Dear Reader,
Writer and foreign correspondent Pallavi Aiyar opened up about grief and illness with the wit and honesty and the deeply personal journey behind her latest book Travels in the Other Place. She has spent decades immersing herself in the cultures of China, Japan, Indonesia, and Europe. On a Friday evening, Pallavi joined our book club to talk about tectonic shifts in China and Europe, the realities of parenting across continents, and the joy of a well-crafted sentence. Edited excerpts of our conversation:..
Pallavi, thank you for joining us from China. What’s outside your window?
It’s dark outside and from my window, I can see the lights of distant skyscrapers. I’m right in the heart of central Beijing, back in the exact same building in the diplomatic compound where I was 17 years ago, when my first son, Ishaan, was born. It’s a little bit of what the Chinese call yuan fen—kind of like fate, or closing a circle.
Being back in Beijing is strange, because everything is the same, and yet nothing is the same. China moves very, very quickly. It’s like a different planet.
Going back to your childhood, were you always a writer?
My parents were divorced; I was brought up by a single mom. When I returned from school, my mother was working and my brother was in boarding school. I was a solitary child.
I used to write to entertain myself: poems, plays. I wrote murder mysteries in the vein of Agatha Christie, starring myself and my friends. One of us would be murdered, and I was always the detective.
How did you get here?
I grew up in Delhi, where I went to Modern School, then I went on to study philosophy at St. Stephen’s College.
In 1994, when I was in my second year of college, my father called me out of the blue and said he would buy me a Eurail ticket because my brother, who was studying in England, was graduating and planning a month-long trip across Europe. My father said, “I think you should join him.”
That was my first experience of independent travel, and it gave me the travel bug.
After university, I got a scholarship to study modern history at Oxford. I returned to Delhi in 1998 and got my dream job as a television reporter with NDTV. But I quickly realised television wasn’t for me—the medium placed a barrier between the story and the storyteller.
I didn’t know quite what to do, because I was living the dream in terms of the dream I had, but it was not what I expected. So I did what most young people do, which is I decided to study further. And this decision is a very important point in the twists and turns that my life took.
This is when a young man enters your life?
On my very first day at the London School of Economics, I met Julio, who was from Spain—but the place he was most interested in was China.
I remember saying to him after we began dating, “Do you think I should learn Spanish?”
And he said, “Why would you learn Spanish? You should learn Chinese. That’s the language of the future.”
At the time, I didn’t think the relationship would last. He wanted to go to Beijing, and I had another year of study ahead of me in LA. But he persuaded me to visit him for a winter break.
I remember driving from the airport into Beijing and thinking: something huge is happening here. There was a vertiginous sense of dynamism—buildings rising from the ground, a palpable energy, a sense that something tectonic was underway.
That visit changed everything. I opened a magazine and saw a classified ad for a “foreign expert” to teach English news writing at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. I called the number, met the professor, and he offered me the job.
And so I suddenly had this route into China, which had seemed impossible, right? Because Julio, again, had this kind of passport—what I call a “Brahmin passport” in the book, a Spanish passport. People like him could decide to go here and decide to go there and have these adventures. For me, as an Indian, the first thing I thought about is visas and how the hell am I going to get there? But now with this job, the university sponsored my visa, gave me an apartment and a salary. I thought I would go for a year. I stayed for seven. China is where I got married to Julio, had my first child, found my voice as a writer, as a foreign correspondent.
From China, you moved to Brussels. You write about that experience in Punjabi Parmesan: A Europe in Crisis in a voice that feels refreshingly different from other commentaries. Tell us more about that.
In Beijing, a German and I might look at the same traffic and see entirely different things. The German would look at the road and see chaos and be like, “The Chinese don’t know how to drive, nobody’s following the rules.”
And I would look at the same thing and think, “Oh my God, the Chinese are such amazingly orderly drivers, nobody is honking, and where are the stray cows?”
So we’re seeing exactly the same thing, but we are seeing different things because my implicit norm is the traffic in Delhi and Gurgaon, and for the German it’s the autobahns of Germany. For travel writers and for journalists, we might see the same thing, but we interpret it differently because of our reference points. That’s what happens when you bring an Indian lens to Europe.
When I moved to Europe around 2009–2010, during the Eurozone crisis, I kept asking: Where is the crisis? In an Indian or Chinese context, a crisis means starvation, disaster, collapse. But in Brussels, the “crisis” smelled of coffee and waffles. Strikers were drinking beer—it looked more like a street party. I saw them as part of a global labour elite, often without much self-reflexivity about their privilege, because by then I had these implicit norms of not just India, but also China.
You recently wrote about your son being called “dirty” at school in Europe for using water instead of toilet paper. How did you handle that conversation with him?
Luckily for my children, they’ve learned naturally by being exposed to such a multiple variety of norms, so that they have come to understand that there is no gold standard—that some people use water, some people use toilet paper.
It can be painful. If you are rooted in one particular locality where everybody is the same, you’re not exposed necessarily to bullying or unkind words—although human beings are able to “other” people very easily, even within communities that are geographically stable. For example, I grew up in Delhi and only went to one school. But even then, there were different ways in which you could be othered based on the colour of your skin or your accent.
Did that othering ever happen to you in school?
It happened to me all the time, very, very openly. I was quite dark-skinned for Punjabi-dominated Delhi. For example, I was a trained classical dancer and became the dance club president, who would traditionally get the lead role in the annual dance drama.
But when I was in Class 12, we had a dance drama about a Buddhist princess and I was basically told by the dance teacher that I was too dark to be the princess. She apologised and said, “You’re too dark to be the princess, but we’ll make a special role for you,” which was the role of a tribal girl who saves the princess from a deadly attack.
Did things like this make you angry?
Yes and no. I didn’t feel like a victim; I was very aware of my privilege. But it did make me attuned to a sense of injustice.
It feels like you take this sense of injustice and deal with it using humour, like your line about your Indian passport being a “bad boyfriend.”
There’s humour in life, but there’s also a lot of injustice, so they’ve kind of twinned. And it’s not just injustice, but difficult things. In my latest book, I write about illness and grief. But I do think that even when you are very ill, for example, it’s not devoid of humour. We’re constantly living these everyday traumas, which are also quite humorous. Like parenting. The parents of a young child will find themselves tearing their hair out, but then, if you take a snapshot of that, it’s like a cartoon, right?
You have lived the dream life, reporting from China, Japan, Indonesia, Brussels, and Madrid. You once spoke about time in Indonesia where you had a bout of depression. Can you share that with us?
My book Travels in the Other Place was going to have a ninth chapter called “Madness.” We had just moved from Brussels to Indonesia. I had two boys under the age of four. I was working on my third book. I was a full-time foreign correspondent, learning a new language.
I told myself things were going swimmingly. My natural tendency is to tell myself a good narrative, okay? Like, “God, I’m so lucky, I’m getting to see Indonesia, I have this great job,” blah, blah, blah. But obviously, there was a huge amount of underlying stress. My oldest son was a very difficult child, and I write about this in Babies and Bylines. My second son, Nico, was easier in some ways, but for example, he had constipation from the time he was two years old to the time when he was four years old. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but can you imagine? I had to give him enemas, and he would be screaming and his bowel movements were on my mind in the middle of reporting assignments.
So all of this was going on, but I felt things were good. And then one day I woke up—I remember very clearly in the early days of the new year of 2015—and my heart was racing like a racehorse, as though something terrible was about to happen. It was this extremely nervous feeling, as though you have an exam to sit and you haven’t studied for it, but it was just a regular morning.
I just thought, “This is very weird, and it will probably pass.” And then a day went by and then two days and three, and I ended up actually being in a state like that for almost three months—not sleeping and not knowing what the hell was going on, and not feeling at all in control of my physiognomy. It took me that long to realise that I was having a nervous breakdown, because I told myself such things happened to other people who don’t have it together.
Finally, I went and saw a psychiatrist, went on medication for years, and did meditation. Long story short, high-stress situations do take their toll eventually.
As a professor, what’s your favourite creative writing exercise you give your students?
I ask my students to tell me their story in 10 and a half sentences. The number is borrowed from the book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes.
Here are Pallavi Aiyar’s ten and a half sentences –
1. If I weren’t a writer, I would make nature documentaries.
2. I don’t sleep well.
3. The loss of my mother a year ago makes me catch my breath every single day.
4. I want to be as gracious to my family as I am towards my friends.
5. There is no better feeling than when I write what I believe to be a really good sentence: surprising, truthful, transparent.
6. I enjoy people. I do not enjoy clubbing.
7. I spend more time wading through shades of gray than standing firm on white or black.
8. I have enjoyed every country that I have ever visited.
9. The lack of eyebrows bothered me more than the lack of hair on my head during chemotherapy.
10. I am comfortable with the idea of randomness.
And finally 10.5 It was my birthday last week and…
As a foreigner and a travel writer, what books have shaped how you see China?
Peter Hessler has written a book called River Town, about his time teaching English as a volunteer with the Peace Corps. He’s also written a book called Oracle Bones, a kind of travel book about China, a mixture of history and sociology and insight, and not just “go see this and eat this” like a travel guide.
Other recommendations are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, Rickshaw Boy by Lao She, Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, and Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop.
You travel the world. Where is home for you?
I have more than made peace with the idea that for me, there’s no home in the singular. I feel very incomplete without India. I feel incomplete without Delhi. But when I’m in Delhi, it starts driving me crazy after a few weeks, and I need to get out.
The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus said, “To the wise man, the whole world is home.” And I do feel that that is a feeling I have. I have a sense of ownership of Beijing’s hutongs and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I feel like, “This is mine.” And Oxford—Oxford’s libraries—I feel like those are mine too, just as I feel Chandni Chowk in Delhi is mine.
So all of these things are mine to an extent, and I’m sort of condemned to this sense of expansiveness. I say condemned because there is a tendency in human beings to want to belong to one group. The realities of visas and the realities of borders are different, and one comes up against those. But if you were to ask me where is home: the world, the earth, this is my home.
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.)
