Chronicles Of The Return

Gouge my fucking eyeballs out, please. I hate this orientalist tripe dressed up as modern anthropological-cum-travel writing observation:

The Turks, as everyone knows, are insane and deceitful. I say this affectionately. I live in Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to go berserk on you for no reason whatsoever, and you just can’t trust a word they say. As one Turkish friend put it (a man who has spent many years in America, and thus grasps the depth of the cultural chasm), “It’s not that they’re bad. They don’t even know they’re lying.”

Affectionately? Do you have any idea how horribly insulting a Turk would find this? And for good reason, too. It’s an ugly, untrue stereotype. This kind of crap just reinforces orientalism and, considering the source, is a set-up for a kind of ‘Wogs begin at Calais’ trope that delegitimizes anything the Turks might do. It’s also just plain wrong. How about this for a little thought experiment:

My friend is right, and his comment suggests a point about American culture that I doubt many Easterners grasp. People here—and, I would guess, throughout the South and the Mountain States, though Texas is the only state I know well—see “truth” as something plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What’s more, feelings here tend to change very quickly—and with them, the truth.

The above paragraph can be used to describe every Fox TV-watching, Sarah Palin-loving person in America. Now go read the original. The whole essay is full of really, really odious stuff that proves a singluar point about human nature: we see what we want to see. Take me for example: when I first discussed hejab in Turkey with three girls who were wearing it, I saw what I wanted to see. Only later would I learn that it was much, much more complicated than my first, oversimplified impression.

Look, the Turks do have unique characteristics. They love practical jokes. Have a very different and wonderful sense of humor. They are supremely hospitable and kind. But this idea that the truth, to Turks alone, is plastic, malleable and that ‘orientals’ are deceitful and insane is an old Orientalist trope. It’s also complete bullshit.

Human beings lie. Human beings tell you what they think you want to hear. We all do it. Why? Because we don’t like hurting people’s feelings. It’s human nature.

I can’t believe it’s 2010 and I have to fucking point this out.

Please, shoot me.

A correspondent from India chimes in on my criticisms of the rail system in India. Full disclosure he writes on more topics than this, but I want to address his one idea on the trains in India specifically, as it is a meme I encounter about the online booking system in India that is, well, rather infuriating. He writes:

a) I travel regularly by train and it never takes more than 5 minutes to book a confirmed ticket online.

This is all fine and well. I applaud the ease with which middle class Indians, all 120 million of them, can use the internet to make online reservations.

But really, we’re forgetting the other 880 million Indians who do not have internet access, much less know what it is. This is a bogus excuse.

Does the farmer in Orissa who needs travel 300 miles to go to a family wedding, or somesuch, have access to the internet?

Does the woman who lives in a small Kerala town, with several children, and no internet access, have the whereabouts to visit her son in the army halfway across the country?

Or do they both have to stand in interminably long lines at the train station, fighting off huge crowds for a day or longer, just to get their tickets?

If you have ever traveled in India you know the answer to this, even if you life in a middle class cocoon of privilege and servants.

The last few weeks have been tough. I’ve been battling a recurrent infection, one that seems to crop up once a year. It’s pretty dreadful. By the time it is in full swing I am lethargic, full of malaise and generally feeling sorry for myself. I told myself, last time it occurred, that I would go to the doctor immediately once the symptoms appeared. Due to America’s horrible health-care system I had to wait two weeks to see a specialist, which was more than enough time for the symptoms to worsen. I walked into the doctor’s office with a significant gait in my left leg. He looked at me and shook his head. “Why didn’t you come earlier,” he asked.

“Had to wait for approval from my HMO. Took a week. You were booked the next week,” I said.

The doctor looked at me kindly and said, “next time call me and I’ll prescribe you something before you come in, okay?”

He’s certainly one of the best doctors I’ve ever interacted with. He has an exceptional bedside manner, listens to everything I tell him, queries me fully, often time spending upwards of thirty minutes with me. For a doctor that’s priceless.

The prescription is for a heavy anti-biotic. The kind where you spend 10 minutes in the sun and it leaves you feeling like you’ve crossed the Taklamakan without water.

As a side note, I’ve read on several occasions that ‘Taklamakan’ means ‘goes in, doesn’t come out,’ in an ancient Chinese, or possible Tokharian dialect. Having flown over the Taklamakan several times and circumambulated its edges, I have to say that I agree.

One May when my father and I were in Dun Huang, the last great oasis before the Taklamakan, I got to thinking about Xuanzang, a 7th century Buddhist monk who sneaked his way past the T’ang guards at the Jade Gate, into the Taklamakan. He then proceeded to cross it, disproving its meaning as a toponym, but no matter. He then crossed the Tien Shan, chilled at a Buddhist monastery in Samarkand–just a few years before the Arabs irrupted into Central Asia, and then did a backwards dogleg into Afghanistan and India where he spent a decade plus collecting Buddhist manuscripts to take back to China.

Buddhism was not new to China, but it’s safe to say its roots were nothing compared to those which dug deep after Xuanzang’s return to Chang’an, the capital of the T’ang empire. What course might Chinese Buddhism taken were it not for Xuanzang’s efforts at travel, discovery and exploration? And what course might my life have taken had I not been exposed to Chan Buddhism in China in 1999?

This diminutive monk spent his remaining days translating the Buddhist corpus is a spartan monastery cell, eschewing all glory and worldly goods and his good works echo down the centuries to my own time and my own debt of gratitude to him.

Now that’s a character with character. Central Asia is littered with them, from the monstrous Timur–aka Tamerlane, who left a trail of human skulls from Damascus to India–to the poignant Omar Khayyam.

I tend to think about people like Xuanzang and Polo and ibn Battutah when I am feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes it works: I feel better, realizing my pedestrian concerns, minor ailments and the general discontent I feel with my post-modern life do get the better of me.

But sometimes it fails: I want to be Polo, or Rabban Sauma, Wilfred Thesiger, people who lived a full life so far away from home. People who made the world their home, citizens of this great and tragic blue ball spinning off into eternity.

And then I get a text message and the world comes roaring right back at me.

Edmond writes in from India:

Dear Sean Paul Kelley,

let me tell you, india is the only place with all its faults, the soul finds its freedom, its peace & joy.
being home to a billion beats , this country has huge resources & beyond. can they be typified under a single banner?

i agree when you say, this is a dirty place, electrical grid is surely a joke, there are many other concerns which india faces today.

but that doesn’t mean people out here aren’t interested . we are. to every enemy there is a friend. to all corrupt people, there are good people. its all round the corner, just a glance away.

i wudnt want to call you the spoilt kid of the west, but when you compare, why is there so many broken families? divorce rules the roost. depression takes its toll. at a young age , students are into bad company?

i bet, this is far far better in India. night life is the only thing in most mindset in westerners.
the govt here is lack lustre, more appropriate corrupted, but change wont happen in a day right?

we can always look at the bright side of things, if we want too. its all in the state of mind.

” Here are some amazing facts that will make you more proud to be an Indian. Read on …
India invented the Number System. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta. India never invaded any country in her last 10000 years of history.

Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software, according to a report in Forbes magazine, July 1987.

The World’s first university was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects there. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.

Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans. Charaka, the father of medicine consolidated Ayurveda 2500 years ago. Today Ayurveda is fast regaining its rightful place in our
civilization.India was the richest country on earth until the British invaded in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus was attracted by India’s wealth.

Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun in the 5th century - 365.258756484 days. The art of navigation was born in the river Sindh 6000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit ‘Nou’.

The value of “pi” was first calculated by Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century long before the European mathematicians. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world.

Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India. Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Hindus used numbers as big as 10**53(10 to the power of 53) with specific names as early as 5000 BCE during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera 10**12(10 to the power of 12).

Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India medicine. Detailed knowledge of anatomy, embryology, digestion, metabolism, physiology, etiology, genetics and immunity is also found in many ancient Indian texts.

USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century old suspicion in the world scientific community, that the pioneer of wireless communication was Prof. Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.
Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted complicated surgeries like cesareans, cataract

, artificial limbs, fractures, urinary stones and even plastic surgery

and brain surgery. Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India. Over 125 surgical equipment were used. Deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etiology, embryology, digestion, metabolism, genetics and immunity is also found in many texts.

The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.

Chess (Shataranja or AshtaPada) was invented in India. When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindh Valley, known as the Indus Valley Civilization.

The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100 BC. Spiritual science, Yoga and most of the religions were found in India and the teachings spread all over the world by Indian Mystics and the Saints.

The World’s First Granite Temple is the Brihadeswara temple at Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu. The shikhara is made from a single ‘ 80-tonne ‘ piece of granite. Also, this magnificient temple was built in just five years, (between 1004 AD and 1009 AD) during the reign of Rajaraja Chola

India is…….the Largest democracy in the world, the 6th largest country in the world AND one of the most ancient and living civilizations (at least 10, 000 years old).
The game of snakes & ladders was created by the 13th century poet saint Gyandev. It was originally called ‘Mokshapat.’ The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes indicated vices. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. Later through time, the game underwent several modifications but the meaning is the same i.e good deeds take us to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births.”

there is so much, & so much more. but is it the blind side??
why are the people there  so racists? did the people there create human or God did? where do you compare culture? & traditions?

moreover, how can you help to make this country what it can be? people like mother Theresa came here, did their best, many more are doing it. this can only change with time. the west only robbed india & went back. if not for the independence movement, we would still be slaves.

i can go on and on, but intend to stop here. i would want to here from you.

Dear sean, this is just my opinion, no offences, i just disagreed on some issues but respect your right to say.

do you want to make a trip to this country again ? would be happy to meet you. await your reply
yours in friendship,
rgrds,
Edmond

First and foremost, thank you Edmond for writing in. I’ve received countless letters from Indian expats and residents. Most of them have been similar in temperament to yours in that they highlight the ancient glories of India as a way of pointing towards the future.

That may be so, but in a former life I was an asset manager and one key principle we learned was ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results.’

Just look at America! What began as an auspicious experiment in Enlightenment Political Theory, progressed , after our Civil War and Progressive Era to the Vanguard of the West is now sinking under the combined weight of greed and anti-intellectualism run amok. We, like you, cannot rest on our laurels. When we do, we betray our fundamental principles.

But, I should really, rather respond to your specific arguments, or historical anecdotes, such as they are:

a.) Sanskrit, while an amazing language and one that has facilitated a great many intellectual awakenings in the East and West, is not the Indo-European mother tongue. As you and I both know, the Aryans who invaded Hindustan around 2,000BCE brought with them a proto-Sanskrit closely related to Avestan and the Anatolian ancestral tongues.

b.) I was unaware of the university at Takshila, but this doesn’t surprise me. India has a very long and distinguished history of learning.

c.) Aryuveda: yes, indeed. India has given much to the world and the West ignores its gifts mostly due to ignorance and arrogance.

d.) Columbus and the wealth of the Indies: this is indisputable, if largely forgotten in the West as well. Columbus believed the earth was a globe–another idea I believe that has its genesis in a fusion of Greek and Indian knowledge–and sailed West in the (false) belief that he would reach India.

e.) Higher Math, Algebra and Zero: Zero, as a concept came from India and it was a concept the West resisted for centuries. The higher math examples you offer I can’t speak to, as I am no mathematician or historian of math, except I can say, with certainty, that algebra did not come from India. Algebra was a Perso-Arab development that came from the region between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers in what is present-day Uzbekistan: Kwarazm.

But that’s really not what’s important. What’s key here is that India, as you document, has given the world many great things. This is not, nor was it ever, in dispute by me. My purpose, in arguing the way I did in “Reflections on India” was not to take away form what India had given the world, but to ask: how does India plan to follow up on its previous accomplishments. Also, I wrote it as a tonic to much of the hype here in the West about how India is the next ‘big thing.’ And all the nonsense about ‘how easy it is to do business in India.’

While what I wrote was addressed to my India friends in particular, it was meant as a wake-up call to Western businessmen and women about the difficulties they will face doing business in India. There is a lot of myth-making about India here in the West, especially by people like Tom Friedman. It needs to be countered. If India and the United States are going to have a global partnership of sorts, as looks increasingly likely, well, then we need to understand each other better, not just our strengths, but our weaknesses, as well.

Would you not agree?

Since I’m feeling wicked sorry for myself today, I offer up these two links. The first one is Krugman’s latest column on the Third Depression. This doesn’t surprise me. Enjoy it. The second link is Joe Bageant’s latest post on, well, who knows, really. I’m only half way through and it’s done nothing to life my spirits, spirits that began a nasty descent yesterday and don’t look as if they are going to make an ascent any time soon.

I miss cold showers in India. I miss sleeping in cheap, five dollar a night hotel rooms with no AC. I miss eating strange foods then getting sick. I miss being out of my comfort zone twenty four hours a day, strange stares and even strange languages. I miss being dirty. I miss long bus rides across impossibly magnificent landscapes. I miss the colors of people who live close to the land, with the land, on the land. I miss strange sounds.

I miss the world.

And every day I grow more and more tired of this anodyne, fluorescent light-bulb existence.

My post ‘Reflections On India’ has generated a great deal of email. More email than anything I have every written, as a matter of fact. Most of the emails have been positive, in one way or another. I’d say the ratio is about 35-1 positive to negative.

In the post I was very harsh on India; however, what I wrote seems to have struck a chord. I’ve been moved by the honest replies I’ve gotten and look forward to meeting many new friends when the chance comes. But today I received my first hate email via Facebook.

The title was simple and eloquent: “Go Fuck Yourself.”

The body of the email was equally simple: “Motherfucker.”

Now, aside from the fact that I have dated women who are mothers from time to time, I don’t think this is what my interlocutor meant. I was tempted to tell him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” But I didn’t and I replied thusly:

“That’s quite an intelligent reply. I’ll be sure an add that one to my next response post.
However, if you would like to try again and actually offer substantive points to debate, instead of insults, I’d be happy to discuss this with you.
Regards,
Sean Paul”

In closing, I’d like to take this opportunity to point my new friend to this New York Times story validating everything I ever said about India’s rail lines.

It can’t all be negative, however. So, I offer this wonderful photo as evidence that there are things in India you simply will never see anywhere else in the world.

This story by John Feffer about Turkey is popping up just about everywhere on the internets. The author, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, has as his thesis that “Turkey is chasing China to be the next big thing.” This is rather fanciful and the China analogies litter the essay. I’ll give him this, many of his facts in the essay are correct: Turkey has largely become Europe’s silent manufacturer and his deconstruction of Turkey’s ‘Zero Problems With Neighbors’ is an excellent elucidation of Turkey’s foreign policy. Further, the Turks are on their way towards rectifying the Kurdish problem.

As for superpower? Look, this is silly. No doubt whoever controls Anatolia and the Straits will always be powerful in a regional sense. But a superpower? How will Turkey project power outside of the Mediterranean Basin? They don’t even have nukes, which is pretty much the contemporary definition of great power status. In spite of its problems, the essay is worth a read as a primer on Turkey’s history since the death of Mustafa Kemal. The biggest fault with the essay, however, is his terribly dismissiveness of Islamism’s rise in Turkey. He writes:

This is, however, a fundamental misunderstanding of the AKP and its intentions. Islamism has about as much influence in modern-day Turkey as communism does in China. In both cases, what matters most is not ideology, but the political power of the ruling parties. Economic growth, political stability, and soft-power diplomacy regularly trump ideological consistency. Turkey is becoming more nationalist and more assertive, and flexibility, not fundamentalism, has been the hallmark of its new foreign policy.

Feffer, sadly, misunderstands the role of how “Economic growth, political stability, and soft-power diplomacy regularly trump ideological consistency.” These are the AKP’s means to an end. I’ve seen it firsthand in Turkey. Islamism is real. Very, very real. The Secularists in Turkey are boxed in. So are the Generals. The Secularists don’t have an answer to Erdogan’s economic growth miracle, because the Secularist economic policies are and were bankrupt. Corruption of the worst kind was rampant. Hyper inflation and economic crises like clockwork were the norm under the last twenty years of secular and military rule. When I first visited Turkey in 2001 one US dollar was worth millions of Turkish lira. The notes were simply insane. Try counting none or ten zeros when you wanted to buy a coke. Dinner was a joke.

Today the lira is stable. Turkey’s economy churns along. Economic life in Turkey is better than it has been in a very, very long time. The AKP has gone a long way towards neutralizing the deep state in Turkey, as well as eradicating the worst signs of corruption, although not eliminating it completely. No, I am not idealizing life under the secularists; it had its problems. But the warning signs of a creeping Islamism under the AKP are real.

While I was there in 2001 or even 2003 seeing a woman in Istanbul with a veil was unlikely. Not any more, as this link makes clear. This link is also indicative of how hard it is to come to grips with the reality of Islamism in Turkey. At first, I too got caught up in the talking point of choice, a kind of post-modern spin on women’s rights, which is anything but. It goes like this: women in Turkey are free to wear the veil or not wear the veil. It is their choice. But, as I investigated closer what I found was the opposite: the social pressure, from fathers to neighbors and the increase in honor killings, to conform to the politics of the veil were very real. That isn’t choice, not as I define it. I don’t want to go into the whole debate again, suffice it to say that many young women in Turkey don’t have a choice.

Nor is Islamism’s creep limited to the rights of women. The theory of evolution is under attack in Turkey. And Turkey is one of the few places in the developed world, outside of America, where science itself is being challenged. As a matter of fact, if you took the Christianist project here in America and put an Islamist label on it in Turkey, it would be almost identical.

There are places where alcohol is banned in Istanbul, as well. Sure, tourists can drink to their hearts content. But locals? Nope. In parts of Anatolia, never a liberal bastion, a quasi-Shari’a is often enforced, if not lawfully, then by custom. And these customs are moving West, to Izmir, Bursa and Istanbul itself as rural immigrants pore into the cities.

These are just some of the reasons why the Gaza Flotilla is such a turning point in Turkish politics. The AKP is slowly chipping away at the foundations of secularism in Turkey. And they are winning. The Gaza Flotilla and Erdogan’s attack on Peres at Davos were exhibitions of soft-power par excellence. But, before we cheer Erdogan on in the face of Israel’s coarse and brutal siege mentality, its flouting of international norms and the continuing inhumane blockade of Gaza, let’s keep the domestic Turkish context in mind. Politics, as they say, make strange bedfellows.

The good news is that Turkey presents a serious challenge to the neo-con project in the Middle East (a project, I hasten to add, I do not in any way support). Turkey presents a much needed wake-up call to the American political class’s constant obeisance to Israel, as well. As Erdogan has proven, he is an adroit wielder of Turkey’s significant soft-power.

I’ve long been of the opinion that if there is to be an Islamic democracy it would have to rectify the values of Islam and the values of secularism and pluralism. It would have to be a democracy in an Islamic context, much as Japan is a democracy in an East-Asian context. And this is a project I’ve not given up on. But helping such a project along requires restraint and nuance (not to mention patience) on the part of American policy-makers. This might be a temporary swing of the pendulum in Turkey’s domestic politics, but then again, it might not.

Alas, the American foreign policy establishment has proven time and time again that it doesn’t do nuance. And restraint?

But in order to keep Turkey in our orbit they’ll need to learn both.

I’m not holding my breath.

Every day I drive to work. Once a week I pay close to $40 to fill up my tank. When I am not driving to work, I try to ride my new bike everywhere I go, even in the almost 100* Texas heat. And when I drive, I think about the oil-soaked pelicans in the gulf, the porpoises washing up on Alabama beaches, literally oozing oil from their insides-out. I feel the weight of the guilt each time I shift gears, and remind myself not to gun the engine too much, better to save oil.

My carbon footprint is lower than it has ever been. Some nights, when it’s cool and overcast I open the windows in my tiny garage apartment and sleep in the warm Texas night. I’m used to the discomfort, having passed many nights in Southeast Asia and India without any form of air conditioning. I take cold showers, better to save the natural gas. Again, I’m used to cold water, having learned to like it while traveling in India and Southeast Asia. (Of course, I use hot water in the winter months.) When I wash my clothes, I don’t use hot water. When I dry them, I use a clothes line.

But every day that passes with dead birds washing up on shore I ask myself what more I can do?

I try and eat vegetables and such that don’t require cooking in the microwave or meats on the gas stove. I still can’t give up meat totally–I’m not that good of a Buddhist yet. I separate the aluminum cans, glass bottles and paper, from the food waste, better to recycle. I don’t have any toys, other than an iPad, a MacBookPro and an iPhone. They are toys, but they have other, environmentally friendly uses, as well. For example, I don’t own a TV, flatscreen or otherwise. I try to live as frugally as possible, going so far as to buy the majority of my books in electronic format now, better to save the trees. (And this is probably the biggest sacrifice I’ve made because I love the feel of books.)  One reason I bought my iPad was so I would stop printing up news stories on the internet, again, better to save paper.

I don’t own any power tools. No gas powered grills. I take my shoes to a cobbler. I have my old clothes, suits included, altered when necessary.

But every day I ask myself, what’s my responsibility?

I don’t live the American dream, although with my job I could probably buy a home and a big SUV just like everyone else here in liberal Austin.

I have to get to work. I’ve asked to be able to work from home two or three days a week to save energy. My requests have been declined. I’ve looked for a small efficiency apartment near work to lower my gas bill, but when I sit down to figure the costs, it would raise my carbon footprint to live in a bigger place. Personal conservation is a virtue, I suppose, but it isn’t easy when all of our living arrangements are stacked against me. It’s hard to break free from the system.

I’m not some kind of get back to nature, dirty hippie, or a survival nut. Just a guy living in a modern American city trying to be responsible.

And yet, every day I ask myself, what more can I do?

Osh, Kyrgyzstan: a post-apocalyptic dump filled with squalid Kruschev-era apartment blocks, febrile, mosquito-ridden air, and regrettable food.

Alone.

Two great mountain ranges encircle the town. To the north and east the Ferghana Range hovers above the city. From the south the Pamir massif pushes up, shrouding the city in a warm, orange embrace.

I need to leave.

A few days before I’d weathered a mob of people and machines crossing over the border from Uzbekistan. But the Kyrgyz side was sleepy, uneventful—not even a passport check.

Getting out, however, was proving difficult.

One escape is flying an antiquated Soviet-made turbo prop through the mountains, “not over them,” as the airport ticketing agent said. The other requires finding, haggling with and hiring a driver to take you to Bishkek through some of the most rugged, remote and beautiful mountains in the world. Weaving between glacier-filled valleys and sheer alpine cliffs in a white-knuckle inducing Volkswagen Bug with wings wasn’t my idea of fun—besides, I hate flying. So I chose the ground route.

Drivers making the trek over the mountains to Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan’s capitol) congregate in a gravel parking lot full of rusted buses across from the main bazaar. Unable to cajole a single driver into making the trip over the mountains to Bishkek—each request was dismissed with a curt, “No, it’s too far!”—I broke for lunch around noon.

Super sized Bunsen burners topped with pots of bubbling broth and languorous noodles occupied stalls lining the bazaar. Blowing gently on a steaming pile of laghmam—a Central Asian staple of thick noodles in mutton broth—a deep voice boomed behind me.

“Ishmael,” he exclaimed.

Expecting a tout, I turned and found instead a leathery-faced, handsome Uzbek wheezing, “Taxi, Bishkek.” He caught his breath and pointed at the distant spires of the Ferghana Range.

“How much,” I asked? After a cursory bout of haggling we agreed on a price.

I trudged uphill with Ishmael along a narrow, tree-lined dirt lane. Walls surrounded the homes in the Persian fashion, his no different. The gate creaked open. Laboring over a washtub his wife smiled and rushed off towards the kitchen. She beckoned me to follow. Ishmael left in search of more passengers.

An hour later Ishmael returned with three strangers. Fatima was a striking, moon faced Uzbek woman with curious eyes, traveling from Andijan to Saint Petersburg to see her brother; Ilhom, a railway worker—“what railway?” I wondered silently—was returning home from a holiday with his elderly parents; and the Wrestler, a big brute of a man with no neck and fewer words never said what it was he did. His silent, brooding demeanor discouraged me from asking.

We darted through Osh’s crowded and decaying streets and soon pushed into the Ferghana Valley, skirting the mountains always to the East. A beat-up and weary old horse stood lonely by the roadside. Mule drawn carts, heavy with peasants in colorful dresses were followed by big steel milk canisters along the roadsides, targets for bored teens with stones. To the west, behind a smiling young boy dressed in white, grain fields spread out like a blanket of saffron.

After an hour on the road Ishmael parked between a restaurant and a small brook. We sat under an old sycamore tree, filled with Indian Mynas chattering in the branches like bored housewives. Leaves rustled like coffee beans falling into a can. Somewhere a mule brayed a stubborn lament.

I nibbled on my shashlyk—lamb kebab—. Ishmael and Fatima talked about Saint Petersburg and life before the Soviet Union collapsed.

“At least I didn’t have to travel to a foreign country to visit my brother? He wasn’t a foreigner then,” she said.

“But we make our own future now,” Ishmael replied.

“What future,” blurted Ilhom?

The table grew quiet. I sucked the last bit of meat off my kebab and tossed the bones to a skinny cat lurking under the table.

We piled back into the car and drove off. Many of the villages we passed felt abandoned, dusty. Others looked bucolic, Italianesque in the slanting light of late afternoon. Poplars lined flat gravel lanes. Grapevines infiltrated trellis-covered courtyards. ‘New’ mud-brick homes replaced old, crumbling Soviet-era housing.

The road into the mountains crossed a small tributary of the Syr Darya River, the ancient Jaxartes, where several young boys swam naked in the river. Shadows crawled across the valley floor.

The Volga crested a blind hill. Shimmering in the sun below lay Lake Toktu-gol, a large hydroelectric reservoir filling the Naryn River Gorge. It’s cool, marble-green waters powering the turbines that light up the night time Ferghana.

Withering heat blasted through the windows. Ishmael wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Fatima and Ilhom shuffled in their seats while the wrestler snored. I watched the passing panoply from the window.

Sage-colored brush dotted the chili-red soil. Jagged, snowcapped peaks grew on the horizon, indifferent to the whirring of cars on the road below. The few clouds that made it over the wall of mountains disappeared before my eyes.

And then dusk arrived, deep and pink, transforming clouds into mountains and mountains into clouds. Higher and higher into the Tien Shan the old Volga climbed. The silvery surface of Toktu-gol’s water faded into the night as the heat broke.

We stopped at a roadblock: my first passport check, now deep inside Kyrgyzstan. A cherubic young officer with a Mongol face and blue eyes waved us, AK-47 in hand, out of the car into a pitiful shack. Plaster peeled from walls surrounding a desk and stool, a single bulb clung tentatively to the ceiling. A teapot stood in the corner.

“Welcome to Kyrgyzstan,” he smiled, inspecting my passport. “Some tea?” he asked, “We don’t get many Americans here.”

I shot a pleading glance at Ishmael but he shook his head. “We’re in a hurry,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders apologetically and walked off.

We plunged into the chill Central Asian night; a full moon glimmered above morphing the blackness into dreamy shadows. The shack receded, until only a pinhead sized point of light remained a thousand feet below in the valley. High above now in the Ala-bel Pass (10,443) a parade of yurts lined the roadside. Lights waved in the keening wind, beacons of conviviality selling kumys—that toxic nomad brew of fermented mare’s milk.

“Kumys,” the Wrestler roared, stabbing a forefinger the size of a Churchill cigar at the window. Electricity surged through the car.

“I want kumys!” he said, his golden teeth reflected in the dim-light.

Ishmael ground the Volga to a halt. The Wrestler leaped out of the car, ambling off towards a yurt like a lame hippo.

I stepped out into the wind. Faint but urgent haggling came from the yurt. Moonshine ricocheted off the mountaintops, a kaleidoscope of black and white dancing nervously across the lunarscape in front of me.

“Halfway,” I whispered and the wind carried the word back from where I came: the rich cities of the Silk Road, Samarkand and Bukhara; the empty Kizil Kum, Baku’s oily Caspian shore; Tbilisi’s schizophrenic architecture; rainy Batumi and bustling Trabzon; Istanbul, the Golden Horn, the last home of the wandering Turks.

And then my thoughts turned Eastward: a night in Naryn, across the Aat Bashy Range, over the Torugart Pass; down into East Turkestan and ye old Kashgar; towards the dunes of Dun-huang and the Jade Gate; Tibet, the Potala; Kathmandu, and India, the Crown Jewel.

Ishmael touched my shoulder. “We must go,” he said in a whisper.

Conquered by the great ships of human commerce, oceans are now but highways for material goods. The skies, once reserved for the imagination, are now full of metal tubes hurled across continents in time for the late night news. Travelers now arrive in hours—at most days—to places that once were remote and unattainable. Once a luxury only the wealthy, or the extremely (fool) hardy engaged in, traveling is now a bourgeois pursuit, commoditized and indistinguishable from tourism. I’m not arrogant enough to presume that what I’ve done is any different from (or better than) those who descend upon enclaves safe from the locals, full of amenities and bereft of any but the most prosaic of challenges—the occasional bout of diarrhea notwithstanding. Far too many real travelers have come before to indulge in that kind of fantasy.

But the underlying virtues of travel—and travel writing—have not changed. Satellites may have mapped the Earth’s undiscovered country but the human heart remains shrouded, its motives unexplained, most especially my own.

Why have I undertaken these journeys?

After fifteen years, thirty-five nations and several hundred thousand miles I’m no closer to an answer than when I began. What I do know, the central truth, as it were, is the troubling knowledge that I find more acceptance and fellowship with foreigners than I do at home surrounded by family and friends. This seems to me the most important question of my own travels.

At a minimum it informs much of why I travel, that I’m more comfortable, fulfilled and content when I am on the road. The peculiar angst I call ‘modernity’ seems not to sting quite so much when I’m moving from one place to another, over a cup of tea with a well-met stranger, stranded in deep reverie or just puzzling over some architectural oddity.

Tellingly, such moments of recognition, connections across a cultural chasm most will never have the opportunity to comprehend, matter more than anything I’ve done at home. Nothing measures up. Perhaps it’s all in the connection with my fellows that I find so addictive. Suddenly I’m no longer alone.

But a profound paradox is at work here. It’s a lonely pursuit, travel.

At moments I’ve met amazing people, like Misha, a small, proud man who drove me through the Zerafshan Valley around Samarkand. A Soviet-trained engineer now relegated to driving a taxi for the occasional tourist, Misha was a warehouse of stories, jokes and anecdotes. He entertained me with humorous antics, charmed me with his wit and his prodigious knowledge of “Glorious Samarkand,” as he called it. Translating for me when my Russian failed, indefatigable in his introductions, proudly showing off his home, his glorious city.

Once in Bombay I witnessed the saddest, most tragic suffering I’d ever seen. A half-mile walkway leads out to a Muslim shrine standing in the Arabian Sea. Waves lap onto a jetty filled with the discarded dregs of humanity; a hopeless boy missing an arm and leg crawls towards me; a covered woman, burns clearly visible on her outstretched hand—begs for a single rupee. Some of them huddle in twos and threes, unable to walk, open sores oozing pus, moaning. A nightmare scene awaiting an Indian Dickens.

At other times I’ve seen works of stupendous beauty, choked up, tearful, spellbound—if only I could hold on to the moment forever, explore just how precious, how close to the heart of mankind this place is. What unifies each scene is the essential loneliness of the experience, be it tragedy or transcendence. Each is transient and none can ever be fully shared with anyone else.

But the rewards, those can never be stolen. Recalled at a moments notice they are a salve, a poultice applied to the cruel banalities of modern life. At times like these I find comfort in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s lament for the traveler: “Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the [traveler] feel like himself, at home.”

Rarified mountain air pours in the windows. The Kumys sedates Ilhom and the Wrestler. I can feel his thunderous snores even now. Fatima sleeps. I doze fitfully.

Late in the night a bump in the road jolts me awake. No longer in the mountains, the Volga speeds down a straight road lined with kiosks selling strange products at an even stranger hour: fireworks, ramen noodles, vodka, cheap Chinese electronis; all proof Central Asia remains a trader’s paradise.

We arrive at my hotel around 2:30 AM.

Fatima gazes at me in a puzzled manner and grabs my arm as I pull my backpack from the trunk.

“Where will you go next?”

“India.”

“Why?”

I shrug my shoulders and reply, “Why not?”