Preface

It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward.

—Søren Kierkegaard, from Journal JJ (1843)

Memories are undisciplined things. They rise up unbeckoned from a fog, conjured up by faint smells, sounds, or sights, sometimes even becoming the fog itself. Then they evaporate, until brought to life again.

As a twenty-three-year-old, I travelled overland from Turkey to India during the second half of 1976 and early 1977. When I travelled next to India, in 1983, the region had significantly changed. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 and the start of decades-long warfare in Afghanistan made the overland trek impossible. Instead, I flew from Athens to New Delhi (via Cairo and Karachi), from where I took a bus first to Kashmir and then to Ladakh, which had only recently opened to tourists. But I too had changed. I was seeking some sort of stability in my life, feeling a need to put down roots, so I ended up returning to Canada after only four months. The years that followed saw me embrace marriage, children, and the university, first as a student, later as a professor of sociology.

Over the next many years, these commitments kept my thoughts, my emotions—my life—tethered to Canada. Occasionally, something called up a memory. (Even now, the smell of diesel has a particular power to transport me.) For the most part, however, my recollections of the time I spent in the Middle East and South Asia remained dormant.

All that changed after 9/11. Within weeks of al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Canadian troops became part of a US-led military action in Afghanistan that aimed to capture the attack’s instigator, Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban regime, end the threat of further attacks, and ultimately install a democratic government. Of course, peace and democracy were not the result, neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq. Priorities differ, and antagonisms run deep.

In the months and years that followed, as I watched events unfold on television or the Internet, or read about them in the daily press, I found myself frequently carried back in memory to my journeys. In my dreams, I found myself once again backpacking through narrow, irregular streets in tiny towns, or sitting in cafés, talking to local hotel owners, vendors, and students and watching old men sip chai. I saw hard-working men pushing wooden carts and mothers leaning from windows to call down to their children playing in the streets. Or I rode buses, their roofs crowded with chickens and sheep, as my senses were bombarded by the smell of diesel, the sound of voices shouting, and the jarring sight of competing colours. It was a raucous world, filled with both squalor and splendour—authentic and human, for all of that.

Gradually, I came to realize that a part of me had never really awakened from my time travelling in the Middle East. It was an unexamined story—and what are our lives if not the sum of stories? I had to return to the stories from these travels to understand how they have shaped my life in the years afterwards.

I began writing this book as an academic. But as I wrote and rewrote it, I became acutely aware that I was engaging in a different kind of writing—a different kind of journey—as both subject and observer: a dialogue between the youth who made the journey and the aging man who now was remembering—or reimagining—the experience. What began as a scholarly treatise became a journey of personal rediscovery, a story, as William Wordsworth would have it, of the youth, with all his faults and foibles, who gave birth to the man.

This book has been long in gestation, in part the result of a lack of concentrated time to work, in part because I was wrestling with my role as narrator—am I an active subject or a neutral recorder? A third impediment, which quickly became apparent as I began formal work on the project in 2008, was the relatively small cache of materials then available about travel to India during the period in question—materials that might help me to better reflect on my experience. A genuine benefit of this book’s prolonged birth, however, has been the publication of several personal memoirs and the growth of Internet websites containing secondary data, the personal reminiscences of others, and photographs. The additional time also allowed me to conduct a series of interviews with many individuals who also made the journey. Their recollections stimulated and augmented my own.

This is not the book I thought I would write when I began. But writing a book is also a kind of journey. You never quite know what you have written until it is done. I trust readers will find the result worthwhile.