Sleeper class

Absorb and wander

Night Train to Varanasi: India With my Daughter

By Sean Doyle

Review by Liat Kirby

A book of many parts that come together with such quick-moving resonance that the reader turns to the next page, and the next and the next, senses aroused and mind sharpened. It’s a return to India for Northern Rivers author Sean Doyle, after many journeys through the subcontinent, commencing in the 1980s – and a first-time journey and rite of passage for his daughter Anna after completing high school. Together they launch themselves into the turmoil, and the stunning stillness of mind that can be provoked in this land of contrast, Doyle as the Old Asia Hand and Anna openeyed and fresh to every sight, sound and smell. So much has been written on India and ‘self’ that it can create jaded, pre-reading assumptions. So to encounter tough, wry, tender prose, together with utter self-honesty, is invigorating and engaging. The writing is ‘in your face’, just like India. Earthy and erudite, the narrative provides not only the changing face of adventures met, but also deep-seated knowledge of the culture of India in all its singular and disarming ways – a knowledge to be felt rather than learned. Spirituality is there, on many levels, whether met through nature, the Ganges, or the temples and ghats:

The view from the top [of Mount Savitri, Pushkar] transcends space and time. Parameters cease to exist. The only limits are your own… The hills and the lake bear an undeniable resemblance to the highlights, shall we say, of a woman’s body… A bounteous Earth Mother, this Hindu Eden. It’s the poetic aptness of Indigenous mythology: landscape begets stories, stories beget meaning. The Earth tells you who you are, you just have to read it. Hindu Dreamtime. Mathura is Krishna town, Varanasi (and others) Shiva town, and as we travel to other cities and smaller towns, we realise the immense significance of Hinduism. Purusha, ‘the pulse of life’, connecting everything and the essence of everyone. As Doyle says, ‘Absorb or wander. No one is pushing anything. It’s up to you.’ An added plus is the conjoining of the sensual and the spiritual. No misplaced guilt engendered here. Father and daughter complement one another in different ways, and the special nature of their close relationship is evident throughout. There is Anna’s vulnerability and burgeoning young adulthood to consider, and Doyle’s controlled but fervent need to ‘show’ her the India he loves so deeply and unrestrainedly, at the same time wanting her to absorb and take from it what she will. His visceral and primal urge to protect her and not allow India to hurt her in any way rubs up against having to relinquish control in order to engage with the place. As he says late in the journey, in Haridwar: ‘I feel my limitations as a father, as a man. The feeling spreads through my mind like a fever, infecting all thought.’ This is a wonderful account of a father’s love and human fallibility. Anna herself is a remarkable presence in the narrative, especially for one so young. See the quiet beauty of her mind as she navigates the confronting experience that is India: lucid, ethical (particularly in regard to animals), with a highly developed sense of justice. Her uncertainty and hesitancy, which sometimes asserts itself, yet still she persists. Her humour and penchant for laughing at her father’s jokes – and occasionally bettering them. The repartee between them is a highlight of the narrative.

Doyle’s passionate, permanent love affair with India sees him enlisting as support for its undoubted worth the many others along the way who have lauded her: important cultural figures of the past, from philosophers to poets, as well as prominent singers, musicians, writers and actors from the 1960s and 1970s. All of it is true, but this reader tempers it somewhat by remembering that from the midtwentieth century on, India and gurus became fashionable, and many who caught the India train, rather than absorbing it more deeply, projected themselves on to it.

There are many literary allusions throughout the text, from Quasimodo to Shakespeare’s Antonio, Schopenhauer to Albert Camus, and TS Eliot to Walt Whitman. These are fleet and fitting, a delight of fluency within the text and evidence of Doyle’s wide reading and appreciation. One important thing to take away from India is, among all the contrasts encountered, the kindness that prevails – simple acts of human kindness that we in the Western world are unaccustomed to. You see it on the night train to Varanasi and in many other small acts accorded father and daughter. And there’s the beauty and simplicity of life running along beneath the busyness and the bureaucracy; there’s chai and the rhythm of ritual. The impact of Delhi, with its hordes of people, pollution and filth, and continuous traffic jams of all kinds of vehicles – ‘horns, horns, horns’ – is, as Doyle says, like ‘glimpsing another older, more instinctive world we still feel in our genes, our souls’. He must wait some time after he and Anna return to Australia before Anna finds the words to describe the psychic shock of Delhi and that first day out in India. Doyle is a fine storyteller, and the intimacy with which he shares this story – the immediacy of which feels almost face to face over a cup of tea, or chai – creates the strength and beauty of the book. On that night train to Varanasi he calls on the ‘old’ charms that, he infers, worked wonders in the past, and they work again here with the reader. Doyle is, indeed, somewhat of a charmer. But a charmer of substance.

Bad Apple Press / 256pp / $32.99