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Travels in Transoxiana
Author: Jaswant Singh
Publisher: Rupa & Co.
Format: Paperback
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 164

There is  no bigger bore in the world than a retired sportsman or an out-of-power politician.

The options available to them are limited. While the former has to choose between cocaine and golf, the out-of-power politician can either become a TV panellist or indulge himself in an artistic pursuit.

Jaswant Singh has adopted the second alternative with a schoolboy’s enthusiasm. Already the author of eight books, he, as the blurb warns us, “promises more”. Earlier in the year, Singh made a mountain out of a mole-hill. He now returns with a travelogue of Central Asia.

Halfway through the book, he lets the reader into a little trade secret: "the mind speaks and the pen follows”. Elsewhere he says: “The mind jumps at will, takes over, and then I am compelled… to note whatever it dictates.” All this is quite alarming really. It is almost as if Singh rambled into a microphone for half an hour every day, and some software transcribed his speech. One misses a narrative thread.

Singh quotes but fails to follow the advice given by Babur to his son, Humayun: “From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and plain words. This will cause less difficulty both for you and for your reader.” It is certainly not very clear to the reader what Singh means when he says, “My ‘outer cognition’ has almost imperceptibly turned to an inner understanding and conviction.”

Travels in Transoxiana is almost grotesque in its harsh opinions, such that one is led to wonder why did Singh travel in the first place

Very often the sentences seem hurriedly written and suffer from repetition. Toilets in Samarkand are described as being “…barely functional in a tinny, wood and tin construction kind of way.”

Singh has an unforgiving eye for obesity. He writes about it again and again, like a man obsessed: “I am sandwiched between a Russian woman of the usual proportions...”; “The girls are somewhat reminiscent of Iran… but with a certain additional heaviness”; “They are all such dears, all pensioners, uncomfortably fat…”. In Bishkek, he boards a bus only to find himself squashed by “…a woman, poor thing, of some uncomfortable proportions…”.

The man complains so much that at times the reader wonders why he undertook the journey. “A boiled egg,” he claims, “is perhaps the only dish that is cooked in an edible manner in these parts.” In Samarkand, “a rooftop reverberates” to “…some unbearable sound miscalled music”.

And in Tashkent, he is deeply unsettled by people’s attire: “The total effect on women is not soft as it ordinarily is and ought to be with femininity, and on men it is characterlessness as it ought not to be.”

Dire predictions (“Communists… too will meet the tireless reaper someday”) alternate with brave assertions (“Oil revenues have finally drowned the great astronomers of Arabia.”) When propositioned by a prostitute in Bishkek, he mulls the “hypocrisy of a system which proclaims its ability to change human nature…”. In Singh’s eyes, the existence of the prostitute signals the failure of the Communist project.

A confirmed right-winger, Singh’s dubious impulse for this book seems two-pronged: to experience first hand, and gleefully, the failures of communism, and to see for himself this breeding ground of medieval invaders, the same invaders who, Singh feels, sucked his land dry “…ethically, culturally and emotionally”. Badly written and beautifully produced, Travels in Oxiana is vanity publishing at its lavish best.
 
Palash Krishna Mehrotra teaches at Doon School