Kerala

Written in 2000 for National Geographic Traveler. This was my first journey collaborating with the extraordinary photographer Macduff Everton. 

I’d have almost preferred not to go back to India. Over the last twenty years I’d made numerous journeys there, culminating in an exhausting odyssey along one of the most dangerous roads in the world. The book that resulted felt like an entire career; I’d seen most of what I wanted to see; and as much as I loved being among Indians, and the daily pleasures of the culture, I felt done with the place. Despite its perennial problems, India used to be an enchanting country to travel in. Amid the catastrophe of its billion people entering the 21st century, I did not find it so anymore.

The one part I still wanted to see was Kerala, the state at India’s southwestern tip. It is one of the country’s great paradoxes, with a dazed green light that only belongs to Southeast Asia. Its lush “backwaters” are an exalted universe unto themselves: a labyrinth of villages linked by lagoons, lakes, and natural canals whose web extends to a 350-mile coast of sunstruck beaches.

For years I’d heard Indians with all the facts at their fingertips describe Kerala in tones of wonder as a success story—the country’s highest literacy and life expectancy by far, a birth rate even lower than ours, its lowest income yet arguably its highest standard of living—plus a splendor not yet marred by huge, badly ventilated hotels. Skeptical as ever, I wanted to see Kerala for myself. I also hoped it might prove a promising first experience of the country for my wife, Kylée; a yoga teacher, she was already deep in the culture, but had never visited.

At least it would be calm. I knew Kerala held few of India’s usual religious tensions, with Hindus, Muslims, and Christians living amicably together for centuries. Most of the subcontinent had been exposed to the outside world and outside ideas through invaders; along the so-called Spice or Malabar Coast, on the sea route between West and East, the exposure had happened through trade, which tends to be more persuasive.

I put this all together and found myself secretly hoping that Kerala might remind me of the India I first saw decades ago—a quiet, humane countryside full of sustained natural beauty, breathable air, amid a visible architectural past—that I’ve watched rapidly disappear from the rest of the subcontinent. The one guarantee I trusted was the people, who are a constant joy of travel here; for outsiders, the doors to the Indian house are always open.

My first morning in Kerala I awoke to the realization that, unwittingly, I’d saved the best of India for last. I was roused at dawn by devotional music from the Hindu temple just across the lagoon. The day before, we’d drifted to our small hotel—a few bungalows perched by the water—in a carved skiff poled by boatmen, past coconut groves with village houses somewhere among them, following a tropical river. The temple, hidden by palms, lay on a beach which faced both the lagoon and the Arabian Sea. I watched a morning haze lift on a horizon of figures gathering fishing nets as surf unfurled along the outer belt of sand. Nearer, men were doing improbable stretching exercises in time to the music. (“You see?” said my wife. “Their clean diet, amid all this heat, makes for an incredibly flexible body.”)

Those songs, broadcast at all hours, signalled the festival which started that night and lasted several more: ceremonial elephants arrayed on the sands, hot-coal walkers, a cadre of urgent drummers, devotees spinning into a frenzy by torchlight as a golden mask of the god was carried in a palanquin up the beach. When it finally ended, and the lagoon was peaceful once more, I felt stunned and sleep-deprived; but this was the India I’d hoped to see again.

People come to Kerala for different reasons. Some do two monumental weeks in the rest of the country and, exhausted by the guidebook sights, take a few days here to recover, usually on a beach or the backwaters. Others visit Kerala’s prolific spice and rubber plantations, and its wildlife preserves farther inland. Or, like one returning Indian I met who was an electronics executive in Atlanta (“My name’s Hasmukh—just call me Harry!”), you could come here not for the waters, but for an annual ayurvedic tune-up.

“This is like nowhere else in India,” he told me. “You can relax. You can get cured. I’m doing five days of ayurvedic treatment starting tomorrow. Traditional medicine. Herbs, medicated oils, massage, the works. A real Kerala specialty, going back not a few centuries but a few millennia. A friend of mine with a bad back is coming for a whole month of treatment.”

This struck me as a truly strange idea: to leave India healthier than when you arrived. I always expect to fly out with bronchitis. But since the air here seemed clear, what intrigued me more was Kerala’s unmatched, longstanding reputation for several performing arts, especially the epic, gaudy rituals of Kathakali theater. (Unlike most first-rate Indian culture, Kathakali rarely reaches the West.) So I decided on a coastal route south to north, from the area around the state’s capital, Trivandrum, to its most historic trading port, Cochin, with as much time in watery beauty as possible, and plenty of live music and theater along the way.


Much of Kerala lives by fishing. Early one morning I left my bungalow at Lagoona Davina (a resort named for its creator, an adaptable English ex-model) and got poled across the lagoon. I walked beside the Arabian Sea, in gathering sunlight, to a village where boats in yellow, green, white, and blue stripes were pulled up. More were arriving, with weighted nets finer than dental floss, full of glinting fish. It often took twenty men, their heads wound with cloth, to haul a large vessel up the sand. Some boats bore names like St. Thomas, whose purported 1st century visit is spoken of like an eyewitness account. A chaotic wholesale fish market was dominated by women fluttering their hands and bargaining hard, ululating at the male prices. It was seven-thirty, and already very hot. On this beach, at least, despite Kerala’s growing tourism, I was the only foreigner.

This was well outside Trivandrum, a hectic city which most visitors sensibly hurry through to get to its nearby beaches, the alternative to my lagoon. I had a look one day at the most popular of those, Kovallam, which must’ve been gorgeous twenty years ago; it’s now a tourist ghetto of handicraft shops, snack bars, concrete hotels, and saried Indians wading modestly among the daring European bikinis. With luck it will remind the rest of Kerala what should not be allowed to happen.

Trivandrum itself was worth an afternoon. Its art museum was a huge mansion in classic Keralan style: high airy interior, cartoony colors, ornate crossbeams and stained glass. The city had several architectural marvels—a huge temple, a spiralling coffee house like a saffron-stained Guggenheim—and linguistic marvels as well. For years I’ve collected Indian commercial names, and Trivandrum gave me Brilliance College, Hotel Hilten, and Oriental Manures Ltd. This is the India I can never get enough of.

Better yet was a forty-mile side trip to the Padmanabhapuram Palace of Travancore, historically linked to Kerala, now in a neighboring state. This rosewood-and-teak treasure, probably the finest wooden building in the subcontinent, was a royal capital for 400 years. Its sleek white walls, crisscross geometries, and sloping pagoda roofs evoked centuries of happy trading ties with the Chinese; its masterpiece was a dance hall with an insanely polished black floor and sculpted stone pillars crowded with tigers, snakes, lotus blooms, dragons, and barefoot busty maidens cupping oil lamps. I saw in this one site both the Keralan appreciation for foreign ideas, and the natural elegance of its people—both unusual qualities in the subcontinent.


I was trying to learn a few useful phrases of Malayalam, Kerala’s palindrome of a mother tongue, through a typically politicized language book (“Who can live by literacy alone? By reading can anyone fill his mouth and belly? ”). This is the only part of India I know where you can get innocently sandwiched in a teahouse argument about, say, contemporary international fiction, as I was, and find everybody around you passionately taking sides.

“Listen to me. Kundera’s last novel was his best.”

“What do you mean? It was pretentious rubbish. Tell me—yes, you, sir—what is your opinion, please?”

I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.”

“Can we be serious for a moment? You are both wrong. The man of the decade is Garcia Marquez. Dispute me if you like.”

“How did you read it? In Malayalam? You cannot get to know a book in translation, my friend, and judge it at all.”

“On the contrary, you avoid the trap of style. As everyone agrees—”

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the principal Malayalam newspaper is the second most widely read in the country, with a circulation of 8 million. Up in Delhi the children beg for rupees; in Kerala they plead for a pen.

And it made perfect sense that this state of avid, argumentative readers was so enthusiastic about other arts. Several evenings at my resort, I’d already been surprised by the high quality of the live music, an experience repeated throughout my journey. Usually it was a violinist, male singer, and mridingam drummer, often accompanying a Mohiniattam dancer of languorous classical gestures, clad in gold and white. This was what Indians themselves loved about Kerala: good art was simply everywhere.

But the eminent magician Professor Muthukad, who started his own Academy of Magical Sciences in order to keep a rich Indian tradition of illusionists alive, surprised me even more.

I saw him perform to a packed house in Trivandrum. With his dark mustache and tough-guy walk he resembled a hero from the melodramatic Bombay cinema, his every move accentuated by glycerine Hindi pop music, but beneath the kitsch he was a fine magician. A Keralite, he performed all over India; he’d soon dazzle New York with his two-hour show of imprisoned maidens galore. He made goddesses appear under a mirrored pyramid; in exotic tableaux he set fire to one slave girl and dismembered another, who talked gaily throughout. He tore India’s biggest film weekly, Screen, into tiny bits and reassembled them—an act of social criticism. My favorite trick was his simplest, when without fuss he made full whiskey bottles multiply like mad from two yellow tubes. He kept vanishing and instantly popping up elsewhere, and he talked more rapidly than anyone on earth.


I was wondering if the backwaters could live up to their promise. Our entry point would be the town of Kottayam. No Indian pleasure is more reliable than its trains, so we made the northward journey there from Trivandrum by rail. For two hours we rattled beside verdant canals, rice fields, and coconut palms—although Kerala is the most densely populated state, it often feels the sparsest, without India’s usual bleak crashing cities.

My wife and I were sharing a compartment with a local railways superintendent who pointed out at every stop that we were “absolutely, rigorously on time, sir.” Though predominantly Hindu, 20% of Kerala’s people are Christian, and when a pastel church flashed past mid-jungle, no village in sight, I mentioned that unusual figure and said, “But from all the churches everywhere you’d guess it was the other way round.”

He smiled proudly. “Back when there were no Christians in ancient Rome, twenty centuries ago, there were already Christians in Kerala.” Like many here, he traced his family faith all the way to Saint Thomas.

Kottayam is a town that thrives on the written word. Its many publishers are inundated by manuscripts from Malayalam novelists, and one house claims to put out a book every day. I was heartily in search of gentle countryside, but first I wanted to visit St. Mary’s, a 16th century church with a rare treasure on its arched ceiling: 99 recessed squares of flowers, birds, and angels’ heads—early, naive Portuguese paintings in vegetable hues, from the era when that country was a power on the subcontinent.

Once inside, I found myself the unexpected guest at a wedding. As fans whirred patiently, the fluorescent lights burned and the dark-frocked priests and video cameramen and the entire congregation chanted along. Two more Indian strangers (in this case, Christians) got hitched, sweaty in their finery, having met only once. Today they wore the shell-shock of a customary arranged marriage, but having seen Indian weddings before and come back to visit later, I knew that next year would probably find them a cozy, expectant pair. “Will they be happy?” the bridegroom’s cousin said to me. “Of course they will be happy. When they get to know each other.”

We were staying a few miles from Kottayam at Coconut Lagoon, a resort entirely of 19th century houses of white stucco and dark teak, “imported” from elsewhere in the state, set in palm groves beside the Vembanad Lake by a long-established local family. (This architecturally faithful and ecologically sound tourism is, in India, the norm only in Kerala, unfortunately.) From here we could make daily expeditions into the backwaters, which are Kerala’s glory.

Soon after dawn the next day we set out on a chugging boat, an updated African Queen, through the misty backwaters. The waterways, 100 feet across, were supported by meticulous stone walls and bordered with trees—hanging creepers, banyan, mango, jackfruit, banana, but mostly palms leaning out to seek sunlight. Men and women were busy in their soapy first ablutions. Butterflies, herons, eagles, ducks, mynahs, cormorants, and snake birds—darters with serpentine necks—patrolled everywhere. Paths led along both sides: a fish vendor on a bicycle, a paper boy striding swiftly to keep up with us, grinning, waving.

The boat chugged beneath plank bridges. At times the backwater became choked with the hyacinth pads that proliferate like beautiful weeds, clogging traffic—a fisherman, paddling home after a night’s work, followed gratefully in the larger boat’s cleared wake. I liked getting around Kerala this way rather than by car; for one thing, other boats are never plowing straight at you. These so-called backwaters may follow a main road and divide a village or town with its bakery, primary school, fabric and jewelry shops, market, temples, churches, pharmacy, YMCA, “typewriting institute” (five cents per page, no mistakes, no waiting), occasionally even a satellite dish. The house architecture was often grand: curved arches, starry lattice-work, and always sloping tile roofs.

Here, too, were bars with hammer-and-sickle posters on the faded walls—Kerala had the world’s first elected Communist government, in 1957—and the elaborate remains of stone gates guarded by sculpted lions or a silver statue of Jesus shaded by a sun-umbrella. The canal kept opening to lesser canals, with locks for controlling the water level, sacred cows asleep like bookends, children paddling a tiny skiff to school, men immersing themselves then surfacing with armfuls of dark silt to use as fertilizer. Vast ricefields stretched away in Mondrian blocks. It was all in reverse, a puzzle-world of water irrigated by orderly fingers of land.

The ultimate way to enjoy the backwaters, I found, was to stay a night or two on a converted kettuvallam, a gliding Kerala cargo boat traditionally used for transporting, say, thirty tons of rice. It looks awkward—a giant eggshell of coir-rope (made from local coconuts) knotted on a web of bamboo and covered with closely-woven thatch. Flaps lift like wings on each side, letting in light but not heat. In recent years the dormant trade of constructing them has bounced back, due to visitors. My wife and I boarded right at Coconut Lagoon, and were surprised how comfortable and spacious the kettuvallam was: two suites with enormous beds, modern bathrooms, and a salon near the bow open to breezes.

The point is not to get anywhere, but to drift languidly through ethereal beauty. It was astonishingly romantic to watch sunset from one kettuvallam among several, while the three boatmen set out hanging lanterns and a pearly glow faded behind the scrim of palms. Dinner was an abundant eleven platters of Keralan cuisine, built around subtly spiced fresh fish. As the coconut islands darkened, the shimmering water doubled the infinite heaventree of stars. Waking at dawn we found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of fishermen’s skiffs on immense Lake Vembanad. It was like time travel, into a quiet morning of another century which I was reluctant to leave.


An oil lamp is lit, and two vocalists begin chanting a verse above the hammer-and-tongs of percussionists. The arrival of actors is unearthly: when a god appears, the audience may prostrate themselves. There are bursts of argument, brandished swords, leaping, to-and-froing with the hands in dispute, harsh imprecations and threats of disembowelling. The actors’ faces, hands, and bodies are elastic, alive to every gesture in the chanted text as the warlike percussion batters on.

Kathakali (“story/movement”) is a unique Keralan performance art that developed in recent centuries out of ancient Sanskrit theater, though it has as much dance as acting in it. Performances are often free and may last all night, usually presented in the open air by Hindu temples that hire a Kathakali troupe. The plays’ texts come from the two Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The effect is hypnotic, powerful, and even terrifying, because the performers loom overhead and at times leave the stage to cut a swathe through the rapt, swaying crowd, who part for the swordplay—the figures now storming at each other, now elegantly dancing, now brooding, now bathing in an enemy’s blood. The actors themselves do not speak any lines. It’s like watching performers act out The Iliad while Homer’s verse is proclaimed in ancient Greek; naturally, a great deal of the experience gets missed if you have no grasp of the language.

I saw the greatest Kathakali troupe perform at the impressive open-sided theater of the state Kalamandalam School in Cheruthuruthy, north of Cochin, having spent an afternoon watching master classes in theater, dance, and music. Students (from age thirteen) live at the school; the rigorous classes begin before dawn. Because Kathakali is hard on the body, and can take ten years to master—every actor learns all the roles—it’s traditionally been an all-male art, though there’s now a female troupe performing throughout Kerala.

All that practice, all those exercises, are designed to transmit the nuances of character through the extraordinary costumes and makeup which announce the broader outlines. The elaborate masklike makeup is applied by specialists, and involves geometric paper cutouts, fringed and folded and pasted-on. The costumes are gigantic encasements. These preparations take about five hours, as the performers gradually become mythical characters.

Tourists usually see a highly abbreviated performance, which makes sense, as so much is inevitably lost on a foreign audience. It can still be a powerful, primal experience, and because Kathakali is done in an intimate space, the kings and gods are only a few feet away. To see one victoriously pulling out cotton strips of an enemy’s entrails, and laughing in triumph while covering a maiden (played by a man) with them, is to realize that the scope of theater is far wider than you ever thought. At the end, there was a delightful moment of healing calm when Krishna renounced the savage blood-frenzy—the god bringing humanity back to man after the madness of war—and it was as eloquently expressed in Kathakali, with all the forgiveness, the amused, rueful benevolence of the god, as I have ever seen it.


Long this coast’s busiest port, Cochin—Kerala’s northern hub and most important city—has three parts, linked by bridges and frequent ferryboats: mainland Ernakulam, British-era Willingdon Island, and the earlier, evocative Fort Cochin, where we stayed. There a pink and yellow architectural past of hopeful colonizers survives in grand Dutch and Portuguese townhouses and stately churches (Vasco da Gama was buried in one), and in the airy British layout of private club, solemn residences, and cricket pitch.

The loveliest part of Fort Cochin was Jew Town, a traditional quarter of shuttered houses in ghost-shades of once-audacious blues, greens, and ochres, often with a Star of David worked into the grillwork of a window. Jew Town’s 16th century synagogue was the earliest in the British Commonwealth, but Jews were already long settled in Cochin. Many old houses are now antique shops aimed cannily at foreign tourists, and the quarter remains the nerve center of Kerala’s spice commerce.

The Jewish Synagogue was, oddly, both simple and lavish, with a white plank ceiling and plain walls, ornate hanging lamps, and 1100 Chinese blue and white floor tiles. Services are still held on Fridays and Saturdays for a dwindling community, but I was there early in the week, so on the advice of the Indian synagogue-guide I waited around one afternoon with a few other visitors to meet an elderly, small-boned man of pale complexion who sometimes stopped by. At first he was hesitant to talk (“We are not animals in a zoo!”) and when I asked his name he said only, “Nameless,” with a faint smile.

“The Nameless Jew,” I said. “My relatives, too. In the war.”

At this he thawed. “There are fifteen of us left here. Only three are young, like you. What will be the future? I don’t know. Whoever is left will decide. There are five thousand Jews in India—lots up in Bombay. This is the oldest location, but eventually it will be over here. And the truth is, we have never been persecuted. Not in two thousand years. This is the only country in the world where that is so. Not once—only by the Portuguese. But never by Indians.”

With the few other visitors standing around, he opened ornate doors to reveal a silver-clad Torah, containing the five books of Moses, and a gold crown, a gift of the local maharajah back in 1805. “You see?” he said. “We were always welcome here.”

That tolerance made Kerala special in India—the worldly tolerance of traders who’d seen the value of their spices rise and fall across many generations. Around the corner, in an old house filled with mountains of fragrant ginger, a dapper man told me with a shrug, “The classical importance of Cochin in spices has gone. You don’t need to actually come here to trade now, because of telephones and roads. The best cardamom in the world comes from Kerala, but the South American price is half ours, so we can’t compete—we sell it only locally.”

“Does spice run in your family?”

“So far, yes. My great-grandfather started this business fifty years ago. I’ve been at it twenty-seven years. Some Jews sold this building to a coir-merchant, then I bought it from him.” Behind him a painting of Christ hung on the lustrous blue walls. “Years ago there were sixty spice merchants like me in Jew Town. Now, about ten. We sell ginger, betel nuts, turmeric, and black pepper especially, mostly to Europe and the Arabian Gulf.”

I saw his speculating colleagues in action upstairs in the venerable Indian Pepper & Spice Trade Association Building. In an air-conditioned room with a polished floor, two dozen booths—each with a fan and several phones—were manned by forty brokers in pepper futures. They cursed, they napped, they gesticulated theatrically and shouted like wrestlers at close range. (All were barefoot, a rule I shall suggest to the New York Stock Exchange the next time I get invited.) Volcanic eruptions of energy linking buyer to seller via these amiable middlemen would subside just as quickly, while a woman in a red sari came and went, talking of Kerala’s condiment.

Here, I thought, were past and present reconciled, in a room of spice traders bickering on cell phones while those lush backwaters were a mere hour and a century away. I’d been right to come back. I hoped Kerala’s genius for subsistence, which in India looks almost like prosperity, would survive—and that its coconut palms would multiply faster than its hotels.

Antigua & Chichicastenango

Written in 2000 for the New York Times Magazine. This was my last collaboration with photographer Macduff Everton. 

So much of travel is an experience of time. We rely on certain places to give us a portrait of the past, and on our imaginations to summon up what’s missing and shut out what doesn’t belong. This is why a Venice is rare: a place seemingly so well-preserved, so complete, that we can enjoy the illusion of walking around in another century.

And why, for a decade, I’d wanted to go back to Antigua, the colonial city rimmed by volcanos in Guatemala’s highlands. Once one of three Spanish capitals of the New World, Antigua was so repeatedly shattered by earthquakes that during the late 18th century it got evacuated and abandoned by government edict. Throughout the last century it has crawled back to life. Many ruins were repaired and rebuilt; writers like Aldous Huxley, visiting before World War II on the heels of a small expatriate community, recounted in impassioned tones (“one of the most romantic cities in the world”) its baroque splendor and half-devastated beauty.

During Guatemala’s recently ended 36-year civil war, the most brutal in the hemisphere, Antigua retained a magnificence and relative calm that still attracted visitors. Rather like a Guatemalan Krakow, Antigua held out as the heart of the country’s intellectual and cultural life, with plenty of museums, concerts, galleries, bookstores, and language schools. (It’s also within easy reach of Chichicastenango, the highlands town with a huge, age-old biweekly Mayan market.) I visited in 1990 for a few days and, like many foreigners, considered staying for months to rent a room inexpensively and study Spanish. But I moved on.

Now, having recently returned, I can think of no other city, not even Venice, where the architectural past is so enveloping and the present so easily held at bay. Antigua was as graceful as I remembered: a stately, walkable Spanish dream of lavish 18th century houses—block after dignified block of red or yellow, gray or green or blue stucco walls like rinds of seared fruit, with modest balconies and formal white moldings and tiled roofs. As if confirming the propriety of the secluded life within, their wooden doors are massive, bigger than horse-carriages, with knockers shaped like lions’ heads, pointed shields, arcing fish, or hands. Cars are forced to roll slowly along the uneven, immaculate cobblestoned streets, and no billboards or shop signs are allowed. One day in Antigua made me realize how much a modern fatigue that we take for granted is simply visual overload.

At the end of every street rose the slopes of volcanos, now plumed in mists, now glittering green in broad sunlight, looming like a false threat when for centuries the true danger has relentlessly come from below—from the uncertain, tremor-prone ground. It could be an allegory of Guatemala’s tragic politics, that the very earth might swallow up anyone’s life without warning.

But that danger seemed in the past. As a French travel agent who has lived in Antigua for over a decade pointed out to me, there’s now even a Guatemalan middle class. “And for people in the capital, Antigua has become the chic weekend spot. It’s driven the house rentals crazy. To buy a large old house is now a million dollars, because there’s nowhere like Antigua, and it’s only a square mile. Then after you buy the house it’s impossible to change it. You want to put a new doorway in an old wall? Forget it.”


As Friday afternoon waned, I sat in the Plaza Mayorbeneath purple jacaranda trees and watched the gentle promenade of the town, infinitely more relaxed than on my first visit. A band of brass, clarinets, and drums took their time between numbers; later they were replaced by a marimba orchestra who kept fizzing well after dark. Indians (the women in striped dresses and baggy blouses) stood in line outside the banks, whose tellers must be among the most sluggish in the world.

Guatemalans are a beautiful people—the Mayans more than the ladinos of primarily Spanish blood. Built low to the ground, they trot along at top speed with no effort, often with a pot or a load of blankets balanced impossibly on their heads, walking faster than everyone else, awkward in their posture but with stolid purpose. Their faces are open, with much inward delight and the struggle well masked. It seemed evident that the two peoples have always moved at two different tempi.

Everyone met on equal footing in Antigua’s hub, that plaza with its columned arcades, cathedral, cafes, and municipal nerve center. In recent years all the street lights have become 19th century-style lampposts, faithfully copied, like the lanterns hung from hotels, restaurants, and private homes. The result, as night fell, was that the shadows belonged to another age; the lamps came alive, as if upon a classic novel into which modern people and their ghostlike motorcars trespassed.

I saw the original lamps in the Colonial Museum, right on the square, along with a collection of cannons, pistols, and the busty stone mermaids lopped off the central fountain in the last century and later replaced. There were also crossbows, drums, rifles, spears, and arrows—pride in violence, and pride in the history of Guatemala (independent since 1821, over a dozen revolutions in the 20th century alone).

Next door a Museum of the Book contained an early edition of Don Quixote and volumes made here on the first printing press in the New World (1660), whose replica resembles a fiendish torture device. Many were treatises or grammars of indigenous languages, like the Maya, whose books the Spanish conquistadores had systematically destroyed. (To paraphrase Huxley: I can appreciate irony on my own, I do not need to have it underlined for me.)

Beyond the printed story there was anecdote. Many families have been here for many generations, and tales from before the 1773 earthquake and Antigua’s abandonment still circulate.

“Oh, there are a lot of stories,” an amateur historian named Hector told me. “Centuries ago there was a count in Antigua. Very important, always coming and going, because back in those days Guatemala wasn’t what it is today, no sir, it went from Chiapas in Mexico all the way through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Anyway, the count had a wife of considerable beauty. And whenever he was away he left her in the care of a servant—not another woman, but a butler. Eventually, you know, there was an understanding between the lady of the house and the butler. One day the count came back from his adventures and surprised them in the middle of, well, their own adventures. So the count got his men to open one wall as if for a cupboard, and he had the butler walled in. Alive.” He paused to savor this solution. “This was in a house right on the square, that’s now the Cafe Condesa, in the back. We always used to hear the story, just like many ghost stories Antigua is full of. Very dubious history, of course. So some of us were surprised a few years ago when the owners were doing repairs on the cafe. They had to open up a wall, and what did they find? A skeleton, my friend, buried in the wall. Standing up.”

The 18th century Antigua that survives is on a smaller scale than the 16th century original, for the early massive earthquakes made clear that those grand, Madrid structures were untenable. A typical story was the Church of El Merced, my favorite—a gigantic yellow wedding cake decorated in white icing, with children playing soccer among tortilla-women on its square. Its history summarizes Antigua. Construction begun in 1548; ruined by a huge earthquake in 1717. After years of restoration, another massive quake in 1773. Then centuries of neglect. Now mostly rebuilt, in the still-shattered arcade of its convent stands the biggest fountain in Central America—nude angels containing the waters—with bougainvillaea grown cunningly into the broken walls above.

Those earthquakes had never halted the appeal of the many-domed Church of San Francisco, one of the largest in Antigua, similarly destroyed and rebuilt but with one chapel which never closed. It is devoted to a beatified 17th century Franciscan monk named Pedro, buried within awaiting sainthood, who still attracts pilgrims praying for his aid. On display are his tattered clothes, the skull he used “for meditating on death,” and a pile of wooden crutches no longer needed by those “who received favors.”


These days most foreigners came to stay for weeks on end, studying Spanish; Antigua was full of young Europeans getting, say, thirty hours of private language studies a week for around sixty bucks. Some were from the USA, but unfortunately a lot of visitors from the States were still fighting a war.

This was for the religious loyalties of the Guatemalans, who have (depending on their background) a vast array of surviving Indian beliefs and also their own peculiar version of Catholicism, which incorporates an elaborate set of Mayan images. You’d think the centuries-old confluence of these two rivers would be enough, but a relentless North American stream of evangelists and “bridge-builders” from the Christian right were determined to divert and convert wherever possible. As on my last visit, I kept running into hordes of these self-satisfied do-gooders in sensible shoes, wielding their pamphlets and maps—a United Fruit Company of the soul. In the phone book for this part of Guatemala alone I counted six columns of such organizations; the result was a sign you might see in Antigua windows, saying in Spanish:

WE DO NOT ACCEPT HOUSE CALLS AND PROPAGANDA

One expatriate I could admire left his house open to the public. This was the Casa Popenoe, dating from 1632, the result of a love affair with Guatemala by an agronomist, Wilson Popenoe, and his wife Dorothy, an archaeologist who authored the first guidebook to Antigua and died young. (Their daughters occupy the house.) Louis Adamic wrote a happy 1937 memoir of an extended sojourn there that details how the house, one of the oldest in Antigua, was carefully restored by the Popenoes after they bought it as a ruin in 1929.

It is built typically around an inner patio whose calm garden is ruled by a great tree and bowl-like fountain and linked to smaller courtyards, their white walls lined with a superb collection of old bowls and tiles. The austere bedrooms, the library and salons, are full of colonial portraits and grave carved furniture. I clambered up spiral stairs to Popenoe’s study, a remnant of the colonial-era mail service—formerly a carrier-pigeon coop, with 115 bird nooks. Then onto the roof, with an all-embracing view of Antigua and its brooding volcanos swathed in mists and green forest. No wonder Adamic had felt he was in a writer’s heaven.


Chichicastenango is a highlands town of 5,000, clinging to its hills a couple of hours’ drive northwest of Antigua. I went, like so many foreigners, for its monumental Thursday and Sunday market, which takes over the small main square between two churches and becomes a dense metropolis of stalls shaded by plastic tarps on rough wood poles. The market is sometimes sniffily described as touristic, but this is a peripheral view, for only the outer stalls are for foreigners—weavings, statues, pottery, and masks. (The specialty of each strolling Mayan girl was tiny prayer dolls for children to tell their worries to, crowded into a box the size of her palm.) One morning delight was to see visitors turning themselves into porters, lopsiding through the market muttering "Permeso," with sacks of newly-bought blankets cradled on their backs.

It is best to attack a market like this with a purpose. To decide you cannot live, say, without a jaguar mask allows you to disregard the lion, devil, quetzal, deer, monkey, dog, crocodile, cock, horse, wolf, conquistadore, parrot, bull, Moor, and cow masks. Certainly the quality has gone down with more visitors; virtually none of those masks had ever seen ceremonial use, and there was a better selection in Antigua, which wasn’t the case a decade ago.

But most of the Chichi market, as always, is aimed at locals. I penetrated it by one lane of stalls and immediately there were no more woven bedspreads but rather the thread to make them with, and multitudes of household items: oranges, batteries in all sizes, coffee, live chickens, rope, watermelon slices, cassettes blaring competitively, a crowded restaurant with no white faces.

Men were always pushing their way through the throng, mostly Indians as small as a child (or even, dauntingly, children) doubled over, staggering resolutely forward with an organized mountain of clay pots in a nylon net on their backs. Many Guatemalan men, carrying nothing, still walk in a forward slump, as if a weight has been lifted but they can’t enjoy or even feel its absence. You come away from this country with a renewed admiration for what a determined back can bear.

Every now and then the steady market chatter was punctuated by a barrage of firecrackers; the trick was that if you suddenly saw children nearby running away, it was best to run with them.

I took a brief walk from the market square to the cemetery. It was visible from much of Chichi and made a kind of rainbow town unto itself, packed onto a ridge. Some large graves were stucco versions of churches but in bright colors; among them were simpler Mayan graves, mounds of earth surmounted by a cross with a name; others were cairns of fire-blackened rocks. Before a few graves, fires were lit among freshly-laid flowers, and women and men swung censers, spewing fumes. Rites were intoned by the professional worshippers and repeated by family members. Behind the cemetery the hillsides of pines fanned out above the town.

The larger of the square’s two churches, Santo Tomas, was immensely touching. Past women selling bunches of flowers, up a series of Mayan steps—for the church was created around 1540 on the site of an ancient temple—through a side door, as was proper, I entered a sanctuary full of people. The air was dense with incense, the scent of burnt offerings, the souls of the dead, and the weight of deeply felt prayers. Small stone slabs covered with burning candles received flower petals and ash under the ministrations of chuchkajaues, Quiche Maya prayer men, while a cofrade (an elder, not a priest) led the Catholic service at the back, where the white-walled church ended in muscular carved altars of dark wood inset with old statues and intense paintings.

The force of this strange alliance, between the rituals of the Mayan past and Catholicism with its passionate sense of blood suffering, was overwhelming. At this church a Spanish friar around 1702 at the last minute discovered the extraordinary manuscript, now lost, of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche creation myth, secretly written down in the 1550s in the Roman alphabet. Fortunately the friar translated it into Spanish, and saved it for the world.


Back in Antigua, I decided to get my horoscope mapped by a Mayan priestess named Rosa Maria Cabrera, a “bundle-gatherer,” one of about two hundred such worldwide, designated by elders. I found her when I stepped into a Spanish language school near the plaza to investigate prices; she had a kind of apartment-office off the courtyard. It was impossible even for a skeptic like myself not to take her seriously—a striking, dark-haired woman in her late forties with enormous energy, who spoke very eloquently about the mystic tradition she was part of. Indeed, she was rarely here, but usually off in the countryside.

Rosa Maria kept a replica of a Mayan altar, a room of masks, crosses, and statues, as a way of explaining to people the tradition in what she does—“so there’s no confusion between witchcraft, which is what the Catholics accused us of, and the reality, which is to venerate the four elements of earth, air, fire, water. These are equally represented in the Mayan cross, which unlike the Christian cross, is evenly balanced.” A day later she produced my astral chart in terms of the Mayan calendar; it included an accounting of the nawales (protective spirits) with me since birth and, alas, an accurate description of my character.

Not a day has gone by since I first visited Antigua when, at home, I have not thought of the place—largely because of the old masks I brought back in 1990. I purchased many of them from a Guatemalan of German background, Gwendolyn Ritz, who ran a shop in Antigua called the Casa de Artes which has been the best such for many decades. I learned, sadly, that she had drowned a few years ago; her granddaughter Karla runs the shop now, and keeps up the family practice of giving lectures on traditional arts and crafts in the schools.

Karla had mixed feelings about Antigua’s newfound chic. “We’ve become a fashionable city. So anyone from the capital with money wants to rent a house here. And they don’t necessarily see it the way we locals do—as a cultural patrimony that we have to look after with great care.”

The pall of violence was off Guatemala now, but Antigua remained much as I remembered, full of glorious ruins awaiting repair. The town’s restoration will probably never be finished, and its poignant magic comes from this. Everywhere you walk, in virtually every block (the Mayans hurrying past), you are reminded how vulnerable are the works of man, that nothing can ultimately withstand the whims of the earth—certainly not the architecture of empires.

Dream of Kashmir

Written in 1999 for National Geographic Traveler magazine

As our century draws to a close there seem fewer and fewer places that, mythologized by the past, have survived intact through our era of over-tourism. At the same time, other remote places that a resourceful traveller could happily rummage around in twenty years ago have, due to political upheavals, become areas to avoid—and may remain off-limits for our lifetimes. Iran, Afghanistan, parts of Central America and of Africa come quickly to mind. But none of those were ever among the world’s popular tourist spots. They were 19th century myths associated with derring-do and explorers, not with a vision of pure, eternal beauty accessible to anyone—like Kashmir.

In 1984, at the end of an Indian journalism assignment and just before the summer monsoon, I left an overheated Delhi and flew north to Srinagar, in the Vale of Kashmir, to relax for a week among the ethereal lakes and mountains. Who then could’ve predicted that one of the most beautiful places on earth, the Kashmir of transcendental serenity and the enchanted name, would soon close down even to Indian tourists and become utterly off-limits for foreigners, with a reputation for kidnappings and unleashed political violence?

When I recall that time—having since written a travel memoir about the subcontinent—I see how much of the best of India, and how many of its difficulties, were made eloquent to me in that week in Kashmir. The technicolor natural beauty; the daily humor and annoyances; the constant theater of the people; even the legacy of British imperial rule, in the paradox of comfortable houseboats where you could escape the torpor of the Ganges plain and be pampered by proud Muslim tribesmen, living here since ancient times, now (with colonial irony) trained to be hoteliers.

Most of all, there was a particular mystical charm unique to Kashmir, which anyone who visited it then remembers with a flood of nostalgia and disbelief. To be in the Vale is to be becalmed, and to leave the world, and the concerns of the world, really far behind. This is partly geographical, for until airplanes came to India, the valley—a hundred miles by twenty—was reachable only by camel, elephant, horseback, and sore feet.

Remoteness is partly why people visit tropical islands, of course, but much of Kashmir’s profound allure is philosophical, too. There is something unfathomably unreal about the place, in which the laws of time and motion do not apply and are quickly forgotten. A day there can feel like a week, and a week feels like a month; every element haunts the memory as in a vaporous dream. To speak of Kashmir in such extreme terms is traditional, since it has always had this effect on everyone.

Kashmir had flourished most under Mogul rule, especially in the 17th century, when the emperor Jahangir built the Shalimar Gardens for his wife. The Vale then contained seven hundred such gardens, though only a few of those Mogul masterpieces remain. Jahangir’s dying wish was that Paradise resemble Kashmir.

When the new countries of India and Pakistan were carved out of British India in 1947, the princely state of Kashmir was the odd man out. Largely Muslim, yet owned by a Hindu maharajah, it became part of India and has been a flashpoint with Pakistan ever since. Three wars have erupted over its potential independence; separatist violence closed its hotels from 1989 until recently. Last year the situation was quieter, but there is no telling if Kashmir may settle down enough to reenter the guidebooks.


When I visited there were few such fears, and despite the fact it was midsummer, when most foreigners avoid India’s heat, there were plenty of tourists. Srinagar, ringed by the rough, slate-gray mountains of the lower Himalayas, is the Venice of India; all life occurs around water. The capital looks medieval, built from stone or wood and peopled by canny-faced tribesmen from all over the East, with smoky alleys, trundling horse-carts, cluttered bazaars, sooty utensil-shops and creaking bridges. I wandered among exiled Tibetans lugging huge, hairy carpets past merchants’ rickety houseboats and fabric shops of blazing color. After the parched heat of Delhi I found the hypnotic relief of magnificent blossoming trees and a cool, watery breeze. Except for the tourists, none of that has changed.

Shikharas—narrow, flat-bottom skiffs that ply the Vale’s lakes and their complex tributary systems—are Kashmir’s taxis, gondolas, trucks, buses, stores, and bicycles. Some shikharas are utilitarian and worn; others, with mildly racy names, have sofas in yellows, reds, and purples, and matching canopies.

There is only one way to fully enter Kashmir’s state of mind. I crossed Dal Lake in Lolita to the houseboat I’d reserved. It was about 120 feet by 20, intricately carved, with a roof deck and a shaded stern veranda facing the lake. Her bow was moored to the shore of a great island. Houseboats stretched away on both sides, mere meters apart; about five hundred cluster near Srinagar.

Next to us were the Prince of Vale, the Rolex, the Floating Heaven, the Pinafore, and the Free Love. Some looked a century old, with a comic air from being so immobilized. All had stern staircases to the water, a low-slung curve, an attached kitchen-boat and servants. My luxurious Tehran cost only twenty bucks a day with meals—this was also part of Kashmir’s perennial charm.

The Tehran’s manager was a wiry man named Ghulam. When I told him I was American, he seemed surprised.

I said, “Don’t you get many Americans on the Tehran?”

This was at the height of U.S.-Iran tension.

He said with real sorrow, “It is an unfortunate name, sir, but what can I do? It is not my houseboat.”

“How do Americans react?”

“They worry,” he said incredulously. “They worry.”

Here along the shore the freshwater lake was less than ten feet deep, and filled with wavering, submerged ferns. Out where the lake was deeper, and possibly hygienic, floated four grand white houseboats, for diving. I swam from them daily—the water warm and clear, with chiseled mountains fanned out all around.

My houseboat’s salon, with sofas and Kashmiri carpets, was flooded by sunlight off the lake. Beyond was a Victorian dining room, complete with mahogany table, lace tablecloths, polished silver. The two large suites had embroidered drapes, ornate woven blankets, and a cigar-box coziness belied by their up-to-date bathrooms. Over my suite’s desk hung a busty, Indianized reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

As a journalist and an enthusiastic traveller I am used to arriving somewhere with a long list of things to do, either for work or self-improvement. It felt strange to arrive in this exotic place and realize I was there only to let it lull me—that to nod off and dream while reading was in fact the point.

No wonder that during World War II the Dal Lake, with its Red Cross hospital, was a favorite convalescence spot. Soldiers got well there quickly, for it was easy to rent a houseboat and a willing Kashmiri girl. And what could be more soothing than to fall asleep to the groan of houseboats and the gulp of paddles as shikharas murmured past, going home for the night?


The tradition is to take breakfast on the stern veranda and window-shop from shikharas, a maritime Macy’s that pesters you ceaselessly with silver and jade jewelry, a shave, apples, nuts, carpets, a sip from a hookah, saffron, treasures from Tibet, flowers, papier-maché boxes, and shawls. These shawls were, since ancient times, important in the Vale’s trade, for Kashmir lies on a silk route. Thus the shawls reached Egypt; and once Napoleon’s soldiers brought them back to Paris, they became fashionable. The Empress Josephine owned hundreds, as Napoleon’s method of baring her shoulders was to fling her shawl into the fire—an allegory for what separatist violence has done to Kashmir.

Near the houseboat a small boy, by an island scarcely bigger than his shikhara, was digging up weeds and mud and loading them on board. To him it was all moveable real estate which he could sell. The boy pushed off with his heart-shaped paddle and set off down a tributary into town with his valuable muck, followed by a fleet of ducks and a shikhara of Japanese tourists clicking away.

Just three houseboats down stood a gabled hotel, white with red trim, on the larger island to which we were moored. In front was a modest lawn. Large letters on one wing read: HOTEL LEEWARD. Since arriving, the name had nagged at me. It seemed familiar, though I couldn’t fathom why. Then it came to me.

V. S. Naipaul, in his 1964 masterpiece on India, An Area of Darkness, devotes the happiest chapter of the book (“A Doll’s House on the Dal Lake”) to his three months in Srinagar. Naipaul, only thirty, had already published four novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, and his non-fiction examination of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage. Naipaul and his British wife Pat, seeking calm and privacy, stayed not on a houseboat but in the lake’s only hotel, just getting started.

There were numerous discrepancies. The tiny hotel claimed they had a flush-system; they had none. They agreed that before Naipaul moved in, a desk would appear. None did. Both these defects Naipaul got set right in a couple of days. When the light in his reading lamp burned out, he had to replace it himself. Other guests could be troublesome; one kept switching off the news on the radio. And Naipaul was continually being called upon by the hotel’s owner to intercede with the Srinagar Tourist Authority, to write recommendations of the premises, to invite important people over for tea.

Such a vocation was something of an ordeal. Yet Naipaul managed to produce in a single month (August, 1962) a masterly short novel of modern London, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. And his relations with the hotel staff are among the most memorable in An Area of Darkness.

“In those early days the hotel. . . had a rough-and-ready air. . . we were in the middle of the lake. Beyond the alert kingfishers, the fantastic hoopoes pecking in the garden, beyond the reeds and willows and poplars, our view unbroken by houseboats, there were the snow-capped mountains. Before me a nightcapped man, hopping about restlessly, and at the end of the garden a new wooden shed, his home, unpainted and warm against the gloom of low-hanging willows. . . .”

In those days it was appropriately misspelled Hotel Liward. Was it still run by Mr. Bhat (spelled by Naipaul Butt, as it’s pronounced—“smiling shyly behind his spectacles. . . abstracted”)? Was Aziz, his principal servant (“one of Snow White’s own men in a woolen nightcap”) still there, too? Aziz had accompanied Naipaul on a long pilgrimage, 20,000 strong, to the Cave of Amarnath in the mountains.

“Yes, of course, it is Mr. Bhat’s hotel. Where else, sir, would they be?”

I got paddled the short distance over to the hotel. Mr. Bhat was indeed at home, seated in shade among his roses and smoking abstractly from a great gurgling hookah. His hair was thin and white, as was his beard, he had an Ahab face, he nodded at the name Naipaul. He didn’t speak, his attention directed to the hookah.

Aziz came waddling downstairs, looking similarly unchanged, his shape hugely indefinite in slack gray robes. He wore the requisite white Muslim skull-cap, and I decided—to finish Naipaul’s simile—his name might be Bashful. Or had there been a Sly?

Lying, I said I was a friend of Naipaul’s, and Aziz went into a side office and came out with a photograph of the hotel as it’d been. I asked to see the suite where the Naipauls had stayed.

“Only one room left, sahib,” said Aziz. “Others—” He made a magical gesture that suggested infinite expansion, remodelling, expense. As he led me upstairs, he said, “And how is Mrs. Naipaul?”

“I think she’s fine.”

Aziz grinned apologetically, his moon-face tugging his whole body forward. “His book banned in India.” He looked sheepish, as if his own presence in its pages might be the cause.

“It’s not banned any more. I saw it in the Srinagar bazaar. Have you read it?”

He said, “We had a copy, but a German three months past take our copy.”

There was something endearing about waiting twenty years to still not read about yourself. I wondered what people had told him. Or had he read it, after all?

The room was square, nondescript, with two beds. It was almost wholly without character, except for the sounds of the lake, and hence not a bad room to write in. I suggested Aziz put up a small plaque.

He said, “That is a fine idea, sahib,” but I felt he was just being polite.

Back in the garden Aziz brought me tea and Mr. Bhat ceased gurgling at his hookah long enough to ask how Mr. Naipaul’s career had gone.

I said, “Since he stayed here, it has gone very well.”

Both nodded. They were still imagining that young man and his wife who’d resided many years ago; they knew nothing of what he’d achieved. I asked if many people recognized the association.

Mr. Bhat’s face lit up. “Every so often someone who stays here asks.” He handed me a business card with a very blurred photo of the expanded hotel (The Biggest Of It’s Kind In Dal Lake, serving you since 1959). He said, “Give him our very best. Ask him to come back again.”

“Ask him to come back with Mrs. Naipaul,” said Aziz.

Leaving, it struck me that they were relieved to go back to their hookah or their chores and not be involved in the past. At first I thought it was that they did not like being reminded of their fame; but perhaps it was the thought of many strangers knowing so much, all of it still unknown to them, that was so unnerving.


Unlike most of India, Kashmir’s appeal lies in granting the easy, unearned wisdom of nothing active to do; ever since the Moguls the place has been described as more a fluid alternate dimension than a destination. I wanted to experience the Vale’s lakes and waterways, which on a map resemble a snake that has gorged itself repeatedly. I set off one morning in a daffodil-yellow shikhara with three paddlers. I sat under a forward canopy, on a sofa that kept swallowing me.

A narrow channel led us through a marketplace of huts on stilts and shikharas laden with fruit. We came on a small lake that was entirely a floating garden of blooming lilies. In a bigger lake were row upon row of vegetables, tilled fields growing right from the water. The method is ingenious. A long, wide plank of wood is fastened to the shallow lake bottom with reeds. Then muck is piled on the plank until it reaches the surface. (One paddler demonstrated by clambering out and bouncing on the floating garden like a diving board.) Some floating fields were fenced by barbed wire, since a whole livelihood could be stolen by simply towing it off.

The day unwound down silent waterways opening to endless lakes. In the heat it was as if life was only a universe of still water beneath a glazed sky, and all that was required was a slow-motion glide. Occasionally there’d be a small island with a tiny gazebo or temple, a shikhara pulled up, and picnicking schoolgirls unwrapping their sandwiches.

Once it was British picnics on these tree-shaded islands. Kashmir has mostly been ruled by non-Muslims; in 1846 the British had placed the local maharajah in power. By 1890 many British were summering in the Vale to escape the heat of the plains. The maharajah decreed it illegal for any non-Kashmiri to own land, so the houseboats were an astute loophole. British residents built them in droves, dreaming of “Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar.” Today even the Srinagar post office is on a houseboat.

We drifted down one narrow passage, beneath circling hawks, past a village of huts in the forest—the men cutting planks from poplar trees to be made into cricket bats for export, the girls slapping tattered clothes against stone stairs to the water, the boys splashing like seals. Then the lake we were crossing became fragrant, and swans appeared around our shikhara; we were at the Shalimar Gardens.

Conceived on a grand scale, the Shalimar’s episodes each still retain the modest intimacy of a gift offered to a lover. With many groves divided by small canals you can actually step across, they form a sympathetic descending carpet between the mountains and the lake. These receding levels, with ever-taller trees as you look back to the Himalayas, emanate a vast languor.

We stayed in the Shalimar a long time. Afterward we drifted under a tiny stone bridge; we kept drifting. Going back, the paddles’ heartbeat was slow, knowing a rest was coming. I fell asleep until the rain came pelting.

We reached the houseboat just as the sun came out again. Afternoon tea—British, with milk, not the salty green Kashmiri tea—was waiting on the veranda. Dark thunderheads, clouds of battle, were coming over the scarred mountains. But they were not here yet, and a rainbow was arcing down out of heaven. It filled the sky and came down into the lake. Around it the shikharas darted and dallied, skimming the water like dragonflies.


I might’ve stayed longer, but I was sure I could always go back. Because I am a novelist first, and a journalist second, for me the ultimate test of a new place is whether I imagine myself staying there to write—taking a room, establishing a daily routine, and getting a novel underway. Man needs time to dream as he needs his daily bread; a novelist puts that time onto paper. The pressures of the world conspire constantly against this kind of reflection, which makes the dream of Kashmir more valuable for all of us. For travellers the lesson is that it’s often the state of mind we achieve in a new place that we remember most deeply, beyond what we saw or did, for it shows us another vision of ourselves. Anyway, in the end all places exist only in memory.

Then the idyll was broken. My last two days in Kashmir were under a strict 24-hour curfew when separatist protests broke out near the city. Several died, and the army clamped down. No one was allowed in or out of a rumor-gripped Srinagar. To be unable to move in that splendor, to essentially be under house arrest on my houseboat, felt peculiar, like being stuck waiting for a war.

I escaped by getting paddled over at dawn to a grand hotel, formerly the maharajah’s palace, where a crew of Air India pilots were waiting to fly back to New Delhi. I checked in and made friends by watching pornographic videos with the pilots for an interminable afternoon and evening. When their jet took off the next morning, virtually empty, from an airport full of desperate tourists pleading to be allowed out, I was on it.

Fifteen years have passed. Those houseboats, lakes, and mountains are still there, but the tourists aren’t. A place of sumptuous beauty has all but vanished to an amnesiac outside world, and become instead simply another newspaper dateline of turmoil. Kashmir is once again inaccessible, a Shangri-La waiting for the world to discover it. We should never take such places for granted, because the dream they offer is more vulnerable now than in any other century.

My Father's Life

Written for G.Q. magazine in 1998

It is impossible to write about my father without speaking of my mother. This is because I knew her so much better, for I grew up with her and not with him, and because (I did not learn this until I was fourteen) they never married. And when finally they told me, their only child, what appeared to be the whole story—that my father had a mentally ill wife, who was regularly institutionalized—it made their bond seem stronger and even more romantic, the enduring love affair more powerful than any verifying document. It was only gradually, in my late twenties and thirties, especially after my mother’s death, that I began to learn how complex the truth was.

My father is ninety-one. I was born when he was fifty. He lives on the Italian coast an hour south of Rome—his base as a roving foreign correspondent for decades. A publicity release from a half-century ago sums up the father I knew from afar: One of the truly great reporters of World War II, George Weller has been bombed, machine -gunned, eaten by ants . . . And because he was always a hero to my mother, as I grew up his life always seemed heroic to me.

Most of his adulthood was spent abroad. He was one of the few correspondents to extensively cover Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South and Central America, the Soviet Union, and the Pacific. During the early 1930s, while writing a couple of novels, he became a journalist in the Balkans for the New York Times, then shifted to the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, a great newspaper in its day. He won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for a story about an emergency appendectomy performed on a pharmacist’s mate in a submarine while under Japanese attack.

Besides all this his personal life, as for many foreign correspondents, was a mess. An early first marriage begun in the Thirties ended in divorce; I have a much older half-sister whom I never see. Then, just after the war, he married a fellow correspondent who soon became highly unstable—severe manic depression. From their home in Cyprus, then Rome, his work often took him away, yet he stayed married to her for forty years while she was in and out of mental clinics.

During that time he and my mother became involved, and had me. They were as in love as any couple I’ve ever seen. Growing up, I never suspected there was anything more to the story than that my father was always being sent from one war to the next. Which was, in fact, true. Their love survived until my mother’s slow death of a brain tumor in 1988—she was sixty-five, he was eighty—still dreaming of a shared life under the same roof, rather than days or weeks stolen here or there. In the end my father’s wife outlived her by two years.

Their personal lives (so purposeful to a child’s eyes) were a jumble of making do, with occasional happy moments when they stole time together and always the prospect of more, but no happy conclusion when all was done. They lived off hope like oxygen for three decades, but for the last few years even hope went stale, could even suffocate, at least for my mother.

This is all true, but it is only an edge of the story.

When I grew up, my father was never at home. As a veteran of innumerable foreign wars, George Weller was always elsewhere in the world. Still, he was a looming presence. Exotic postcards were always arriving for me from overseas—of African jungles and teeming veldts, or Arabian deserts with camels and bedouin; from Afghanistan, Laos, Paraguay, Siberia. He could write you from the tumult of a revolution and make it sound like he was on a picnic. His workplace was much of the planet, and those postcards became my vision of it. I took it for granted that I’d become a writer one day, and travel everywhere.

A big, gusty man with extraordinarily alive blue eyes and a powerful head suggesting steel-reinforced bone structure, he always seemed much larger than a mere six feet. Abetted by an actor’s talent for exact mimicry and a voice of nuance and flexibility, he could turn on, seemingly at will, a kind of light raconteur’s charm that brought an episode alive while downplaying his own part. Contrary to the popular image of his profession, he was never a drinker or smoker. “Unfitted for simplicity” by his early years in the Balkans, he felt most American political thought belonged in a kindergarten. It amazed him that attention and even respect was paid in this country to the opinions of pundits, politicians, and tank thinkers about places they’ve never actually spent time in.

His great reportorial gift was a mask of naiveté and ignorance that was totally misleading and trapped his subjects into unwitting revelations, followed by the daggered question that went for their inner organs. A devout and eclectic reader, he felt at home everywhere and went deep into what he called the secret history of each place. His memory of all he read was astounding, but this also meant a tendency to preface a funny anecdote about some mishap in Aleppo with the entire history of the Middle East.

He was most of all a man of the world, in an old-fashioned definition of the term: a type of American gentleman who still existed mid-century and does not exist now, who was at ease in all situations, spoke six foreign languages fluently (albeit with a Boston accent), was exceedingly literate, charming, and stubbornly confident about his place in the order of things. At the same time he was not at all posh. He grew up poor —his Harvard tuition was paid by a man he caddied for every week—and has remained frugal all his life. A career under fire or trapped in difficult places, from the Hindu Kush to the wilds of New Guinea, stopped him from worrying about eating well or dressing stylishly.

Those postcards, bearing stamps that were a geography lesson in themselves, always let me know I was part of his life as he was part of mine—that no matter where he was, I was there with him—and that I was to look after my mother in his absence. I suppose not every small boy is relentlessly told this. It may have been an echo of losing his own father as a teenager. In later years I realized that the hidden import of this was that my mother was my responsibility, no matter how much he loved her. His own primary responsibility would always be his wife. (He often ruefully cited a schoolteacher who told him he would do well if only he learned to put first things first.)

A lot of his life seems a struggle to be a good son for a father who wasn’t there—a Harvard-educated lawyer who dropped out of the family on booze, but whom my father couldn’t blame entirely and remembered lovingly. From his teens my father saw himself as the head of the family for his mother and younger brother. The “dutiful son” in him hurt his fiction, for he was reluctant to write characters a reader might disapprove of. But he wasn’t scared to live his life that way—though he’d stop short of divorcing an ill wife.

My mother was a Londoner, a well-known ballet teacher and dance scholar fifteen years younger than he. (Her parents were Polish Jews who emigrated; her mother died young.) They met in Sicily when she was nearing thirty, had a prolonged affair, and split up, for he was already married. Being tired of Europe’s deprivations following the war, she moved to New York and, in a characteristically audacious and pioneering move, to Georgia, where she knew no one but realized there was no ballet company that mattered. By then my parents had hooked up again and decided to have me: it must’ve felt like a last chance for him, as well as for her. She was thirty-five when I was born, in 1957. She always spoke of how he wrote her every day during her pregnancy.

It doubtless struck them that with her renting a house in Georgia, it’d be easier to hide the facts, easier to pretend they were married. Only one family of Georgia friends knew what would’ve been in those days the very shocking truth, and acted as witness to the legal change of my mother’s last name. She told no one in her family. My father’s work was in any case sufficient excuse for the fact he was always overseas.

Due to his itinerary, and the situation I did not know about, we were lucky to see him one week a year—I never met him until I was eighteen months old, though my mother was proud that I immediately recognized him from a photo by her bedside. In those years we’d go every other summer to Europe, which my mother missed enormously, doing the ballet circuit of friends and relatives that involved London, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. We’d see my father for a few days snatched in a hotel here or there, or sometimes in Nassau, where we spent much of each summer until I was ten. In those days the Bahamas were inexpensive and had enough British echoes to be a kind of homecoming for my mother. I can only imagine how complicated these rendezvous must’ve been to arrange.

His odd weeks in Georgia had the fanfare of a state visit. His constant companions were a portable Olivetti typewriter and an enormous leather “grip”—a bag like a giant animal belly that held a limitless amount. I’d hurry to his airport taxi, preceding my anxious mother, insisting with my father that I was able to carry his bag, dragging it down our walk. When he did come home he was always careful to make duties fun. Plagued by bad teeth—he was ever undergoing massive dentistry in parts of the world where you’d question a Band-aid—he tried to instill good habits in me through the Toothbrush Derby. This meant a mad rush and tussle after every meal to see who got his teeth-cleaning underway first.

He could pack more efficiently than anyone I ever met. He could set up house in a hotel room in minutes.

I doubtless wouldn’t have become a novelist and journalist myself were it not for him—though it’d have been a form of rebellion had I become, say, a banker. My sense of the world being available, and seeing it being the most important part of a man’s education, came from him. He was also quick to deplore the way that journalism was an elephant’s graveyard of talent, and urged me never to let it outweigh my novel-writing. His faith in me as an artist was unwavering—partly because he had not exactly set out to be a journalist himself.

His first career overseas after Harvard had been as the only English-speaking actor in Max Reinhardt’s theater company, in Vienna, where he partnered a very young Hedy Lamarr. Later, living in Athens and Dubrovnik on practically nothing and covering the Balkans, he wrote a couple of fine novels (Not to Eat, Not for Love and Clutch and Differential) that were well-reviewed and highly praised by figures like Conrad Aiken but made him little money during the Depression.

He had quite a war. As one of the few reporters who stayed behind in Greece during the German invasion, he smuggled stories out for weeks and was “quarantined” by the Nazis. He was one of the last men to get out of Singapore and then Java, fleeing the Japanese on a leaky boat to Australia (resulting in a classic book of war reportage, Singapore Is Silent, followed by Bases Overseas). He was also the first outsider into an atom-bombed area, bucking army orders to sneak into Nagasaki a few days after the explosion. Macarthur’s censors killed all 50,000 words of that saga.

Though he wrote another novel later in life, as a Nieman Fellow, it was difficult for him to go back to literature after seeing first-hand “the world at war.” This saddened him deeply. That 1949 novel, The Crack in the Column, about the war in Greece, was dedicated to his friend George Polk, the CBS journalist murdered in Salonika in 1944. The dedication has much of my father in it:

for George Polk
WHO KNEW THE GREEKS
AND DID NOT FEAR THEIR GIFT

At one point he confessed to me that for a time he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died, and took risks he’d never have taken otherwise. When I asked what had struck him most about war, he replied that it was how lightly young men would volunteer for missions from which they could never return.

Early in the war he tramped into Central Africa and found some of Stanley’s old adversaries—in many of his photographs the 19th century seems to have lasted until the end of WWII. In 1946 he was captured by the Red Chinese in Manchuria with several other reporters, his wife-to-be among them. He covered the Viet Nam conflict during the French era and went back to see the fall of American forces at the end. In Istanbul once for Sports Illustrated he swam the Bosphorus with an Olympic champion. His last working decades were spent as Mediterranean and Middle East correspondent for his paper, based in Cyprus and Italy.

I have said that I became a writer because of him. This is not quite true, because my literary education largely came from my mother. But from childhood I took it for granted that I could write and that to be a writer like my father was a noble calling, there was no higher profession for a man to follow, and that I could do so as naturally and easily as he. There was nothing “easy” about any of it, but this sense of self-belief, in many ways the hardest thing about becoming a writer, was one of his greatest gifts to me and kept me going for a long time.

At no point in my upbringing did I not feel deeply loved, and I certainly felt close to him. Yet because all my childhood was spent with a woman who loved deeply, faithfully, and passionately, but virtually never got to see the love of her life, I never held any desire to be a journalist. I could appreciate and envy my father’s sense of the world, his sense of duty to expose the truth before history and memory heaped dirt on it, but I vowed from an early age that I’d never become a foreign correspondent like him. I would never leave a woman stranded with a child, waiting, alone.

My own desire, which he heartily encouraged, was to be a novelist and poet first, and despite a good deal of magazine journalism—and a long travel memoir of India and Pakistan—I have held on to that proportion. Even now, due to these implanted boyhood judgments, I feel an unjustifiable prick of annoyance when someone introduces me as a journalist.

This isn’t to say I blamed him during my childhood for his absence, just as my mother didn’t. I told myself that even if we all lived together he’d have been away most of the time anyway. This is a child’s view of his work, yet it wasn’t far wrong— as many children of foreign correspondents from those years would attest, though our case was particularly extreme. My mother and I were always waiting: for a letter, for the absurd rarity of a phone call, for the more remarkable event of his actually arriving. One call a week would’ve changed my mother’s life, yet he would not make it. Much of the time she never knew where he was until after he’d left, since mail from him could take a month. The easiest way to keep track of his movements was by subscribing to his paper. I copied my mother’s anxiety and did my best as a little boy, and later as a less convinced teenager and young man, to allay it and reassure her.

The problem for us was, of course, that his wife survived. No one (I was told) believed that she would, not for all those decades. Even now it’s impossible for me to parse how much of his choice was a profound sense of Catholic guilt, how much the remnants of love for his wife, how much a self-centeredness reinforced by his endless travel, how much his own instinct for fucking things up, and how much a basic sense that she came first as a responsibility simply because she’d come along first. Something drove him to set himself up with not one but two women, both of whom he avoided to some degree. Though it sounds unlikely, it was clear when my parents were actually together that they were deeply happy; their letters back and forth remained full of devotion and even delight.

I used to imagine that on some level he blamed himself for the continuation of his wife’s illness, but then again he rarely blamed himself for much that went wrong. (His business choices were disasters.) He was full of speeches about what a noble suffering he underwent by sticking by her, by choosing her over my mother, and spoke as if his life might, long after he died, survive a kind of moral scrutiny because he hadn’t abandoned his wife. I’m not sure it occurred to him that the scrutiny of those closest to him might mean more.

Once he retired to the Italian coast he refused to get a phone, keeping his wife cut off from her own family, keeping himself out of reach of everybody, and wondering aloud why friends passing through Rome never drove down to visit him. His arrogant frugality with phones now seems unforgivable to me. There was more to it than penny-pinching, for he could be sweepingly generous too. I think he simply did not like giving up control of the lines of communication—or control of anything, for that matter.

As the years went by, my mother grew more despondent that this stretch of time together would never come. It never did, apart from a dozen New England summers they shared after his retirement. By 1980, when I moved to New York after Yale, he was in his mid-seventies and finding it harder to get away from the situation in Italy. My parents were back to a weird system of seeing each other only for a week snatched when my mother would go to Rome and my father join her for a couple of days at a time. His wife, with her bad heart that had survived several bypass operations, was as unstable as ever.

I found myself increasingly bitter at being made the lightning rod for all my mother’s pain and for my father’s need to pretend nothing could be done and hence everything was fine. They’d chosen this situation themselves: I had not been given a choice. To maintain compassion for them meant trying to keep a distance. In those years, living in New York, traveling as a freelance journalist, I saw my father more often than my mother did—many air routes still led through Rome.

There was other, unexpected fallout: in my own personal life I often found myself trying to go out with women who were already involved with other men. In retrospect I think I may have been vicariously attempting to put myself in my mother’s role—as the outsider stealing a partner from an established couple—but end up winning, as if on her behalf.

What I’d been dreading all along eventually happened—at his instigation, of course. I had left New York and was living in Paris with a Frenchwoman who became my first wife. We used to visit my father in Italy a few days at a time, staying in a hotel in the town near where he lived. He always picked up the bill; and without warning on one of those long weekends he insisted we stay with him, and with his wife—who had known about my mother’s and my existence almost from the beginning. She was, of course, far worse than I could have imagined, but also better than I would’ve liked. I could glimpse how difficult his life had been, and why he had gotten nothing done after his retirement. But it was now hard to resent her in quite the same way.

From now on this was the pattern of visits with him. They left me exhausted and sick, and somehow he failed to notice that his wife, who had always wanted a child of her own, would end up back in the clinic for several weeks afterward. They were rough on my mother also, and she spoke of having lost her belief in a future with him; she was enormously depressed and under great stress. At least when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he left his wife in Italy with a nurse-companion and came to stay with my mother for what amounted to about ten months before she slipped into a coma. After her death he surprised everyone by staying on for over a year in my mother’s now utterly empty rented house in Georgia. It was doubtless a kind of penance, but also an excuse for avoiding Italy.

Soon after he retired I began to press him to write his memoirs. He began them, but soon turned away—he had seen, he told me, what he needed to see.

I said earlier that my father was a man of the world. He was also a man in a box. That he put himself there does not make it any different. He was always trying to get out, trying to swim out to sea and bask on his back; he once told me he had dreamed of having a version of one of those large Polynesian families, of many children and relatives all around, with my mother at the center of it but—knowing him—maybe he imagined a house with several wives all in good health and getting along. This has part of his fault of seeing himself at the center of all things but also his deep wish for the family he was denied as a boy. He never really learned when to be selfish, and when to be unselfish.

It is pointless to try to tally what those who matter most in a life have given you alongside what was withheld. In the end the two are inseparable, and what you carry away is how you were able to respond, given your own limitations. Life is too costly, and there is too little of it, to withhold forgiveness. By my age my father had seen as much death as the world has to offer, yet he never lost his sense of beauty, or the grandeur of human achievement, or his unflagging humor. I try to keep that strength in mind.

I like to recall one time in Rome when I was on my way to the Middle East, to the Arabian Gulf, for the first time as a journalist. I had no idea what I was doing. He brushed aside my fears as if they were flies; the important thing in that part of the world, he advised, was not to lose my sense of mischief.

“Just prepare yourself for a new luxury of sentiment,” he told me at the airport. “You have to learn to enjoy things going really, really wrong. And do what I do: always try to leave the situation there just a little more confused than how you found it.”

The Talk of Moscow

Written in 1998 for Playboy magazine

“Nobody really knows what's going on in Moscow,” said Victor Pelevin, Russia's leading novelist. We were at the Temple of the Moon, the city's most exorbitant Chinese restaurant, feasting on sweet-and-sour crocodile. "But I'll tell you a joke. It's about the New Russians, who've made so much money they can afford anything -- the term connotes a bandit with a gold chain, who drives a BMW convertible and speaks on a cell phone from a sauna, surrounded by naked girls. Two New Russians are talking. One says: ‘How much did you pay for that necktie?’ ‘Five thousand dollars.’ ‘Where did you buy it?’ ‘On the corner of Tverskaya.’ ‘You fucking idiot, round the corner you could've bought the same one for seven thousand.’”

Everything is possible here. I heard this mantra constantly, but it only applied to Moscow, a city of 10 million in a vast country of 150 million that stretches over nine time zones and is so undeveloped you can't cross it by road. The other mantra I heard, sometimes as a joke, more often as a warning, was darker. Nobody else can ever fuck us up the way we can fuck ourselves.

It's said there are more $100 bills in Moscow than anywhere outside the U.S. -- mainly under people's mattresses, because no one trusts the banks. These thousands in savings are what many Muscovites have been living on since the Russian economy tumbled back in August, 1998. (The ruble fell in a couple of days from 6 to 23 to the dollar.) And despite how the ongoing crisis is portrayed in the western media, the mood on Moscow streets has remained far from doomsday, for all of Russia's money still passes through here first. Several towns outside Moscow have eaten their cats to stave off starvation, and in Vladivostok this winter people froze to death. In Moscow there was plenty of heat and plenty to eat, and anyone with any power is still making money. At night Moscow becomes lit-up, even excited -- it must be the only world capital where it's easy and free to park.

It is more corrupt than you can ever imagine was another mantra. I came expecting Dodge City, with shootouts, but I found Moscow calm, and safer than an American city; I walked all over late at night and never felt uneasy. There's a police office at each subway station, you don't see homeless people or teen gangs of hoodlums, and the mafiya, who are now much of the business establishment, don't make their millions preying on pedestrians.

“Nobody would ever bother to shoot you on the street because no one can make money on it,” said Pelevin.

He is very tall, with strong Tartar features and an acute awareness of having lived in many different countries by simply having remained in Moscow. At 38, Pelevin has received worldwide acclaim; his books, like A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Omon Ra, and The Life of Insects, are by turns satirical, poetic, and fantastical. They are also best-sellers here, an amazing situation for a serious writer.

“The problem is that most Russians were exposed to the world too fast. Like Indians who didn't know what alcohol was, so they became alcoholics in a day. The same thing happened to Russians suddenly exposed to advertising. Americans build up a kind of immunity. But for us, because there's such a difference between what we had in Soviet times and what we have now, some people become mad consumers, and only define themselves in terms of what objects they own.

“Look, everybody who grew up in the Soviet Union believed how the official propaganda always depicted the West: as a place of absolute evil. Imagine a cartoon that showed America as black skyscrapers, a yellow sky, and no hope for ordinary people, who suffer immensely while the rich feed on their bodies. A stupid, cruel society, where all power is controlled by criminal tycoons. Imagine this idea was brainwashed into you by Soviet propaganda.

“Then, from the headquarters of the Communist party, came an order: ‘Now we are starting to build capitalism.’ The people given this task were ordinary party members. But what vision of capitalism do they have? Only these party cliches of a totally evil society, from the back page of a satirical magazine. And they succeeded. They built us a perverted image of capitalism, from a set of wild notions about the West that exist only in Soviet propaganda. And the kind of capitalism that they've made here exists nowhere else in the world.”


Most of Russia's cash is in Moscow, though this wealth comes from natural resources -- oil, gas, and minerals -- thousands of miles away. Step outside Moscow and you're in a peasant countryside that, despite a concrete diarrhea left everywhere by Stalin, holds 19th century echoes of horse-carts and mud.

The city is surprisingly lovely and staggeringly ugly. It's huge (the ring road is 80 miles long) and under constant, very sketchy repair due to a mayor who still harbors presidential ambitions, Luzhkov. Parks give it many neighborhoods; skyscrapers are rare. The historic center, surreally litter-free, is all lollipop colors, mansions with rococo icing and stately columns. Lubyanka, the massive KGB headquarters, could be a 1920s Miami hotel that took a sadistic turn.

Boulevards are wide enough for tank brigades; to cross them is suicidal. Instead you traverse underneath, through passages of shops selling videos, CDs, books and lingerie. Leave the historic center and you're among hideous, grimy 20-story apartment blocks, where most Muscovites live. I couldn’t see how they could afford any of it, until I spoke to a lawyer.

“In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, everybody was given ownership of their apartments,” he pointed out. “So they don't pay rent. Water, heat, electricity cost virtually nothing. My girlfriend spends only $25 a week for food, and never dines out. Any extra money goes to clothes. Even somebody who makes half what she does will spend it all trying to be fashionable.”

Two years ago middle-class Muscovites were like kids spending all their allowances from week to week. In those few days when the ruble plummeted and prices on foreign goods dropped as well, people couldn't buy up the Versace underwear fast enough.

“Everyone, but everyone in Moscow, is lying all the time,” said Natasha. “Why? Because they feel that is the only way to survive.” She was in her twenties, a bubbly, successful literary agent; she'd been a teenager when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. We were in a cafe, and she was trying to explain this new world she was helping to invent.

“You see,” said Natasha, “Muscovites are always lying to the government because there are so many taxes, so many laws. Not one person in this country tells the truth, and they all understand this is the only way. If they don't lie to their friends, they still lie to the people below them and the people above. And they feel, if not afraid, still very worried.

“I’m lucky. My salary’s paid in dollars. But it’s difficult to plan day to day. We lost contracts, because many publishers’ banks failed. Everyone lost something at the banks, even if it wasn’t their life savings.

“Before, for everyone, in Soviet days, their whole life was secure. When there were difficult times they knew the reasons and knew why there were problems. Now, though things are better, they feel only vulnerable. Unless you're a New Russian, you miss the security of the old days. Children don't have any idea how it was before, it's all boring to them. They don't know the history and they don't care. For them Lenin means nothing, and they would rather listen to pop music than read.

“Yet, more than ever, Moscow is not Russia. It wasn't Russia before and it isn't now. Moscow is still the only place in this country with possibilities.”

Few Muscovites have any sense of how much enormous wealth flows through. Most is controlled not by the federal government, which is broke, but by the rich city government, which has a stake in everything. The city owns all the land; besides rent and many taxes, it grabs a percentage off every deal. That might be a fourth, say, of what the twenty-plus McDonald’s, open round the clock, take in.

Little is actually spent improving the city. Most goes into people's pockets. For all the talk of the mafiya, the biggest gangster in Moscow is undoubtedly the city itself.

Besides a residence permit to avoid endless hassles and fines, everyone also needs a krysha (“roof”), i.e. protection -- the most important mantra of all. For a normal business, besides payoffs to city collectors, this means extortion money paid to gangs -- or else. “He was murdered because of his business activities,” was a frequent police quote in the press.

Every inch of Moscow sidewalk is spoken for, but a babushka selling cigarettes in the subway needs a different roof than a law firm. No gang would pressure a McDonald's -- if your business is 25% owned by the city you have plenty of krysha. But you might need a security force.

Bribery is routine. To improve their salaries, the Moscow police just stop cars and demand money. Need an operation? Bribe a doctor and bring your own sheets.


These days Red Square is the place to shop, for across from the Kremlin stretches a transformed GUM. Built shortly before the 1917 revolution, GUM was for a time the largest department store in Europe. Inside it’s belle-epoque industrial: a crystal palace of sunlit halls and iron-and-glass ceilings. Famous in Soviet days for offering shirts in one style, two colors, and three sizes, GUM is now full of familiar names -- Sony, Reebok, Lancome, Pierre Cardin, Estee Lauder, Ray-ban, Lego, Revlon, and the rest; the Levi's shop sells 501 jeans for $95. Despite the ruble collapse, plenty of Muscovites can still afford to shop here.

The new Manezh subterranean mall nearby is even more lavish, with its space-age elevators whispering three floors below the square, its marble atriums, its glittering shops. It burrows right beside the Kremlin, for 75 years the headquarters of the Communist world. All the names missing from GUM are here: Nike, Guess, Next, Benetton, Rockport. Shop windows drool with Swiss watches, French bikinis, jewelled golden swords, high-end Japanese electronics, and Italian fuck-me outfits. A toy store sold dolls for $1000, a kid's gas-powered Mercedes for $5000. What made it stranger was that the embalmed corpse of Lenin also lay on view in a glass case, 200 yards away.

One Sunday afternoon I decided to see where ordinary, hard-pressed Muscovites, who survive on $50 a month, were shopping. I rode the metro, arguably the best subway system in the world: it carries more people daily than those of New York and London put together, and trains arrive every minute. Each station in the city proper is magnificently different, a Stalinist-era vision, but all are marble, and insanely expensive to keep up with their bronze statues and ornate mosaics.

By the Sportiviny sports stadium people were stampeding a muddy tract of close-knit booths selling cheap clothes and electronic goods, housewares, videos, leather coats, shoes, Marlboro cigarettes ($1), sunglasses, and pins with Elvis Presley and Madonna. There were Port-o-sans for those who gorged on Coke, Pringles, and hot dogs.

Now the ex-middle class were shopping at flea markets like this rather than downtown at GUM. It was imports that weren’t affordable. Gas and vodka and food, anything of Russian origin, were cheaper if you were living off dollars from your mattress.

The Sandunovskiy Baths, in two historic buildings, seemed a possible element of changeless Moscow. I went for the lux men's baths, up a marble staircase, past nude statues. There I chose a sheaf of leafy birch twigs and reflected on the masochism in many of this culture's pleasures. The idea is to sweat the vodka from your pores, then lie on a stone slab and pay an attendant to wreak an invigorating birch revenge on you.

In a polished-wood salon of hard benches and lackeys serving tea, fat men in towels sat around gossiping. A decrepit marble antechamber led to the sauna. In stultifying heat I was joined by two New Russians in their twenties who determined I was American, then joyfully went through obscenities (“Motherfucker! Don't try that shit on me!”) until we hit a barrier in the universal language.

Rather than asking them, I gave myself a few cursory thwacks with my birch sheaf and visualized the place in its heyday, full of chubby party officials hiring it for co-ed parties. Nowadays you came here to avoid the mafiya and ended up naked with them.


Mutual friends told me that Sasha, in his thirties, had been a star at the KGB. A Ukrainian, he lived with his wife and child in a decaying apartment block, with dark entryways that stank of urine. It was a typical Moscow flat: flowered wallpaper, ornate cabinets, golden drapes, and an upright piano. The only oddities were Bruce Lee posters, and the tall Japanese swords and battle axes that Sasha had made himself.

“I loved martial arts as a boy -- boxing and a Russian form of judo. For two years I was a sergeant in the army and a driving instructor in the tank corps. To do that you have to have steel teeth and steel balls. This was in Afghanistan. I was young and felt sorry for myself. I saw a lot of blood, but my division came back. I met some KGB officers there, and ended up doing my higher education at the Moscow KGB university, specializing in law, studying to be a KGB officer.

“Before, questions about Communism meant little to me. I learned a lot. Afterward, I was ready to struggle against the enemies of my motherland -- terrorists, spies, foreign armies. I was ready to be James Bond.

“I also became a karate champion, one of the top three KGB martial arts instructors. Along the way, I realized that KGB political officers were idiots. They could barely read, they spoke of nothing but the Great Russian Party that Ruled the World. I stopped being afraid of them, and maybe that's why they fired me. I was twenty-three.”

But it wasn't that simple, what had happened to him.

“The KGB school had strange rules. One was no Jewish wives -- because they must be spies for the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. My wife is Jewish, though we were not married then. One day my KGB chief asked me, 'Why do you think Jews are normal?' I answered that I'd met a lot of assholes in my life, and they were from all kinds of backgrounds and nationalities.

“This was too impudent to tolerate. To be fired was very painful -- I cried and cried. A few years ago that guy was thrown into prison for selling weapons, which made me happy. In those days I really believed in the ideals of the KGB. I felt wounded because I wasn’t given a chance to carry them out abroad.”

Eventually, with the collapse of the USSR, Sasha found his way to a good salary, first as a bodyguard, then at a foreign embassy, now with a private security company.

“And what happened to your old KGB colleagues?”

“The ones with brains became big businessmen. Some are with gangs, some are still in the KGB. Selling weapons and drugs. Their official salary is under $100 a month now, that's the problem.” He shrugged. “A little bit of democracy creates a big vacuum and a big mafiya to fill it. They gave so much money to the church that in one part of Moscow the priests were saying mass for gangsters killed in action, can you imagine? But the real mafiya here isn’t gangsters, it's the police and the KGB.” He sighed. “In America your police motto is To Serve and Protect. In Moscow it's Give us your money and fuck off.”


Alexander was a blond Russian in his forties who trained in the States and has his own p.r. firm. “Five years ago the spin doctor business didn't exist here,” he told me. “All media were controlled by the government -- an absolutely perfect propaganda machine that broke down. Then lots of money came into Russia from the west. Now it's bankrupt. Political factions are fighting for control of the media; elections are always going on somewhere in this country and big money gets spent on p.r. In the States, you have to be clever to convince journalists of your agenda. Here you just need a thick wallet. The result is armies of ‘image consultants’ marching through the streets telling people they can make Swiss chocolate out of a piece of shit.

“You get completely different coverage of internal politics just by changing TV channels. People are rioting on one channel and it disappears on another. Russians are naive. My sister-in-law said, ‘Isn't it funny that airplanes started to fall out of the sky a few years ago?’ It never crossed people's minds that they hadn't been told the truth before. That's why trips abroad were forbidden in the Soviet years.

“Russians have become very nostalgic about a beautiful past: the stability they did have, and a lost prosperity they think they had. People were shocked by what happened in the fall of ‘98, they lost money, life became more expensive. But the crisis is behind us, we're in some kind of stable situation which people can deal with okay -- though it might get worse.

“Some groups, like miners and teachers, hadn't been paid for months anyway, so nothing changed in their nightmare. The ones who got hit were the emerging middle class, young white-collar professionals who got laid off.

“But one phenomenon of Moscow that hasn't changed is the big black Mercedes with someone important, followed by an Escort jeep full of bodyguards with thick necks, driving other cars off the road. Imagine: back in the 1970s a real pair of Levi's jeans were a status symbol. This is how far we've come.”


Nothing here is changing as fast as TV. “People love game shows,” said Yuri, a former television producer. “Most are copies of American shows. A Wheel of Fortune, a Name that Tune. Our talk shows are also based on Western models. We never had true-life stuff before glasnost in the late '80s. People can't get enough.

“The new trend is sex talk shows. On one the host is a black girl from America who speaks Russian like a native and has fake blonde hair. Her guests are homosexuals, transvestites, people who have never had sex, nymphomaniacs. And they discuss sex openly. On another show a young couple have to do different tasks and if they fail they take off their clothes. For some reason we keep seeing lots of topless girls.”

One of the most popular shows (85 million viewers) has been a game with the Moscow police. On Perechvat (Interception) a “thief” -- the contestant -- “steals” a car in mid-city and has 35 minutes to elude three squad cars. The police have tracking devices, so they're on his trail quickly. If they arrest him, he loses; if he can keep moving, he wins a new Korean car, waiting back in the TV studio with a howling audience.

The cops can't shoot, and the thief's not allowed to break the speed limit. (In an episode I saw, one contestant drove onto a train and escaped; another used a boat.) Most head for the wasteland of an abandoned airfield, where they can't be cornered.

Meanwhile the police cars charge through Moscow streets, sirens blaring, TV cameramen hanging out the windows and people scattering. The chase looks convincing, though the thief maps out his route with the producers. They don't tell the police, they just set up their cameras.

It's not hard to grasp the popularity of Interception. Each year in Moscow 18,000 cars are reported stolen. There's also no tradition of cop shows, so this is the first time Russians have seen their police in action. Most of all, it's the fantasy of winning a car worth a family's life savings by evading a hated, corrupt authority figure.


Night life for most Muscovites means drinking as much vodka as possible with a video on. This vast intake makes men impotent -- you simply can't down a lot of vodka and still perform. As one joke said: When two Moscow ladies Moscow want a wild sex weekend, what do they need? Nine Russian men.

Moscow is a late-night town: people routinely telephone you at 1 a.m., and most clubs stay open until morning. The most useful biweekly guide rates night spots by calculating the odds of having sex or getting hurt. * = You have a better chance of getting iced than laid, ** = You have a better chance of getting laid than iced, *** = You WILL get laid, and afterwards, you'll want to ice yourself.

They also rate a club's “Flathead Factor,” i.e. its gangster density. *** = If you come here, you WILL wind up on our Death Porn pages.

Among clubs with names like Propaganda, Taxman, Rasputin, Plasma, and Buchenwald, the most notorious was the Hungry Duck (“Thank God for antibiotics, folks!”) -- a rampaging, howling riot that the police sometimes shut down, where you got spilled on and trampled and were lucky to avoid a brawl.

Despite what you read, every woman is not for sale, though you do see prostitute brigades after dark, waiting like a line of taxicabs. In the fancier clubs, with cover charges around $50, security's tight, with courteous gorillas wearing walkie-talkies and Kalashnikovs. Single women came to dance and meet someone -- but most wanted to be kept mistresses, maybe for the night, maybe for life. This financial reliance is built into the promiscuous society, but it was hard to tell who was a professional and who a gold-digger, since every woman dressed and danced outrageously but flirted with restraint.

The result was a dance floor shaking to techno-pop, full of ravishing women dancing solo -- those years of state-sponsored ballet training really pay off. Impossible to exaggerate their sheer overwhelming beauty, which surpasses even Havana: long-limbed goddesses with high cheekbones, elongated eyes, a refined pout, a headlong confidence, and a penchant for high boots.

The weirdest Moscow custom was the Jealousy Game -- that blonde angel in skintight leather dancing alone, smoldering at you, who wanted you to join her so she could make her mafiya boyfriend with the nine-foot wingspan, drinking with his cronies, jealous and exceptionally violent.

Under stroboscopic lights, with dry ice spewing past at high speed and athletic bodies gyrating in spandex beneath psychedelic streamers, one gorgeous young prostitute said to me, “There are women here who will not sleep with anyone. And others who will do everything you want without a condom. Which type you prefer?”


Moscow's opportunism-with-the-gloves-off owes as much to the old totalitarian approach as the recent capitalist mess. What astonished me is how much many people miss one of the most brutal regimes in history.

This attitude was exacerbated by a profound conviction that the rug could be pulled out from under them at any moment. Nothing was predictable: anyone who said he knew what would happen here was deluded.

A refrain I heard often was how much people missed the security of the Soviet system, when you could afford everything that was in the stores. Of course, back in the good old days there was nothing in the stores.

“It's simple,” said Tania, one Sunday afternoon. “Our lives, for most of us, fifteen years ago, were much, much better.”

Tania was twenty-seven, tall, dark-haired, with a pixie smile and a slant-eyed gaze that bespoke Tartar blood. Her English was good. Trained as an economist, she worked for a communications company. She'd gotten her job immediately after university, on merit (she claimed), not connections; she was now looking for another. When I asked what she earned, she shrugged. “Don't laugh, please. $60 a month. But two years ago, it was about $250. This is why so many people miss old days. Because now there is only rich and rest of us. Before, life for most of us was more similar. Not only rich and poor.”

Tania wasn't complaining, but her salary clearly didn't go far in an expensive city. Nevertheless, she was well-dressed, a residue of the boom years. She lived in a flat with her mother and brother. She and her friends rarely went to movies, or even a cafe -- too much of a splurge. They went for walks or watched videos at someone's flat.

“About half my friends live with parents,” she said. “That's why I don't travel. Until last year I was saving money to get my own apartment, to have a private life. There aren't mortgages for someone like me.” As there's no credit, every ruble is due up front.

We'd met at the Tretyakovskaya Museum, a favorite outing for Muscovites because it’s affordable and contains only Russian art, mostly 18th and 19th century paintings. This mirrors the fad of wealthy New Russians for collecting Tsarist-era stuff, no matter how schlocky. Later (the river aglow in dusk light) we walked over the bridge to Red Square and a glory of Old Europe: the Kremlin spreading its walls and turrets past the gold-tipped tulip domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. As we entered the square Tania indicated a group of men arguing.

“Communists,” she said. “Organizing another revolution.”

“Will they succeed?”

She rolled her eyes. “No way.”

Tania had come of age in a new Moscow, having grown up on another planet. Clearly she had mixed feelings. But what about her parents' generation? How did her mother feel about Stalin?

“She and her friends have great memories for their youth,” she said. “Their lives were clear and secure. Russia was strong, Stalin was our strongest leader. Very popular. They miss him.”

“Miss him? What about all the millions of his own countrymen he murdered? Thirty? Forty?”

“They didn't know that then. So they remember other things.”

In Moscow, everything is possible.

Macon, Georgia

From the bottom of night
through the ravine
at the end of our street
go back, go back
faint shuffle of a train passing
slowly, not to wake anyone
go back to sleep, go back
a steady line of freight
moving through the South, men on board,
wives somewhere at home
in bed in another state
go back, go back to sleep
faint dreams of a train passing
slowly through the ravine of night
the country will survive

[1998]