Along the Silk Road: Samarkand

I

In the early 15th century, the grandson of Amir Temur, Ulugh Beg, received a gift from his father, Shah Rukh. The gift was the city of Samarkand, Temur’s prided imperial capital. After Temur’s death, his vast empire had fractured amidst a bloody battle of succession, and Shah Rukh had just managed to stabilize his hold on the region. Ulugh, who was more interested in arts and sciences than warfare, would eventually have a brief, tragic two-year stint as a king. But during his several decades of life in Samarkand, he will oversee the magnificent cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance.

Ulugh wrote poetry and history, but his first love was astronomy. In pursuit of that goal, he looked at the work of earlier astronomers, especially Ptolemy from ancient Greece, and noticed that their data was riddled with errors. So he set upon the task of inventing the trigonometry and mathematics needed to make things right, recruiting elite astronomers from across the Islamic world to build a team of scientists, constructed a giant sextant at his Ulugh Beg Observatory (he had a deep trench blasted directly into a limestone hill to hold a pure marble arc with an immense 40-meter radius), published the monumental Zij-i Sultani with his team, which, alongside mathematical breakthroughs like inventing a method to calculate the exact sine value of small angles, produced a brand-new catalog mapping the precise coordinates and brightness of more than a thousand stars. Zij-i Sultani will go on to become the definitive handbook for astronomers in the Ottoman Empire and Mughal India for centuries.

 

II

The Afrosiyob runs at almost 250 km/h, and connects major Silk Road cities like Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. While its coaches are made by the Spanish manufacturer Talgo, the Uzbeks picked its name after the ancient archaeological site of Afrosiyob in northern Samarkand. Taking this high-speed train cuts the journey between Tashkent and Samarkand to just about two hours, half of what the regular passenger trains of Uzbekistan Railways would take, or one-third of what it will take to get there on roads. Its tickets sell out entirely within minutes of being released. I am lucky to get one.

The journey is short and pleasant, if one is careful enough at the train stations. After my tête-à-tête with Uzbekistan’s genteel bureaucracy at Tashkent airport earlier, I promptly keep paper tickets, anticipate x-ray scanners and multiple checkpoints, and be generally more ‘present’ in wherever I am. Dealing with bureaucracy is a good exercise in mindfulness, a point that Kafka didn’t explicitly highlight in The Trial but hinted as much. The stations at both ends are beautiful – aesthetically pleasing Soviet structures that seem to be influenced more by Islamic tilework and colors than by brutalism. The train drops me off at Samarkand station just before 10 am, and stepping out of the air-conditioned coach feels equivalent to stepping inside a furnace. I take a few minutes to adjust myself, click a few pictures, and find a place to sit in the shade in a small garden within the station complex, with the goal of drinking some water, soaking in the air, stretching my arms and legs, taking out my sunglasses, and ordering a Yandex cab. Spending about twenty minutes in that shade teaches me another quirk of the local bureaucracy: train stations such as Samarkand remain locked, except for a short window before and after arrivals of trains. I find them locked when I make my way to the exit after. I proceed to locate a uniformed guard, use my best sign language to explain what I was doing in the shade, show my paper ticket to confirm that I got off the Afrosiyob twenty minutes ago, and walk out of the gates under his still suspicious eyes, my head hanging in shame. The bureaucratic discipline has its benefits though; there are no people loitering around either inside the trains or the stations, and no vendors other than registered ones.

Afrosiyob at the Samarkand railway station

The train ride offers a fascinating mix of rapidly modernizing industrial zones, rustic Soviet-era towns, and extensive flat agricultural fields. The scenery from the window as the train pulls out of Tashkent changes from cityscape to bucolic pastures, first slowly, then abruptly. On the outskirts of Tashkent, and again when approaching the city limits of Samarkand, I see a massive boom of new, multi-story apartment complexes under construction that are transforming the edges of Uzbekistan’s historic cities. Once the train clears the industrial zones and enters the rural plains and rolling hills, there are flocks of sheep and goats grazing on the dry, golden pastures bordering the tracks. Amidst the wide-open cotton, wheat, and melon fields, I spot plenty of vineyards easily recognizable from my work in American wineries years ago. Uzbekistan apparently has a centuries-old winemaking and table-grape culture, and there are extensive, low-lying vineyards in the Syrdarya and Jizzakh regions that the train journey cuts through. I also see long rows of arched, plastic-sheeted greenhouses that local farmers apparently use to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemons year-round, amidst the harsh climate that only allows a short growing season for delicate vegetables. The train route clings to the green patches on the country’s map, and the track runs through a geographical valley, sandwiched tightly between the western edge of the Tian Shan mountain system: the Turkestan Range and the Zarafshan Range on the left and the Nuratau Mountains on the right. About three-quarters of the way through the trip, right after the city of Jizzakh, the train slows down to squeeze through a narrow, rocky gorge called the Amir Temur Darvozasi (Gates of Temur). The rock walls of the mountains close in on both sides of the tracks, which apparently was a bottleneck that armies and Silk Road merchants had to use for thousands of years to get into Samarkand. When the train eventually gets past and the mountains recede, the landscape once again spreads into the dry, irrigated plains. Somewhere ahead is Samarkand, a city that many men were willing to kill for, across centuries.

 

III

Samarkand is situated in what’s called the Zarafshan (“Sprayer of Gold” in Persian) valley. It is a ‘desert oasis’ – much like Damascus (Syria) or Mendoza (Argentina) – making it indispensable for travelers. To the north and west lie the lethal sands of the Kyzyl-Kum Desert, and to the south and east stand the colossal, jagged peaks of the Tian Shan and Pamir ranges. The Zarafshan river, originating high in the Pamirs, flows at its highest during the blistering months of June and July due to melting glaciers, which provided Samarkand with reliable water in the summer, making the valley a natural, flat, perfectly watered highway. To go east to China or west to Europe, caravans had to travel through this valley. Add the Amir Temur Darvozasi as the natural bottleneck where even a small garrison of soldiers could successfully repel a massive invading army, controlling Samarkand was a strategic prize.

By the time Temur arrived and made Samarkand his capital in 1370, the city was already a 2000-year-old ancient metropolis that had risen, fallen, and rebuilt multiple times. Cyrus the Great absorbed Samarkand (then called Maracanda) into the first Persian Empire as early as the 6th century BC. Alexander conquered it in the late 4th century BC, famously declaring, “Everything I have heard about Maracanda is true, except that it is even more beautiful than I imagined.” Following centuries of dominance by native Sogdian merchants, the city fell to the Arab conquests, flourished under the Samanids, and was ultimately razed to the ground and largely depopulated, obviously, by Genghis Khan in 1220.

After securing the city, Temur started to convert Samarkand into a personal “Disneyland.” He moved masons, tilemakers, craftsmen, carpenters and other artisans from every city he had captured and destroyed across Persia and Central Asia. In addition to being a war megalomaniac, he also fancied himself as an architect, and started designing extravagant structures with ridiculously massive scale that defied architectural and engineering constraints. The Bibi-Khanym Mosque that he built for his wife is said to be of the size of two and a half football fields, while the arches of his Aq Saray palace at Shahrisabz spanned almost 73 feet and could be seen 25 miles away. Temur’s massive vanity projects, constructed at extraordinary speed, began to collapse even during his lifetime due to structural issues.

Remains of the gateway to the Aq Saray Palace, Shahrisabz. The two surviving halves were originally joined by an archway which later collapsed. (Image courtesy: upyernoz, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Temur’s aesthetic ambitions were equally extravagant. Based on one historical record, a foreign envoy visiting one of his palaces describes a gateway adorned with “very fine work in gold and blue tiles, the principal reception room paneled with gold, and the ceiling entirely of goldwork.” His own court apparently had trees made of gold as décor, with their leaves carrying rubies, emeralds, turquoise, sapphires and pearls as fruit. The result was excessive bling piled upon enormous scale, from a man who probably came into an enormous amount of wealth without necessarily having the taste for it, and used his own imagination rather than artists at his disposal.

Of Temur’s original, blindingly opulent city, the vast majority of the gold, the jeweled trees, and the delicate marble work was looted or destroyed during centuries of subsequent tribal warfare and earthquakes. By the 19th century, the great dome of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque had collapsed into rubble, and the staggering arches of the Aq Saray palace in Shahrisabz were reduced to fractured, lonely brick towers. The Samarkand of today is almost entirely a resurrection; a modern, postcard-ready city sculpted by Soviet and Uzbek restorers who glued the shattered pieces of Temur’s hubris back together.

 

IV

Walking out of the Samarkand railway station after the guard obliged me by reopening the gates, I take a good look around. There is a bunch of yellow Daewoo Nexias and Chevrolet Spark cars, with their bored drivers who probably spent their energy goading passengers when the high-speed train actually came in; I am just a delayed straggler who doesn’t seem very interesting. On the horizon is a reasonably modern city, with apartment blocks, office buildings with glass facades, and ongoing construction everywhere.

With the backpack straps digging into my shoulders through the sweat-drenched t-shirt, I find my Yandex cab, a Chevrolet Cobalt, and wave frantically. My driver is a young man in his 20s, dressed in a modern t-shirt and jeans. As a creature of habit, I plop myself on the passenger seat in the front, smile along with my rendition of as-salamu alaykum, and try to pull the seat belt, only to realize that it probably hasn’t been used since its inception and doesn’t seem to have a recoil mechanism. To ensure additional safety, a small metallic device has been inserted into the area where the seat belt is supposed to lock in, perhaps to prevent any accidental use of this egregious human-tying apparatus.

“This is no problem; only driver; no problem.” My driver’s voice is reassuring, and as the car speeds up, the hot air blowing through the open window on the melting sunscreen of my face feels like a respite. A warning beep originates from car dashboard. It slowly picks up its intensity and frequency on being continuously ignored, until a heavy voice of a woman emanates from the car speakers, possibly reprimanding me for not wearing my seatbelt. I look to my side with a guilty face, and immediately feel reassured noticing my driver’s nonchalant expressions. After a few minutes, the woman’s voice and the beeping succumb into silence, giving up their valiant efforts. This city has been all about winners and losers, and today, they have lost.

As the car makes its way from the newer, Soviet areas of Samarkand, the flat roads turn into serpentine curves, move up, dip again, navigating along the edges of the ancient Afrosiyob hills. There are dramatic glimpses of turquoise domes rising over the crest of a hill, before being dropped back down into a valley street. Along the way are a variety of local fueling stations proclaiming Metan, Benzin, Propan, Gaz, Dizel, and I feel like reading the periodic table of energy. This overwhelming variety sorts drivers into tiers – methane is the cheapest, but the stations often have hour-long lines of cars waiting to fill up. If one is in a rush, one can pay for propane, or really go extravagant and pay for imported petrol (benzine). Also cutting through the roads are sleek, green-and-white trams, apparently born out of a bizarre experiment when Tashkent dismantled its tram network and shipped everything to Samarkand overnight. Somehow, these trams took off in their new home, and are packed with daily commuters nowadays.

My driver slides out a cigarette from the pack of Esse in his cupboard, and extends it towards me. I politely wave my hand to decline. He lights his own stick, puffing and taking a good view of his city. We talk in signs and occasional words. “Life is tough,” he says, or something similar, as if apologizing for his smoking, and throwing both his hands up in the air in a gesture of resignation. Then, taking a deep drag, he tilts his head, pouts his lips into an exaggerated kiss toward the ceiling, and looking at the half-burnt stick, says a single word “heaven.” A sharp honk jolts him back from his heaven into our shared reality, and we lurch forward towards history.

 

V

In the crisscrossing narrow alleys of the old Samarkand neighborhood, the concrete carriageway is split into two lanes by a drain flowing right in the middle. A tired rusted signboard announces “Samarqand Shahar -> 200m”. Each of two lanes of the carriageway are sufficiently wide for less than one car-width, making these streets essentially one way; they were never meant to host cars. A Lada 1600 is parked in one of these streets, straddled across the drain, and appears to be yawning in boredom. At this hour of intense dry heat, the streets are largely empty, and the only activity is inside dark, alcove like houses, that look like a basement with their small windows, low-height doors, and a lot of wood used in their construction. They seem aptly designed, small and dark enough to stay cool, protecting themselves from the harsh climate.

A typical street in old Samarkand (Image courtesy: Zachary Williams)

Lada 1600 is a relic of the Soviets, that had a remarkable 30-year production run from 1976 to 2006, becoming one of the most popular vehicles in Soviet history. It is from an era when Soviet engineering produced things that were meant to last. Almost the entire country today is dominated by Chevrolets; General Motors swooped into Uzbekistan in 2008, taking over Daewoo’s bankrupt assets, which used to be the only manufacturer after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Uzbek government bought out GM about 7 years ago, and its factory is now nationalized and runs as UzAuto Motors. Around the same time, the government also reduced duties on electric vehicles, and in any Uzbek city one visits today, shiny Chinese cars from BYD, Chery, and Hongqi zoom past the older vehicles from a different era.

In the afternoon, I make my way to the crown jewel of Uzbek tourism: Registan Square. The first impressions of the site are overwhelming: three “madrasas” with their huge archway entrances, soaring towers, and monumental domes, flank three sides of a large courtyard. Their turquoise, green, blue, and gold colors glisten in the sunlight, and almost every patch of the walls and the ceilings are covered with intricate mosaic tilework, geometric ornamentation, and exceptional calligraphy. These are some of the greatest examples of Timurid and later post-Timurid architecture that inspired what the Ottomans and Mughals subsequently built elsewhere, primarily what I have seen in Turkey and India.

Registan Square at night (Image courtesy: Benjamin Goetzinger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The insides of the structures are even more audacious. The oldest of the three, the Ulugh Beg Madrasa, has a soaring, cavernous lecture hall where geometric tile stars are an ode to its astronomer-king founder. The Sher-Dor Madrasa has a labyrinth of student cells around an inner courtyard. Then there is the central Tilya-Kori Madrasa, which literally translates to “decorated with gold.” It offers a stunning deep blue and gold work across its walls and vaults, and is a feast for the eyes. The vaults in particular use a ‘honeycomb’ structure that creates an interplay of light and depth, further accentuating their power. Almost every surface of the structures is covered in floral and geometric patterns, as well as calligraphy imbued in everything. The square is an enormous architectural theatre designed to be seen, demand attention, and almost intimidate.

After my initial exuberance, a dose of realism starts to settle in. Almost all of the student cells lining the inner courtyards of the madrasas now host souvenir shops selling carpets, hand-painted ceramics, and textiles. Each of the three madrasas was apparently built in different time periods across a span of two and a half centuries between 1420 and 1660. And yet, they seem almost too perfect, much like a movie set. There is a modern ‘audience’ filling into the square, and the towering structures beckon them to ‘consume’ this dramatic experience. Salespeople cajole visitors to rent traditional dresses and pose beneath the towering arches to get their Instagram-perfect pictures. Electricity zips through these structures with modern plumbing, and more cameras consume the monuments than human eyes. The entire complex is a deeply sanitized, postcard-ready version of history that seems to have erased the scars of time. Most of the original structures were reduced to rubbles over the centuries, and what’s on display today is the result of an aggressive, massive restoration campaign started by Soviet engineers and still in progress by the modern Uzbek government. On one hand, the reconstructed walls and minarets, and the shiny re-tiled surfaces provide a glimpse of what Samarkand once was. On the other hand, it’s a modern recreation of a memory, and feels almost artificial – much of Temur’s Samarkand was lost to his own engineering hubris, but perhaps the visual drama he intended to inflict on the world survives intact. A short walk to Bibi-Khanym makes me feel the ersatz even more sharply. This mosque, that Temur built for his wife, and its entire complex was in ruins by the nineteenth century. Standing here today, however, I see well-furnished buildings that are impossibly complete. It is difficult to imagine what Temur actually built, what survived, and what the restorers decided to present as history.

I find my way across the busy Shah-i-Zinda street using a pedestrian overpass, and climb the high slope of the hill on which the Hazrat Khizr Mosque is located. From one of its balconies, there is a magnificent panorama of old Samarkand. The colossal Bibi-Khanym complex is visible just across the street, its turquoise domes floating over the colorful canvas of the Siab Bazaar. I had spent some time wandering through that chaotic maze of the bazaar earlier: a large, pulsing market for dried fruits, fresh lepeshka bread, and traditional sweets. Further down the horizon, I can just make out the distant silhouettes of the Registan. From this vantage point, it is somewhat easier to visualize the glorious Silk Road city of yore, which once commanded the attention and fueled the desires of some of history’s most valiant rulers.

Leaving the balcony of Hazrat Khizr, I walk to the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. It is here that I find some of the old Samarkand coming to life; the curated theater of Registan and Bibi-Khanym melting away, replaced by something raw and more authentic. A steep flight of stone stairs leads me into a narrow, winding corridor of tombs that were built for Temur’s royal family and nobility. The entire complex is an intimate labyrinth of uneven surfaces and faded walls; almost antithetical to the immense, perfectly symmetrical plazas that I have seen so far. This site was also aggressively re-tiled around 2005, yet the narrow, subterranean layout resisted some of the sanitization. The mosaic tiles inside its humble shrines are visibly imperfect, often cracked, asymmetrical, faded, and extraordinarily beautiful. The interiors of these small enclaves are dark and cool, and there are patches of raw earth inside many of the tombs where time first stripped away the colors, and then the structure. There are few salespeople, fewer cameras, and a sort of quiet, sacred reverence to the place. This is an elegant avenue of the dead, where the swagger and propaganda of rulers of the past has yielded to the wheels of time. Rather ironically, for me, these sublime burial grounds are the beating heart of ancient Samarkand.

Shah-i-Zinda Necropolis (Image courtesy: OrexCA)

Temur wanted an imposing Samarkand, to be remembered through monuments. Amidst the replaced tiles and rebuilt domes, much of that Samarkand now survives only in memory. Ulugh Beg’s thousand stars, however, are still very much there.

Tashkent: The City of Stone

Prologue

Again the times are out of joint.
The wheel of fortune is a marvelous thing.
What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

The night is pregnant. What will the dawn bring to birth?
Two molten battles rage in the plains.
Bring blood red wine and fill the cup again.

– Hafez Shirazi (c. 1315 to 1390)
[Credits: William Dalrymple’s narration in the brilliant podcast, Empire]

It is the late 14th century. Temur has emerged from the rubbles of the now fragmented Genghis Khan’s infamous 12th century Mongol Empire that stretched from the China Sea to the Mediterranean. He has built a new dynasty in Central Asia, with Samarkand as his capital. His army, at least a 100,000 strong, has already taken most of Eastern and Western Persia (Khorasan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia), and he is now marching to take the south (modern day Iran).

Hafez is Persia’s greatest poet, living in Shiraz, and nearing the end of his life. He writes these lines about the twists and turns of history, hearing about the impending catastrophe that is about to befall his beloved city. It’s a lyrical ode to men, conquests, and violence, that unambiguously and sublimely define every patch of land on the planet.

I

In the heart of modern day Tashkent, Amir Temur Square is glistening in the oppressive, dry heat of Central Asia. Despite growing up in a country where my childhood was defined by summers (which got us trips to grandparents, and lots of mangoes), I am struggling with the itching of my limbs. It is not the prickly itch of Indian summer, it is the itch of skin that dries up the way it does in winters, with no sweat, and forms a strange concoction: winter skin in brutal summer heat. My guide and friend, a young Ms. Kadirova in her early 20s, satisfactorily eyes my melting ego, as I balance my backpack to take out bottled water, while removing my sunglasses and my boonie hat as soon as I have found a tiny patch of shade.

The square is dominated by a large, bronze statue of Amir Temur amidst a carefully manicured garden. He sits astride a rearing horse, his right arm raised. The maroon granite pedestal on which his proud horse stands is blinding in the sun. The inscription, which was Temur’s historical motto, harmlessly reads: Kuch Adolatdadir (“Strength is in justice”). Temur’s expression is urgent: furrowed brows, fierce eyes, firm and slightly parted lips, tightened jaw, and a face turned slightly to the right where his hand is. It’s the representation of a confident, ruthless military commander leading his men to the next conquest. Allegedly, Temur was a man with a limp, and couldn’t easily get onto a horse: the nicknames Temur-i Lang (“Temur the Lame”), or Tamerlane, derive from this.

Amir Temur Square (Image courtesy: Embassy of Uzbekistan)

“So, Kumar, what do you know about this man?” Ms. Kadirova interrogates me, perhaps to assess which side of history I stand on. She is a petite, youthful woman who recently finished studying English language at the University, making her a delightful respite in a country where without some familiarity of Uzbek or Russian, most communication is essentially just sign language.

I evaluate my options to frame a response. In front of me is the man who acquired the choicest of epithets on both sides of the aisle: as diverging as “the Scourge of God,” and “Ṣāhib-i-Qirān” (Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction). The former title comes from his penchant to use terror and brutality as deliberate military policy. An extraordinary practitioner of cruelty and theatrical violence, Temur has the reputation of killing 15 to 20 million people, often with sadistic pre- and post- rituals such as burying alive, burning, trampling by horses, constructing towers from human skulls after massacres, or catapulting severed heads into fleeing ships. The number of departed souls attributed to Temur rivals those of Genghis Khan, despite Temur having controlled a much smaller territory, and his individual sadism is comparable to contemporaries like Vlad the Impaler. On the other hand, his auspicious title of ‘one who is destined to rule’ comes from his stature as the founder of the Timurid empire that gave rise to the most magnificent cultural renaissance that he initiated, and which flourished under his descendants shaping much of the arts and Persianate architecture that adorns today’s Central Asia, Iran, and India.

Instead of getting into the intricacies of rulers and their vanities, I settle upon the more sanitized versions to respond to Ms. Kadirova. She belongs to the large Gen Z population of Uzbekistan, a country with strikingly low average age (just 29.5 years). Being a post-Soviet-era child, she perhaps grew up in a nation that was reinventing its cultural identity in its Mongol roots. Temur, by all means, would have been a natural binding force to forge that identity of a nation, and he is splattered across almost everything tourists do or hear in the country today.

I try a neutral answer to Ms. Kadirova’s question: “Well, I know that this guy ruled as an Amir, and not a Khan, because he wasn’t a Mongol. But he married right, and got himself a posh Mongolian wife that gave him some legitimacy.” Born in Shahrisabz, about 90 km south of Samarkand, Temur was ethnically a Turk, and despite being neither a Mongol nor a Persian, rose from a common brigand to a ruler of an empire that stretched from Delhi to Istanbul.

My answer didn’t seem to impress her much, and she was probably sharp enough to sense that I am dithering. Admiration for Temur’s greatness seemed too clean for me, and condemnation seemed too easy: leaders throughout human history are too complex for a binary judgment.

Today’s Tashkent is a layered city. Temur has been dead for six centuries. Where he and his horse are installed today, there used to be a monument of Karl Marx, and the square was called the Revolution Square until being dismantled in 1993 to be replaced by Temur. The brutalist Soviet-era Hotel Uzbekistan still overlooks the square: a reminder of a different, more recent layer of the city.

Ms. Kadirova was already walking ahead, toward the next thing, in the manner of someone who had made her peace with her question long before I arrived.

II

The short 90 minutes flight from Almaty to Tashkent is a feast for my eyes in this cloudless month of June. As the aircraft gets airborne on its westward journey, the majestic snow-capped peaks of the western Tian Shan (“Heavenly Mountains” in Chinese) appear, surreally rising above the heated earth. The foothills in southeastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan first roll into dunes of rich green velvet, and then flatten out to meet the vast Eurasian Steppe that has shaped the rich history of nomads: people who first domesticated horses, made humans exceptionally mobile, conquered vast territories, and supported trade routes as transformational as the Silk Road. There are also vast stretches of yellow ochre desert punctuating the scenery; I promptly look at the map to understand the topography – the desert is the norm, and the greens are the banks of Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, mighty rivers that drain from the Pamir and Tian Shan, fanning out across the steppe, and making civilizations possible. Every major city in these regions cling to the narrow bands of green – Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and the fertile Fergana valley in the east. Beyond them lies an immense country of deserts and scrubland – large parts of Uzbekistan are just empty.

Tashkent Airport is a compact, old-fashioned soviet building, where time probably froze a few decades ago. It makes for an underwhelming first impression. At the passport control line, I decide to practice radical acceptance and mindfulness, occasionally interspersed by uninformed studies of humans, their possessions, expressions, and habits. Amidst this indulgent and intimate enterprise, time stays still for what seems like a few hours, and I try to bring my mind to match its pace with considerable difficulty. As an official directs me to go past the gates, an irrational fear pricks the balloon of my sangfroid – “How will I get out of this country?” I promptly dismiss that border control issue, and move to address more pressing matters of bladder control. Behind one of the only two conveyor belts in the arrival hall, there are some cargo pellets with plastic wrapped goods. Besides them is a group of men, some sitting on the conveyor itself, some on the pellets, and some standing. Behind those men is a narrow opening, which I use to explore the whereabouts of a functional toilet. I see a door, slightly ajar, and make my way into a smoke-filled enclosure. An officer in dark blue police uniform is puffing away near the only wash basin, under the “No Smoking” sign, occasionally tapping away the ashes into an awkward plastic dustbin. His expressions mute my American urge to smile and say hello. I silently complete my business, edge my way to the basin, wash my hands, and make my way out.

I take a good look around the arrival hall. It’s the size of a bus station, somewhat crowded, and offers an enriching glimpse of anxious locals, women, children, and their precious possessions wrapped in crude suitcases, cartons, and simple cloth bundles. There is a mild commotion; perhaps time has frozen on this side of the gates as well. Only one of the conveyor belts is functional. The other clearly has a lot of weight to carry, and people dispossessed of their belongings for extended periods of time might be getting jittery. After retrieving my bags, my next stop is the mêlée near the x-ray machines for customs clearance. I haul my bags carefully into the tiny mouths of the ancient machines, wait at the other end, and mentally prepare myself to look for an ATM, my usual routine at foreign airports.

“Where are you coming from?” I hear a voice emanating from another dark blue police uniform behind a rickety metal table. I respond truthfully, mustering as much of a smile as I can.

“Put your bag here.” There is a deep, hollow, acoustic in the voice, and without prior exposure to this country, the accent sounds like a version of Russian.

I haul the suitcase on the rickety table, with considerable difficulty. I remind myself on the virtues of light packing, which is also my usual routine at foreign airports, and then prepare myself for the interrogation.

“Open this. Do you have any antiques?”

I am a bit flummoxed, though the question isn’t vituperative. There is a mental voice of rationality that is eager to proffer a logical explanation to the uniform – under Uzbek law, it is illegal to export cultural artifacts or antiques, and I am just entering the country for the first time in my life. I subdue that voice of rationality, which is my area of expertise gained from where I work.

The subsequent 10 minutes are spent in a public display of, amongst other things, dirty laundry from my previous destination, shoes and dirty socks in a bag, smelling workout clothes in another bag, a book, another bag with an electric toothbrush and an electric shaver and a curious-looking tongue-cleaner from India, yet another bag with wires and chargers, a ziplock with protein powder, a small shaker bottle, and another ziplock full of pills. Another uniform has decided to join the show, while both managing to keep relatively solemn faces as they unzip every tiny corner of the objects, including a zip that removes the lining of my suitcase that I never knew existed as a feature. A third one is called for. There is a relaxed tension permeating the air. The third uniform arrives, and carefully lifts my ziplock of pills with the expressions of a hazmat unit operator. After preliminary visual inspection, he opens the packet with extreme care, and takes out a red pill. The mental voice of rationality in my head is eager to proffer a question – why not the blue pill – but the solemnity of the occasion does not warrant it. The uniform proceeds to carefully split the capsule into its two constituent halves, and empties the contents of one of the halves on his rather well-padded left palm. Looking at a sparkling white powder under bright tubelights makes me feel somewhat high, though I resist the temptation to smile with widened eyes. The uniform sniffs at the powder, without a single flinch in his expression, as if this sequence of events is the most quotidian occurrence, and unsurprisingly lifts his gaze. His eyes scan me from top to bottom, shift towards the other uniform, and I hear another deep, hollow, acoustic voice. The first one now faces me, breaks into a smile, and says: “So? India, haan? Chal Chhaiyyan Chhaiyaan.” I take a few seconds to recognize the abrupt shift from a Bollywood crime thriller to a Bollywood romcom, and while still absorbing the events of the immediate past, proffer the insincere American smile.

It is an unusual welcome, one that hints at a country still negotiating the space between its sepulchral Soviet past and an increasingly open present. The blueprint of Soviet governance – the Apparat – is firmly entrenched, fueling an administrative machinery that still runs on paper, stamps, and formal permissions. The Soviet propiska system, which was designed to tightly track and control the movement of all people within the USSR also lingers. The system originally required any Soviet citizen traveling to a new city to register their presence with the local authorities within a narrow timeframe of 72 hours. Today, foreign tourists must still register within 3 business days of arrival, and ensure that their physical location is continuously tracked with zero chronological gaps if they move to a new city or change accommodations during the trip. While departing from the same airport several days later, I would be asked to submit registration slips from all cities I visited at the passport control. I wouldn’t be able to produce any.

III

Walking towards the Independence Square under the unrelenting sun, Ms. Kadirova continues with her well rehearsed history lessons. Tash means stone, Kent means city; so this is the City of Stone. Before Islam, before Russian rule, and long before the Soviet Union, this region belonged to an older Central Asian world. It practiced Zoroastrianism, the worship of fire. Later came Arab conquest and Islamization, Turkic migrations, Mongol conquest, Temur and the great Persianate courts, Russian expansion and Soviet rule.

Despite wearing sunglasses, I find myself squinting in the empty ‘square’ visually radiating heat from the stones that are shimmering brazenly. It’s a vast, tree-lined expanse, overlooking soviet-style government buildings including the Ministry of Finance and the Senate Building, and appears to be a place designed entirely for politics. The history of the square is a condensed history of the city itself. It was Cathedral Square under the Russian Empire, Red Square after the Revolution, Lenin Square during the Soviet era, and finally Independence Square (Mustaqillik Maydoni) after 1991. The Lenin statue that once dominated it has been replaced by a golden globe bearing the outline of Uzbekistan, with a mother and child at its base, a deliberate attempt to move away from soviet past and symbolize a country being reborn.

Old ‘layers’ of the city could have been more prominent, if not for the earthquake of 1966 that destroyed much of old Tashkent and gave the Soviet planners something close to a blank canvas. They built broad avenues and wide boulevards, large public spaces and imposing buildings, perhaps much of it planned for the ideological ‘community’ aesthetic, making ‘individuals’ feel small. The Soviet imprint is most spectacular underground. Tashkent’s metro, opened in 1977, was the first in Central Asia, and each station seems to have been given a different architectural vocabulary. Marble, chandeliers, mosaics, geometric patterns and elaborate Soviet symbolism turn what should be a mundane commute into something resembling an underground museum. Soviets also expanded Tashkent’s ancient canal network, an oasis that has survived almost two millennia, and in the process, boosted industry and agriculture. The ‘expansion’ also diverted enough water that triggered the famous Aral Sea ecological disaster.

Kosmonavtlar, a space-programme-themed station of the Tashkent Metro. It honours Soviet cosmonauts including Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in space. (Image courtesy: Visit Tashkent)

Post-independence rulers have kept themselves busy editing the city: renaming streets, districts, and metro stations, replacing Soviet names with Uzbek ones; changing statues; and almost reconstructing its Islamic past by presenting new buildings as old. The Hazrati Imam Complex is beautiful in its modernity, yet somewhat strange in presenting a largely modern architectural ensemble as a historic Islamic quarter. Just beyond the Hazrati Imam Complex stands the newly built Center of Islamic Civilization, an enormous structure modelled on the architectural language of medieval Central Asia. It gives an unsettling feeling of stage design rather than heritage preservation. Perhaps it’s a prudent choice towards building a national identity, for a country as layered as Uzbekistan needs an anchor around which to unite and grow. Ms. Kadirova describes the economy, the gold and copper and natural gas and cotton, lots of cotton, that are dug from the old, tired and thirsty earth, chugging the country towards a liberal, international-friendly, diversifying state. As we walk along the “Broadway” Alley (renamed to Sayilgoh Street) watching young men playing on the numerous public ping pong tables, she juxtaposes the scenery with an elaborate description of challenges that men face in finding brides, the ‘bride price’ of anywhere between $200 and $3000 to secure one, and for the men who can’t afford, the practice of stealing someone else’s bride.

Some of the best remnants of the layered past of the country are perhaps found in the goods at Chorsu Bazaar (Persian, meaning “crossroads” or “four streams”). Historically, it was an open-air market along the ancient Silk Road, and served as a meeting point where merchants from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East bartered for spices, silks, and ceramics. After the 1966 earthquake, the Soviets rebuilt the structure with a monumental, 80-meter-wide concrete dome tiled with deep turquoise.

This is where I first see the preparation of plov, Uzbekistan’s legendary national dish. In the open-air food rows of the Bazaar, massive cast-iron cauldrons (called kazans) sit on heavy brick and clay structures, similar to a tandoor, that burn wood and channel intense smoky heat to the pots. The theatrical cooking performance, apparently, has three parts, much like magic. There is the sizzle, that aggressively fries chunks of mutton or beef in a lake of oil, then there is the layering, which adds mountains of julienned yellow and red carrots, onions, whole heads of garlic, and chickpeas and spices and sweet raisins. This makes for the rich, aromatic broth (zirvak) that permeates the air with its delectable smell. And finally, there is the steam, where long-grain rice is piled on top, and massive metal lids cover the pot to steam everything into perfection. The complexity of tools and the ingredients used are a result of evolving civilization over centuries that resulted in the plov – a genealogy running through the Persianate world, Central Asian traditions and later Russian and Soviet influences.

Chorsu Bazaar (Image courtesy: Uzbekistan ACDF)

Just past the main dome, I go inside the bustling, flour-dusted bakery section of the Bazaar, a magnet for curious tourists drawn by the scent of roasting yeast. There are fiery clay tandoors that open towards the front, and inside them are glowing rows of raw nons slapped onto the scorching walls, puffing up over the open flames. The sight fascinates me, and sensing my excitement, or maybe as a usual stunt for tourists, a sweat-soaked baker hands me his long, hooked metal rod and guides me in spearing a blistering, golden-brown loaf off the clay wall and bringing it out. I decide to buy a few of the piping-hot nons and walk around the rest of the Bazaar blowing and chomping on it. There are piled high produce, colorful spices, dried fruits and nuts, a variety of cheese, lots of meat, bread, and gift packs, all competing for space, with smells of cooking drifting through the aisles. Multi-level concentric balconies are packed with vendors calling you out to buy their wares, while the outdoor alleys host clothing shops, and the open kitchens.

Despite the modern dome, the Bazaar feels old, and largely ‘non-curated.’ It has absorbed centuries of humans that have passed these lands buying, selling, bargaining, carrying, eating, while history moved with its glacial pace. And it seamlessly met the modern daily life humming beneath this dome, while continuing to draw life from the same rivers and oases from its earliest civilizations.

Javanese Hills, Stone and Ash

 I

Civets are small nocturnal mammals, roughly the size of domestic cats, with a distinctive gut. Their gut hosts a “secret” bacteria that helps digest fruits uniquely – breaking down the entire outer pulp, and only permeating the inside seed with enzymes and gastric juices, reducing the seed’s acidity and bitterness while enhancing its aroma. When the fruit happens to be coffee cherries, and the wild animal has picked the ripest and the sweetest fruits from the forest for itself, about 24-hours of digestion in its gut will produce droppings of coffee seeds on the floor with a supposedly distinct aroma and sweetness. It’s sold as kopi luwak, one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Capitalism subsequently did what it does to exquisite products – leading to force-fed caged civets excreting beans that are commonplace in Indonesian airports and usually come with don’t-buy recommendations from travelers. I could find several boxes of ‘authentic’ kopi luwak each with different claims and price tags, and decided that I am doing just fine in life with my regular morning coffee.

Converting poop into coffee is a strange human endeavor, and the credit of its discovery goes to the human desire for accessing the forbidden. Coffee was introduced in the 19th century as a cash crop for plantations in Java and Sumatra by the Dutch, who controlled the Indonesian archipelago for roughly 350 years. Dutch plantation owners strictly forbade native workers from picking the cherries for their own use. Driven by curiosity and a desire for the “forbidden” drink, local farmers noticed that wild civets (luwaks) would eat the ripest coffee cherries but excrete the beans intact. They collected excreted beans, cleaned and brewed them. When the plantation owners tasted this significantly smoother and less bitter coffee, it soon became a highly prized, expensive delicacy among the elite.

II

Indonesia is a land tough to fathom. It’s the largest country in the world made entirely of islands – an archipelagic state. There are over 17,000 islands in Indonesia, with the largest ones being New Guinea (western half belongs to Indonesia), Borneo (shared with other countries), Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java. The capital city of Jakarta is located in Java, the most densely populated island in the world. The number of people living in Jakarta metropolitan area is roughly the same as the entire population of Canada, or 1.5 times the entire population of Australia. It’s infamous for its traffic, though the city’s infrastructure has improved significantly with the country’s growth (Indonesia is one of the wealthier economies in Southeast Asia), and for me, commuting in elegant BYD cars amidst the imposing cityscapes feels like a privilege.

The term Jakarta evolves from ‘Jayakarta’, a 16th century name of the city. Jayakarta is a Sanskrit term (for victorious), bestowed on the city by Fatahillah, a Muslim military commander, who defeated a Hindu Sunda Kingdom. The lines between language, religion, conquests, and the modern state of Indonesia are challenging to understand from the perspective of clean lines drawn in the modern politics of India, the country I come from. But perhaps the modern lines are the strange ones. Hinduism and Islam in their older forms, on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, were less centralized, more local, and more porous than they are today. Both have narrowed into the national, textual, hyper-masculine versions we know now: small gods and local saints and Sufi dargahs giving way to a standardized faith convenient in politics. A Sanskrit name bestowed by a Muslim commander on a former Hindu capital belongs to a religious world that existed before this narrowing.

Jakarta Metropolitan Area (Image courtesy: Jakartadunia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The hotel I am staying at in Jakarta features two exquisitely woodcarved panels in the lobby, one portraying Ramayana stories in intricate detail, the other Mahabharata scenes replete with chariot battles and the moment when the Bhagavad Gita is delivered on the battlefield. Just these two panels carry a Hindu visual culture that is refined and heightened, a religion that took deep root in this country and grew its own flavor. The epic stories from Hinduism remain famous in Indonesia, and are the bedrock of their traditional wayang puppetry. Juxtaposed against this imagery, in the same lobby, is a Ramadan Oasis, a beautiful decor with colorful fanous lanterns hanging over a wooden camel and desert hut, to welcome guests for iftar. The city is in its most reflective and spiritual phase in the final days of Ramadan when I arrive – Indonesia is also the country that hosts the largest Muslim population in the world. I stand for a long moment between the panels and the lanterns, working out where I am: Hindu epics carved in wood on the walls, an iftar oasis at the centre of the floor, and a country with the world’s largest Muslim population going about its evening. Amidst the fantastic hospitality of Southeast Asia, this juxtaposition seems effortless, however strange to me.

Hindu and Buddhist ideas came to Indonesia from Indian merchants, who shifted their focus from the West to the “lands of gold” in the east after the Roman Empire fell in the 5th and 6th centuries. On the map, the most direct sea route between India and China goes through the Strait of Malacca, the ultimate choke point for global trade (more strategic than Hormuz, with roughly a quarter of all globally traded goods passing through it). The strait has been controlled variously from the lands of Sumatra on its west, Malay Peninsula on its right, and Java in the south, and the riches passing through saw the rise and fall of kingdoms often more prosperous than those around the Mediterranean. The Srivijaya kingdom (7th-11th century) was one of the early ones to prosper out of Sumatra, and became a global center for Buddhist learning. Then came the Majapahit (13th-16th century) in East Java, a Hindu-Buddhist empire that unified much of the modern Indonesian archipelago for the first time. Islam spread through the archipelago over these same centuries, carried by traders from Gujarat and the Arab world, and Sultanates rose as the Majapahit declined. The Dutch arrived in the early 1600s and left only in 1945. The Sanskrit-based courtly cultures of the previous thousand years produced some of the greatest achievements of Indian thought outside India: Borobudur, the largest and most philosophically complex Buddhist structure in the world, and Prambanan, a Hindu complex with Ramayana reliefs that are more complete and better preserved than any found in India today. I got a chance to visit Borobudur, which attracts around 1.4 million visitors a year, with foreign tourists surprisingly making up only about a tenth of that.

III

Borobudur was built around a natural hill in Magelang and dates to 9th century. This was the period of Shailendra dynasty (Sanskrit meaning “King of the Mountain”) that ruled Java and is associated with a cultural renaissance in the region. To get to the temple, I fly into Yogyakarta (another Sanskrit-derived name from Ayodhya, Rama’s capital in the Ramayana, joined with karta, or “accomplished”). Yogyakarta is situated in the southern part of the island of Java, and technically the only royal city in Indonesia still ruled by a monarchy. It has a surprisingly beautiful airport, with hallways and gate areas decorated in intricate Batik Kawung motifs on the ceilings and walls. The corridors are an art gallery in themselves, and most of the interior structure has a wood or bamboo-texture, and terracotta-style tiles. Every gate is a Gapura, a welcoming symbol of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms. The city is the heart of Javanese fine arts and culture, and the origin of globally popular batik textiles. It’s also the centre of Indonesian education. The ‘university town’ feel of Yogyakarta is apparent as I drive north to Magelang: there are photo copy and printing shops, establishments for laptop repair, billboards advertising scholarships and even notary services, and several fast food joints. As the vehicle moves farther out towards Magelang, the landscape changes into lush green paddy fields, and winding roads through canopies of banana, palms, and teakwood. Java has incredibly rich, volcanic soil that allowed for massive rice production. This surplus food supported a much larger population than other islands, providing the “manpower” needed for the vast armies and monumental construction projects like Borobudur.

As we drive further north, the massive silhouette of Mount Merapi looms to the right. This is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and is the “source” of the fertility – the ash from its frequent eruptions is why the paddy fields stay so impossibly green. The vehicle also crosses several wide, rocky riverbeds (like the Progo or Elo rivers) which are apparently “lahar” paths that form the channels for volcanic mudflows. Locals still manually collect sand and stones for construction from these rivers. About halfway between Yogyakarta and Magelang is the town of Muntilan where the roadside is lined with hundreds of small workshops. In them, craftsmen carve volcanic stone into statues, stupas, and pestles – a living link to the stonemasons who probably built Borobudur.

Mount Merapi: Indonesia’s Most Active Volcano (Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

IV

I am staying at Manohara, the only accommodation located inside the Borobudur Temple complex. The Sanskrit word Manohara literally translates to “stealer of the heart”, and the accommodation perhaps is named after the story of Manohara, one of the most famous Buddhist tales. Stories in Buddhism are called Jataka tales (Sanskrit for “birth stories”) and they are legends detailing the previous lives of Siddhartha Gautama before he became the Buddha. The more of the Jataka tales I encounter (primarily in Southeast Asia), the more I start seeing how much geography and characters are shared across Buddhism and Hinduism, apparently two very different religions of the world. Buddhism did emerge within the same cultural landscape as early Hinduism and shares the same spiritual vocabulary. Place names like Panchala, Hastinapur, and Ayodhya are common across Buddhist and Hindu tales, and Sanskrit serves as the common substrate for culture.

That evening, I walk to the restaurant at the rear side of Manohara, and stop. Across the lawn, half-hidden by the late afternoon trees, sits the most beautiful stone structure I have ever seen: a dark, stepped pyramid sitting on its hill the way a mountain sits on the earth, absolutely there.

Borobudur Temple (Image courtesy: Heri nugroho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Borobudur temple is an imposing pyramidal structure built using almost 2 million blocks of gray volcanic stone. The square base of the temple can fit two full-sized soccer fields side-by-side with room to spare, and at 35m high, it rises to about 10 floors of a modern building. The structure is a massive Lego-like puzzle, with stones that were laid without a single drop of mortar and fitted together using intricate “knobs” and “dovetail” joints. The mortar-free masonry allows the entire structure to flex slightly during earthquakes, critical for a seismically active region like Java. When viewed from above, the entire structure is a mathematically precise Tantric Buddhist Mandala, representing a cosmic map of the universe. There are about 100 gargoyles, a sophisticated drainage system for tropical rains, each carved to look like a dragon. And that’s just the engineering.

My ascent begins at four in the morning. We are given thin sandals that feel like rubber, designed to softly tread the stones that have withstood the weight of prayers and hopes for centuries. A line of small flashlights threads up through the dark garden to the eastern stairway. A faint call to prayer drifts up from a village somewhere below, carried by the mist. We climb in silence.

As the first light reaches the corridors, the details become clearer, and immediately overwhelm the senses. The builders of the temple essentially “wrapped” a hill in stone and then carved it. The temple features over 2,600 relief panels narrating the life of the Buddha, his previous incarnations as the Jatakas, and the path of enlightenment, and 504 Buddha statues: a mind-boggling number of fine art installations that are essentially rock carvings done at the level of finesse and detailing of a wall painting. The monument consists of nine stacked platforms and a visitor walks through galleries making her way up to each. The walk up represents progressive realms of enlightenment. One starts at the lower realm, Kamadhatu, the realm of desire, depicting humans entangled in the cycle of samsara and the law of karma. The reliefs at this level show the consequences of human action in unflinching detail: gossip, theft, cruelty, lust, and the suffering each begets in the next life. Curiously, most of these panels are hidden, covered by a stone encasement added during construction, perhaps to stabilize the structure, perhaps because the imagery was considered too explicit. Only a small section at the southeast corner remains visible, a glimpse of the world the visitor is meant to be ascending out of. The second level is Rupadhatu, the realm of forms. To me, these five terraces are the most beautifully carved, symbolizing the stage where one has abandoned desires but is still bound by physical forms and names. These are narrow corridors lined with hundreds of relief panels and more than 400 Buddha statues in different mudras (hand gestures) housed in decorative niches. The reliefs here narrate the life of Siddhartha Gautama, his previous incarnations as the Jatakas, and the pilgrim Sudhana’s search for enlightenment. A visitor walking these corridors clockwise, as the temple intends, reads them like a turning book, each panel a chapter in the long argument that the Buddha himself was once like us. Then comes the top level, Arupadhatu, the realm of formlessness. These are circular platforms strikingly plain compared to the levels below. There are no narrative reliefs here, a detachment from the physical world. This level features 72 perforated bell-shaped stupas, each containing a seated Buddha statue. The visitor’s journey is clockwise to ascend each level, walking through nearly 5 kilometers of corridors, and symbolically spiraling upward from the everyday world toward the final state of Nirvana, represented by the empty, formless central stupa at the very peak. The architecture “thins out” as one reaches enlightenment.

Arupadhatu levels, Borobudur (Image courtesy: Gunkarta, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

I give up on clicking pictures of the panels, overwhelmed and saturated. It’s probably a hidden lesson about the nature of beauty. I start listening more intently to the guide. His hands, wrinkled and experienced, darkened by years of tropical sun, point at the clever stone joints, then to the history of the UNESCO restoration of the monument, and then to the stories of the largest panels, which he narrates with care. These are stories from my own childhood, common to Hinduism and Buddhism, that traveled from India to Java through conquests and rituals while communicating the same essence of life. It isn’t lost on me that my guide is a Muslim, who takes pride in this monument and its beautiful stories etched in stone over a thousand years. I chat with him more, and get to know his life story: his Umrah of 2015 to another great site in the world, and where he hopes to return for Haj in 2027 if he manages to save enough money. “I want to die happily,” he says. “Most people want to live happily. For me, this life is only a process. To get to the next one.” I marvel at the core of every religion that gives hope and meaning to human life, and simultaneously serves as a tool for political organization.

I sit near one of the “open Buddha” statues, one of the few open ones among the 72 enclosed statues at the top level where the outer stupas were damaged over centuries. This is the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma. I look out at the horizons. Mount Merapi is visible, with its fiery interiors that have periodically deposited layers of volcanic ash and debris on this island over the years. A little to the right is the silhouette of the Menoreh Hills, its jagged ridgeline resembling a reclining person, who, according to a local myth, is Gunadharma, the architect of Borobudur who laid down to rest after finishing the massive task of building the temple.

I feel my breath in the early misty island air, and an unbearable lightness settles in my soul. My physical body is surrounded by nothing but stones built to enclose an emptiness. The place feels like a void, not of the melancholic type, but one that dissolves everything into it, marking everything that constitutes consciousness as irrelevant. There is no pride, privilege, ambition, or want in this space and time. I am far from Nirvana, but in these fleeting moments of almost meditative trance, I carefully note the last remnants of the physical world that appear in my mind. And I later reflect that these remnants were only the simplest things of absolute beauty: the sun rising behind the slopes of Merapi, its golden glow across the stupas, the fog in the valley below, birds waking up and darting through the sky, and a smile on my face that didn’t signify anything other than ‘being’.

It’s time to descend. I walk down in silence through the same platforms in reverse, the realms of formlessness, form, and desire arriving in sequence as the sun gathers strength. Halfway down I look back at the central stupa, smaller now from below, an empty bell against a clearing sky. The architects had thought of this view too. The descent is part of the design. You return to the world of desire knowing what is at the top, and what is at the top is nothing.

Fiji

I

“Sugar. Yes please.” (Song by Maroon 5 in their 2014 album “V”)

Sugarcane is one of the thirstiest and most demanding agricultural crops on earth. It needs a warm, tropical climate, plentiful rainfall, and extensive human labor. To plant the crop, a worker will lay sections of stalk directly into the soil and cover them by hand (sugarcane is grown this way rather than from seeds). Once the crop grows to roughly 6 to 13 feet over the course of about a year, the worker will set the fields on fire to burn away dry leaves and debris, and to chase out snakes. The worker will then use long machete-like blades to cut individual stalks at the base, as close to the ground as possible, because sucrose concentration is highest in the lower portions of the stalk and diminishes toward the top. The leafy tops will also be cut off and discarded or left as mulch. Hacking away at the stalks, one by one, a worker might cut several tons of cane in a single day. The thick, dense lower stalks, thus harvested, will be sent to a sugar mill for extraction and crystallization. It is an arduous process defined by heat, smoke, and relentless physical repetition.

The history of the crop is as brutal as its agricultural production. Sugarcane originated thousands of years ago in what is now Papua New Guinea and the broader New Guinea region, where people chewed wild cane stalks for their sweetness long before anyone thought to refine them into crystals. From there, the plant spread to the Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, and ultimately to India. By the Gupta period, around 350 AD, Indians had developed and perfected the technique for boiling and refining sugarcane juice into solid crystals, which they called sharkara – the root of the modern word “sugar.” This knowledge spread westward through Persia and into the Arab world, coinciding with the transfer of the Indian knowledge of mathematics (and zero). Arabs subsequently brought sugarcane cultivation across North Africa and into Spain and Sicily during the medieval period. For several centuries, sugar remained a rare and expensive luxury across most of Europe, where people relied heavily on honey, dried fruits, figs, dates, currants, and berries for everyday sweetness.

History is replete with winners, losers, and turning of the tables. In the late 1870s, descendants of the inventors of sharkara were picked up by the British from the fertile plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India, and shipped off as “indentured” laborers to work the cane fields of Fiji, a Pacific island thousands of miles away from home. These laborers were known as Girmityas; Girmit being a distortion of the word “agreement,” a five-year contract signed by the British, often extended to ten or more years through debt, coercion, and manipulation. The arrangement uprooted families and saw a heavy death toll just from the voyage across the sea that took months in packed vessels. On the island, the workers were assigned to plantations, and made to work from dawn to dusk under the tropical sun, hacking away cane, to meet their quotas or face beatings. Women were doubly exploited with their bodies and their labor. In British parlance, this indentured system of formal contracts was a “humane alternative” to African slavery, which had been abolished in the empire in 1833.

Forced labor fueled the consumption patterns of the metropole, and the comforts of many empires were built upon the broken backs of millions. The Girmityas of Fiji never went back. They couldn’t afford the passage, or they had children born in Fiji who knew no other home. Sugar drove slavery elsewhere too. The Portuguese and Spanish had established cane plantations in Madeira, the Canary Islands, Brazil, and the Caribbean, building a mass sugar economy using enslaved African labor. The Caribbean became synonymous with sugar production, and the crop drove an enormous share of the Atlantic slave trade. By the 18th century, sugar had become affordable enough in Europe to sweeten everyday tea and coffee.

The indentured system in Fiji formally ended in 1916. The descendants of the Girmityas, the Indo-Fijians, constitute roughly a third of Fiji’s population, down from nearly half in the mid-20th century. Emigration and ethnic tensions after two coups have steadily reduced their numbers. Fiji still produces sugar, though the industry has declined significantly. The cane fields remain, sprawling across the western lowlands, reminders of the warp and weft of history.

II

The journey westward from Los Angeles to Nadi, Fiji’s gateway for tourists, takes about 12 hours. Somewhere above the vastness of the Pacific, the plane crosses the international date line, a human invention sketched arbitrarily across the expanse of the ocean. In an instant, hours vanish or reappear based on the direction of travel. The descent into Nadi begins over an endless blue with strange patterns composed of atolls, reefs, and islands emerging from the water. The turbofans slow down, the wheels extend, and the plane drops through layers of humid air before its tires meet the tarmac with a jolt and a screech. The landscape outside the windows is a riot of green. This is Viti Levu, the largest of the 800+ islands and islets that constitute the Fiji archipelago. Most are uninhabited. Some are barely more than coral outcroppings. But together they form a nation scattered across an area of ocean larger than many countries.

The first impression stepping off the plane is that of any quintessential coastal town. The air is thick, warm, and distinctly smells of the sea: laden with salt, humidity, and vegetation. I think human brains have a strange archival and recall mechanism – a smell, a tune, or a scenery can trigger vivid involuntary recalls of past experiences. For me, the smell of Nadi airport and the particular combination of heat, humidity, and sea brine transport me to Kerala, to a specific establishment called Kadavu in a town I once spent time in as a student. The connection makes no logical sense, but the olfactory memory is powerful and immediate.

The drive from the airport into town passes through lush fields of sugarcane, palm groves, and patches of forest. It is the rainy summer season this time of year, and the earth is soaked in yellow ochre mud and verdant green. Scattered along the roadside are homes made of concrete, corrugated metal, or thatched wood. There are small shops with brightly painted signs. A temple appears, its gopuram rising incongruously, a piece of South India transplanted halfway across the world.

Nadi is located on the western side of Viti Levu, in the heart of what was once the sugar belt and where Indo-Fijians are most concentrated. The city is a curious place, neither fully Fijian nor fully Indian, but something in between. There are many temples, including the large Sri Siva Subramaniya temple, apparently the largest Hindu temple in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a large structure built in Dravidian style, with towers painted in vibrant hues of red, yellow, and blue. My visit coincides with the festival of Thaipusam, and I get to witness the decoration, the commotion of devotees, and a piece of India.

Walking through Nadi’s streets, there is a strange sensation of familiarity mixed with alienation. The local clothing is recognizable: women in sarees and salwar kameez, men in plain shirts and trousers, and the colors distinctly reminiscent of small-town north India. Names of shops are familiar – Shriji, Meenoo’s, Makanjee’s – and collections and displays familiar. And yet, the context seems wrong. There is the tropical heat, the trees are different, and occasionally there is an Indigenous Fijian face. This is not India, but its echo – a place shaped by India but fundamentally transformed by distance and history. The language is “Fiji Baat,” a creole evolved from the dialects brought by the Girmityas. It is rooted in Bhojpuri and rural vernaculars of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but reshaped by over a century of isolation from the subcontinent. I can understand it, mostly, but it requires effort. The vocabulary is familiar, the grammar recognizable, but the rhythm is different. The intonation, the stress patterns, and the way sentences rise and fall all deviate from what I know. Some words are pronounced in slightly different ways, and the pauses fall in unexpected places. It’s a reminder of the beauty of languages and how they evolve, adapting to the environment and shaped by the confluence of cultures. Fiji Baat is a living link to the past, to the laborers who stepped off the ships more than a century ago. They brought only their dialects, their gods, and maybe hope. Language and faith are portable, and both have survived, adapted, and taken root in this foreign soil. India itself doesn’t appear to exist in the imagination of the local Indo-Fijian community, and the only connection is perhaps by lineage and ritual.

Nadi’s main street is a modest affair, a single road lined with low-rise buildings housing shops, pharmacies, travel agencies, and small eateries. I didn’t see any colonial quarters here, nor any carefully preserved historic district. Perhaps the town was never meant to be a showcase, and was just a service town for the sugar industry. There is a quiet commerce, with shopkeepers sitting in doorways, and shops with displays of cheap clothing on mannequins, knock-off sandals, and sunglasses. Obscure Bollywood music of the '80s and '90s, of the type that might be heard in Indian villages, spills out from crude speakers placed at the entryways of larger establishments. I walk the length of the main street in perhaps 20 minutes. It is not a place designed for strolling; the heat discourages aimless wandering. There are few tourists here; they tend to stay in the resort areas along the coast. Nadi doesn’t give the impression of an exotic paradise from tourism brochures. It is strikingly ordinary; a modest and unassuming working town that does not perform for the tourist gaze. It’s not interested in being picturesque, and it simply is – powerful in its lack of pretense. At least for me, there is also a pervasive sense of melancholy, as if the displacement never fully healed.

III

There is sea all around, achingly beautiful and utterly indifferent. It is the provider of fish and livelihood, the highway connecting the islands, and the source of myths, folklore, and life itself. Capitalism worked its magic and led to the development of Denarau, a purpose-built enclave on reclaimed land, home to marquee resorts and conveniently disconnected from the quotidian humdrum of Nadi town. Port Denarau is a picturesque marina lined with luxury cruisers, catamarans, and charter boats that ferry tourists out into the blue-green waters, generating significant employment and livelihood for locals in the process. There is a cheerful, slightly manufactured atmosphere here: drinks flow freely, Western music accompanies the sunset, and the mood is resolutely holiday. Every morning, day tours depart from Port Denarau, heading west to the Mamanuca Islands, a scattered chain of atolls and islets. Along the way are sand bars, crescents of white sand rising improbably from the middle of the ocean, sometimes just a few meters wide, surrounded by shallow turquoise water perfect for snorkeling. There is Castaway Island, made famous by the Tom Hanks film, and several other islands with resorts that have manicured the wilder edges, turning paradise into product, carefully packaged and priced.

Mamanuca Islands (Image courtesy: Tourism Fiji)

From my privileged vantage point at a fine-dining table at a Denarau resort, I see the white sand and hear the sound of waves breaking at a distance. The sun descends toward the horizon, and the sky moves through shades of orange and pink. The menu offers a delectable “farmer’s thali,” an Indian assortment that has undergone the same transformation as the language of Indo-Fijians. The ingredients are recognizable: dal, sabzi, roti, rice. The spices are familiar. But there is something distinctly foreign about the food: the proportions adjusted, the flavors recalibrated for this place. It is Indian food that has evolved beyond India, and does not project the hubris of India’s modern-day nationalism. It belongs entirely to the people who brought their culinary traditions to this remote archipelago and eventually made it their home. On the table sits a small bowl of sugar sachets. The irony is sharp and inescapable. This pack of crystals carries within it the weight of centuries: the labor that extracted it, the empires that profited from it, the lives it consumed and reshaped. It is simultaneously a symbol of exploitation and of survival, of brutality and of the stubborn persistence of communities that endured.

I think of the Polynesian and Micronesian navigators of the Pacific Islands centuries ago, who perfected inter-island travel on canoes, traveling between islands separated by vast stretches of empty ocean, navigating without instruments or maps. They read the stars, the shape and rhythm of ocean swells, the nature of wind, the flight patterns of seabirds, the color and temperature and smell of the water, the presence of certain fish, the way clouds gathered over distant islands, and everything that the sea below and the sky above offered. They were the original astrologers, with a now-lost knowledge system of extraordinary sophistication, developed over millennia, encoded in chants and passed orally.

The system used by these navigators was called “etak,” which is an inversion of perspective and perhaps a useful metaphor for life. Instead of imagining the canoe moving across a static ocean toward a fixed island, they envisioned the canoe as stationary and believed that the “island comes to you.”

Lessons in Transit

Fiji (Image courtesy: Viator)

The evening light is soft and golden, deceivingly so. It’s the middle of summer in Nadi, just a few hundred miles from the Tropic of Capricorn, and the tropical sun was blazing overhead just a few hours earlier. My luggage is loaded into the van that will take me to the airport, and sitting on the front seat beside the driver is the default setting in this part of the world.

“So, are you from Nadi?” I ask the driver.

“No, I am from the north of Fiji. Where are you from?” he replies.

“Washington DC.”

“Were you born there?”

“No, no. I moved there about 5 years ago. I was born in India. I only work in Washington DC.”

He nods and changes the FM channel. “You must be understanding this,” he offers with a smile.

“Oh yes, the previous one was a Bollywood song. This one seems to be a talk show.”

“Are they talking about love and romance?” he asks.

“No, it’s more like a discussion on skills needed to join the radio industry.”

“You know, there are many Indians here in Fiji.”

“Yes, Indo-Fijians, right? And they have a language that I can understand, but it’s slightly different.”

“They have been here for many generations. Most of them also speak Fijian, very fluently! You understand their language thoda thoda?” he asks, smiling.

“Oh yes, I can understand it. It’s just evolved slightly.”

After a momentary pause, he asks another question: “Is India very different from America?”

“Yes, very different. Washington DC has better infrastructure, I think.”

“Yeah, more advanced, no? What kind of work do you do?”

“I work with the World Bank. Its business is to give loans to governments, you know. For development work, like electricity, roads, schools.”

“Like here in Fiji?”

“Yes, Fiji. We have many projects here. Also nearby. Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, Vanuatu.”

“Wow. And you must have family back in India…”

“Yes, my parents live in India.”

“Hmm. I live here with my family. A wife, three kids,” he says with quiet pride.

“Nice. Boys and girls?”

“Two boys, one girl. My wife is studying. And I am supporting her.” He smiles. “One year done, two more to go. I struggle struggle struggle, for one year. After two more years, payoff!”

“Very nice. What is she studying?”

“She will be a teacher. You studied in India?”

“Yes. Education is good in India.”

“We have many doctors from India. And many patients go to India for treatment. So, India is definitely above us.”

“Well, India also has a lot of people.”

“Yes, that’s true. We have less than a million people.”

“And India has 1.3 billion.”

“Yeah. More people, more brains!” he observes.

“I don’t know if I would put it like that. But if you have so many people, even if some end up doing good, you get a sizeable number.”

“Yes, like you. You did good.”

“Haha. I don’t know if I really did good.”

“I am sure you did. So, Mr. Kumar. Give me some advice.”

“Tell me,” I offer sincerely.

“What should I buy? A car, or an island?” he asks.

“Depends on what you want to do. I think you are thinking about a career, which is going to be either your own business or a job where you will work for someone else. If you want to do something on your own, then between a car and an island, you would want to choose what will make more money for you. Is it going to be a car that you can use for a transport business, or an island that you can use for a tourism business. Whatever you think is better here in Fiji. But if you want to do a job, then you would instead want to think about who are the people or companies you would like to work for, what would they need, and what you need to learn to get there.”

“So, it’s about money?”

“I think it is. But not money for the sake of it. Money by itself is worthless. It’s a piece of paper. If you are alone on that island with a million dollars, you can’t eat your money. You would need food and water. I think you need to know what kind of life you want. Do you want to support your family? Have your kids get a good education? Travel around and see the world? Just have a nicer life? You need to know what you are aspiring for, and money is important to help you get there. I think money is about power. And access. It helps you navigate the world and is often the means to where you want to get to.”

“So you are saying that money is about purpose.”

“Yes. I am saying that money is important not because you just like to be rich, or because you are greedy. It is important because it helps you do what you want to do. But you need to know what kind of life you want. So, if you were to spend between a car and an island, you shouldn’t spend on the car because you just want to have fun driving a nice car. Then you buy something that’s not really making more money for you because that car will get old very quickly. You want to work hard, have honesty and intent, and put your money where it works for you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kumar.”

“I don’t know if what I said made sense,” I add.

“You know, me and my wife have worked very hard. And after she completes her course, I have been telling her that we should move overseas.”

“Where would you go? New Zealand? Or Australia?”

“Australia. Life will be difficult there, no? My wife says it’s very expensive.”

“Well, it might be. But that’s what life is for. You work hard, it might not be as good as here, but then it gets better, because you have put in the work.”

“So you think I should move to Australia?”

“I definitely think you should. Look, nobody likes to move away from home. You think I really like being so far away, instead of being at home and eating my mother’s food? But that wouldn’t lead to the life I dream for myself. If you have a life that you dream of, you have to do difficult things, the hard things. Australia might be hard, harder than here. But you go through that, and then you achieve things.”

He grows quieter. And then I hear reflections: “you know Mr. Kumar, I drive this car. I take people to their destinations. People like you, coming from America. Others, coming from all over the world. I ask them for advice. And I learn. I record everything everyone says here.” He touches his temple. “I learn from different people who have seen different things. Today, I live in a rented house here in town. $350 a month. I drive this car with TTF, $5 an hour, 8 hours a day. But do you know I was a fisherman?”

“When?”

“I was a fisherman in my village. All I knew was how to fish. Using a spear. When people from my village see me drive this car, they say really, you drive this big a car? All they ever saw me driving was a small boat.”

“That’s a beautiful story,” I say, mostly out of words.

“I came to this town. It was difficult. In the village, we had fresh fruit, fresh fish. It’s not that easy here. When I came, I used to work 91 hours each week.”

“You were doing 13 hours a day?”

“13 to 14 hours. Sometimes 15. I used to drive a bus. Sleep in the bus anywhere on the side of the road. I worked as hard as I could. Now I am working for this company, sitting in this tourist car, in this uniform. I get to meet people like you. And I still work hard. Me and my wife support each other.” He sneezes. “See, that’s what happens to me with this aircon,” he grins.

“You know, I don’t know if you believe in God, but I think when you really work hard, and with honesty, God gives you the return.”

“Yes, you receive. When you work hard, you receive. And I have worked hard. You see, I had gotten so skinny when I used to drive the bus. Now look at me!” he says, pointing at himself.

“The universe indeed pays off. You inspire me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kumar. My name is Bill, by the way.”

“You have a beautiful story, and you really inspired me, Bill.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kumar. And thank you for choosing TTF; I hope you had a pleasant ride. And as we say here, until next time. When you come back to Nadi, and if you choose TTF for transportation, ask for Bill.”

“I wish the very best to you and your family, Bill. And I hope you go to Australia!”

We hug, and he smiles warmly. “Bula Vinaka, Mr. Kumar.”