An excerpt from Pallavi Aiyar’s book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts (Tranquebar, 2025)
‘There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women …’
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
It’s 1983. I am eight and prickling with excitement. In a few minutes, I will be sneaking out of my home’s back door, tiptoeing to minimise the creaks. I will make my way down to the far end of the garden, where I will crouch, waiting for the signal. An owl-like hooting will mean that my friends are ready and around the corner. It’s a moonlit night, so we will need to keep to the bogeyman shadows cast by the branches of the neighbourhood trees as we scuttle along.
Midnight picnics are magical. Something about sitting under the stars makes the potted tongue sandwiches extra delicious. And one of us can usually sneak out a bottle of sweet lemonade to wash it all down with. Mother and father have never got wind of these secret pleasures, although Timmy, our dog, has threatened to give it away on occasion. Tonight isn’t just going to be about having a jolly time, although it always is when the five of us gather. We’re also going to put on our thinking caps to figure out what to do about the hidden passageway. It’s terribly narrow. And we’ll need to enter sideways in single file. The opening is barely visible, a crack along the side of one of the smaller monuments on the edge of the tomb complex.
I have two boys. My older son was born in Beijing in 2008, the younger one in Brussels three years later. They went to kindergarten in Indonesia and primary school in Tokyo. As they became literate, I couldn’t wait to introduce them to Enid Blyton’s worlds.
A few days ago, we’d been hunting down parakeet feathers in the gardens when Timmy had begun to bark uncontrollably. And then suddenly, we couldn’t hear him any more except for a distant whine. We chased his cry, and that’s how we stumbled upon the opening and the curious carvings along the walls of the passageway. We were going to try and follow it all the way down tonight. There was something not quite right about it. It smelled like … like ... dammit, all I could smell in that moment were alu ka parathas. Lunch was imminent, and my daydream came to a crashing halt.
It wasn’t midnight, but noon. I had never seen, let alone eaten, a potted tongue sandwich. Our house did not have a back garden. No friends had ever hooted at me. I’d never been up after 9 p.m. And I’d never discovered a secret passageway.
I did have a dog called Timmy, but I wasn’t allowed to take him out for walks by myself. He’d pounced on a passing dog once, and my uncle, who’d been holding him by a leash, had nearly toppled over. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house on my own, period. An adult was always in tow, whether to the school bus stop or the local market.
I did occasionally hunt for parakeet feathers in the grounds of Humayun’s Tomb. My family went for walks there on the odd weekend. The tombs had been built for the Mughal emperor Humayun, by his son, the emperor Akbar, 400 years before I ever stepped foot in them. But the neighbourhood in Delhi that I lived in, Nizamuddin, was nestled in the shade of these crumbling monuments. For adults, the backdrop had become mundane, opaque. But for children who hadn’t yet forgotten to really look at the world, the tombs were alive with possibilities. Much of Delhi was like that—ugly and traffic-clogged, but also punctuated with the carcasses of magnificent medieval buildings that offered alcoves and latticed windows and monsoon-swept terraces and bat-crowded crevices. Things to look through and climb under. Shapes and stones that fed the imagination. An imagination already fattened on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.
In the early 1980s, India was liminal. We were like Schrodinger’s cat, existing in two contradictory but equally true states. My generation of urban, upper-middle class Indians was post-colonial, having been born three decades after the British had vacated the country. But our tongues remained colonised by English, and a good part of our imagination too. The principal conquistador of the imagination wasn’t a rapacious asset-stripper like Robert Clive or a quintessential aristocrat like Louis Mountbatten, but the daughter of a cutlery salesman from East Dulwich in London, who had never stepped foot in India: Enid Blyton.
We’ve had some arguments, my boys and I, about what they consider to be my exaggerated reverence for the Book. Reading is ‘old fashioned,’ I have been told. YouTube explainers are more efficient than non-fiction. TV series, documentaries and movies are better entertainment.
It was through Blyton’s Faraway Tree books of adventuring children that I, and many English-educated young people of my generation, first travelled elsewhere. We went to places where the summer was ‘delightful’ rather than the hellish onslaught of heat we knew it to be. We visited worlds where lacrosse-playing schoolgirls forgave errant foreigners for their transgressions, aware that they lacked an English sense of honour. We ‘ate’ scones and crumpets and quaffed ginger ale, exotic foods that seemed to be the essential accoutrement of Adventure.
Blyton’s books never explained exactly what lacrosse, crumpets, or cornflowers were. The result was that, although they found a place in the ontologies of her Indian readers, they did so in purely imagined form. In those information-circumscribed days, one couldn’t Google, so one fabricated. I imagined lacrosse to be a balletic exercise with butterfly-catching style nets, the ultimate goal of which remained hazy. Sardines, I envisaged as some kind of kebab. At eight, which for me was a St Clare school series–addicted age, I was even convinced that an English sense of honour was a ‘thing.’ And I wanted one.
I suffered from what Katherine Rundell calls the ‘book worm’s curse,’1: the problem of knowing the meaning of words without their pronunciation, never having heard them out loud. ‘Pseudonym’ gave me pause. And names like Penelope sounded like a combination of ‘pen’ and ‘elope’, until someone sniggered and corrected my pronunciation. Rundell recalls how she’d learned the word ‘soporific’ from Peter Rabbit and had been convinced that it had something to do with lettuces. I remember thinking ‘putative’ had some kind of rancid, disconcerting connotation. Somewhere I’d got it crossed with putrid.
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Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was an English children's writer.
The very act of reading as a child was like being set supervision-free in an adult world; a place where you had to rely on your wits to make sense of the experience. Mysterious words lurked in every other sentence. And it was only through the exploration of what lay on either side of them that meaning could be pieced together, bit by bit. Context, as all travel teaches, is key.
So many of the great writers of children’s literature in English—Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Blyton—created worlds where parents were dead or gone. In their stories, children were always being abandoned, sent off to absent-minded uncles on remote islands, or packed off to school. But this was almost benign parenting in comparison to the nastiness of the fathers and stepmothers of fairy tales. Think Hansel and Gretel, where the children are forsaken in a forest by their own father. Or Cinderella, where evil family members force a little girl into servitude. Through books, the child reader is released from the strictures of their adult-determined lives and plunged into somewhere both terrifying and exhilarating, physically safe but emotionally dangerous.
With childhood travels through books on the mind, I asked my social media hivemind a question: ‘Why did we all read so much Enid Blyton when we were kids? What was the attraction?’ The thread blew up. Many said it was because we had few options. One friend answered, ‘Er, colonialism?’ There is probably some truth in both explanations.
We were Indian in lived experience, but having had our tongues English-ified, we read in English. And at the time, what bookshops offered in terms of English-language children’s literature, was Enid Blyton. We didn’t have easy access to stories translated from Indian languages. The only Indian stories I read were shoddily produced comic books of mythological tales from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. These were even more removed from our urban realities than Dorset—he setting for many of Blyton’s adventure stories.
But several of the responses I received to my query also pointed to how, despite the seeming disconnect between the childhoods of Blyton’s characters and our own, we found a way to build bridges from whichever Indian city we happened to be curled up reading in, to the southwest coast of England. We made that journey day after day, without moving from our bedrooms. We travelled, like humans did, on the pages of books. One friend wrote, ‘I remember those days when we had very little TV till the late 1980s. I remember being able to relate to tales from EB (Enid Blyton). I remember wanting to be similar—to be empowered to have adventure and fun’. I grew up in a small town, which was an overgrown village, where one could drink water from tube wells, fish in ponds, swim in rivers, climb trees, play with birds and butterflies. We were very much empowered to walk barefoot all over the town/overgrown village and then get back to EB. The exact feelings and memories cannot be expressed or explained. Pure innocence and joy.’
Another said, ‘It was a magical world that I did not have access to in my physical or economic lived reality at that time, but it appealed to my formative sensibilities about where I would love to be. It was a world away from the world—so distant in reality, but so present in mine … My neighbourhood friends and I, in sleepy Mysore, made our own versions of that life—packed cucumber sandwiches and nimbu paani (homemade lemonade) and took off on our bicycles for a “picnic”.’
And another: ‘I think what appealed most was the way food was described in those books! From picnic lunches to treats in ‘magic faraway lands.’ But by the time I actually started travelling to the UK, most of it had been replaced by tikka masala.’
I have two boys. My older son was born in Beijing in 2008, the younger one in Brussels three years later. They went to kindergarten in Indonesia and primary school in Tokyo. As they became literate, I couldn’t wait to introduce them to Enid Blyton’s worlds. Watching them read and wander in their heads, I believed, would return me to being eight again; to the bated-breathness of chasing mysteries.
My fantasies around motherhood had always involved bedtime snuggles and books. The littles and I would sit together-apart, sharing our physical space but traveling with our own books, pausing only to sip contentedly from cups of chamomile tea. I wondered how their tastes might differ from mine. Who would be their most beloved character among the Famous Five? Would the Mallory Tower series have them begging to be sent off to boarding school as it had me?
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Cover of ‘Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts’ by Pallavi Aiyar.
In reality, neither of my boys made any headway with Blyton. They found the writing stilted, the idea of potted tongue gross. My younger one detests sardines. Lemonade and ginger ale—words I used to hold in my mouth with a shiver of anticipation for a world full of the exciting unexplored—held no power over them.
They preferred the tropical eastern islands of Indonesia to the windswept English coast, having experienced both firsthand. And they were flooded with a choice of reading materials, in addition to the Screen. They were so cosmopolitan and knowledgeable, travelled and bathed in abundance, that I realised I was foolish to think Blyton’s tales would be their chosen repast. She had been food for the recently decolonised, pre-liberalisation mind. For my cyborgish children, her books were offal—sustenance for the deprived.
In my childhood, holidays and planes and hotels were rare. Doordarshan, the one state-owned television channel, went live for only a few hours in the evening, and its target audience was farmers pondering seed technology, rather than a young girl with magic on the mind. And so, reading was my most sustained experience of travel. Books had stood in for friends. Sometimes they’d stand in for dinner; I used to forget to feel hungry when I was in the grip of a good yarn.
My rational mind understands that it is futile to compare my proclivities as a child to those of my children, for they are creatures of a different paradigm. They have rarely known boredom, a prerequisite for learning how to read for pleasure. They’ve had lives so filled with gadgets and classes and play dates and physical travel that the space left over for books is meagre. Focus for their generation is a hyperlinked thing, which makes the linear, immutable book-ness of a book and the demands it makes on the concentration challenging.
We’ve had some arguments, my boys and I, about what they consider to be my exaggerated reverence for the Book. Reading is ‘old fashioned,’ I have been told. YouTube explainers are more efficient than non-fiction. TV series, documentaries and movies are better entertainment.
Yes, I splutter internally, but do you realise what is lost? What is lost is the stillness of mind that travelling through books brings to the reader; the very opposite of physical travel, which provokes a mental restlessness—a fear of missing out. Physical travel is often about a need for external validation—enter the selfie—that your trip is every kind of envy-generating superlative. Book travel is the most immersive kind, given that our minds are forced to engage with the writer’s words to bring
