Travel Tales and Close Encounters, edited by Maithili Rao and Rinki Bhattacharya, is not just an anthology of short stories

He was a tram conductor in Calcutta of the 1940s. He'd completed his studies but couldn't wait for a 'respectable' job. And so, every day he approached passengers and asked, "Ticket?"

She was a girl in her teens. Her parents had succumbed to... the Bengal Famine? Cholera? Whatever. Her sister, then her guardian, lost her husband. She had to come down to the streets.

But Nabendu Ghosh's Dregs isn't the story of a tram conductor alone who spends days and nights ferrying people from Kalighat to Esplanade. He maps the turbulent story of Calcutta in the 1940s. And Basana, the street walker who starts her journey as a ticketless traveller? She embodies life itself: A rollercoaster ride that now takes us to the peak, and now comes tumbling down.

But Travel Tales and Close Encounters, edited by Maithili Rao and Rinki Bhattacharya, is not just an anthology of short stories. It covers essays, musings and critiques that chronicle the experiences of people who set out in divergent directions for distant destinations in answer to different pulls. Their journeys were more important than their destination.

Charaiveti charaiveti... excelsior! This mantra from Aitreya Upanishad is often used as a life motto. Life goes on, moment to moment. And a traveller goes from destination to destination. On wheels. Of trains and trams, buses and cars, bicycles and motorbikes, planes and bullock carts. And in India, on foot too, especially for pilgrimage. So, every family is a storehouse of travel tales -- told and retold, grandma to grandchild. New stories added with every new invention of science. And with every new turn in the life of a nation.

So, in Russia of early 1990s, Maithili Rao visiting remote Sochi as part of the FIPRESCI jury, gets folded in a bear-hug by a big burly man with grizzly hair and, notwithstanding his sagging suspenders, embarks on a mismatched waltz to the singing of 'Awara Hoon'. Then, on a flight from JFK, she gets a proposal for her daughter from the lady beside her -- an Italian mamma who dreaded the day when her Michael would marry and she'd lose her son forever. "I don't mind if she's not Catholic," she is forthright, "because I love that Indian girls stay with their in-laws."

Oh, there are horror stories of prejudices too. On a state-hosted festival away from Prague, Rinki Di was denied her dinner until she thrust both, her 'Entry and Exit Visas', that were mandatory in the mid-1980s. Worse, she was 'Almost Arrested Abroad' when she was mistaken for a shoplifter after cheerfully picking up a jar of Nivea!

Shoma A. Chatterji tells us about a 'Star-struck Cairo' where intimate essentials were missing. Jayanta Sengupta recounts 'A Night on the Prowl' in Stockholm. Bindu Desai writes of 'Museums and Monuments', Kalyani Nityanandan of her 'Everest Expedition'. Memory blurs details, but the experience does not lose its shine. "Like a roller in the ocean, life is motion..." Excelsior!

Travel Tales and Close Encounters

Ed. Maithili Rao, Rinki Roy Bhattacharya

Mind u Read Media

pp. 266; Rs 599