, though, I was grateful she was not.

Talking about dangerous situations, I have to mention one other accident, in the deep, whale-infested, ice-cold waters of the endless Antarctic ocean. On the twelfth day, the ship I was on hit some submerged rocks, cracked up instantly, and filled with water. The engine room got flooded, electricity broke down, the ship tilted and an unforeseen emergency arose. Passengers and sailors alike had to jump off the ship into the small square openings of some tent-like dinghy boats, leaving - losing - all possessions behind. How we were finally rescued is one of those long stories, but it is no wonder that I felt I had been reborn after that calamity. Along with my clothes, jewelry, money and papers, I lost two cameras and about two hundred slides. That I still regret, and this is why I still harbour a desire to go to Antarctica once again - to recapture it in my lens and in my eyes one more time.

If I have to impart a message to anyone I would say, emphatically, that no matter where one comes from or what one does, one must develop various interests and cultivate a long-lasting intensity  about something in life. There should not be room for even a suspicion of boredom, because time is so precious and knowledge is inexhaustible. There are some qualities, like fearlessness, tenacity, contentment, confidence that may not be in a person’s genes but can be developed. Most people say that they are afraid of being - or travelling - alone, but what are they afraid of? Themselves? Which is mostly the case without their realizing it; or is it something else? If it’s unknown factors, how can anyone think of them as fearful? They could as easily be pleasant. So it’s a question of allowing oneself some time, and others a chance.

Travelling may be difficult to sustain first, because it is expensive and second, because it requires physical movement. Leaving home, family, work and other responsibilities behind is not possible all the time but one can reach some sort of compromise by travelling off and on, or by going nearby and of course, by reading or listening to news about people and places. For each person the combination of “can” and “cannot” are varied, and each one has to search for one’s own winning resolution.

In London once, at a community function, an acquaintance came up to me and said, “You are like a fish that swims against the current.” It was a wonderful and rare compliment. It is the salmon that swims in the face of the flow, even at the risk of perishing. I cannot say I am prepared to perish yet, but I am definitely not afraid of challenging norms! Luckily for me, a pilgrim. I had no precedence or training or encouragement or guidance. My conservative background did not offer me any originality, but my spirit escaped, desiring to be free and fearless and alive, and to be in love. I could describe my struggle, and the long journey that it has been, in one sentence - “I came from Mile Zero and reached the North Pole.”

My life-force took me in a direction that is still not accepted by most societies in this world, but I am not asking for much by way of praise or acknowledgement any more. I recall a boat on the dark, deep, silken waters of the Nile. It travels alone, even against the current. With its sail swollen with the wind and its fate in the hands of a boatman. It does not want anything more than to be there for as long as possible. In the last few lines of a recent poem, I have used another image to convey a similar feeling:

At a transitory camp now

I pluck some weeds out

And let a garden emerge

A petal at a time.

I am aware that, personally, the path I took is not on any map, but slowly and surely it has been marked with many milestones of unforgettable memories. Who knows, some time, someone may stumble upon one of those milestones and embark upon an odyssey of their own.

At least I can hope.

Glossary: 

1. Mile Zero      : the starting point or the very beginning of a journey. Mile zero or zero mile markers were markers where drivers could set their odoments to follow directions in early guide books.

2. Yin and Yang  : In chinese philosophy, the concept of yin and yang is used to describe low polar or seemingly contrary forces that are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world and how they give rise to each other in turn.

3. English Channel : an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Great Britain from Northern France.

4. Bruge       : Capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish region of Belgium. Located in the Northwest of the country.

5. Jordan      : a kingdom on the East Bank of the River jordan in West Asia

6. Syria         : a country in West Asia, bordering jordan

7. Myanmar, Cambodia : countries in Southeast Asia

8. Tibet   : A plateau region in Asia. North of the Himalayas, the highest region on earth.

9. Greenland   : an autonomous country, within the kingdom of Denmark located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic archipelago

10. Argentina : second largest country in South America

11. High Arctic  : Arctic region, the region around the earth’s North pole, is divided into Low Arctic and high Arctic according to various environmental and biological characteristics.

12. Magnetic North Pole : differs from the geographical North Pole. It is a point hundreds of miles south of the geographic North Pole, at which the Earth’s magnetic field points vertically downwards

13. Tunisia : Officially, the Tunisian Republic, is the Northernmost country in Africa

14. Seven countries of Central America  : Belize, CostaRica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama

15. Gulf war   : (Aug 2,1990 - Feb 28,1991) Persian Gulf war, commonly referred to as Gulf war was a war waged by a UN authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States and United Kingdom against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait.