Journeying Back

Contact! Jan Morris Faber and Faber Pages: 202 Rs 550

There is no overstatement in saying that Jan who was,till 1972,James Morris is the greatest traveller of the past century. She has written from more of the world than the hardiest among them can even aspire to visit. But Morriss stature cannot be measured by distance covered. Morris is a favourite because shes been the traveller of her age. Over a writing career that began in the 1950s,she defined a way of travelling,observing,studying,inquiring into and intuiting the cusps of change cities,countries and societies could be at. To have read Morris on so many parts of the world is to have her observations become part of an acquired memory of places you may not have visited and of people you will never meet.

So now,all these years later,it comes as a surprise when she tells us in Contact! that in a lifetime of travel and literature I have written relatively little about people. Her readers,if she took a survey,would disagree. Nobody does cities like Morris does,and what are cities without their people? All the same,if that odd thought served as a spark for Morris,now 83,to revisit 40-odd books and put together snatches of personal encounters,its all to the good.

The entries are often less than half a page,they are not sourced,and most often not dated. But to read them is to reaffirm how much places are made by their inhabitants or is it the other way around?

In Madras: Morris has her tape recorder out to make notes about the high courts architecture and so attracts a policeman. How do I know it is not a bomb? he asks. You can speak into it yourself. What shall I say? Anything. I cannot think of anything to say. Sing a song then. What kind of a song? A Tamil song. Very well,I will sing you a very old Tamil song,a tragic song.

In Delhi: Certainly, said the government spokesman,perusing my list of questions. By all means,these are very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once8230;. I will telephone with the answers myself or if not myself,then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning But neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.

In Washington,DC: Yeah, said a woman loudly and complacently,stepping back from a china cabinet during our guided tour of the White House. Just what I thought chipped !

And in Moscow: I made the acquaintance of Guy Burgess,a renegade British diplomat who had been a Soviet agent for some years but was then sadly nostalgic for England and his mother. I could not help feeling sorry for him,and we agreed to go together one evening to the Bolshoi. We arranged to meet outside the theatre door,and when I got there I saw him waiting for me on the steps. I waved a greeting as I approached him through the crowd,and he waved a response,but by the time I reached the door he had vanished. I never saw him again.

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Morriss acute feel for history,place and person is strangely comforting. Even as these snatches elicit nods of familiarity,there is also the takeaway that nothing about change need be bewildering: you just have to be a good observer. And it is apt that the last page has her recollection of a meeting with Harry Truman. He is at a big polished desk,with a splendid globe by his side: He was,as he reminded me,the president who,in the years after World War II,had decreed an interventionist foreign policy for the United States of America the Truman Doctrine. When he twirled that globe he was retrospectively reshaping the world,abolishing my empire,and affecting the way I would live for the rest of my life.

And you wonder,is Morris telling you that these are fragments of a biography?