Indian Summer
Mario Rodrigues
June 21, 2004
Itinerant writer Will Marks was besotted with India the moment he landed here. The New Zealander who has been to at least 40 countries all over the world swears none of them seized all parts of his imagination as India did. Mario Rodrigues caught up with him
TALK about real life imitating fiction and Will Marks will tell you how it so eerily came true in his case. Even as he kept spinning out fictional encounters and incidents for his youngish characters while fleshing out his debut novel The Highway (published by Frog Books), a lucid otherworldly trip on the undulating road to nirvana and self-discovery across the Indian subcontinent, some of them had the unerring knack of coming true down the line. “I would write something and years later it would happen (like his character Zac Goodman falling in love with a yoga teacher, for example). It was as if I was not writing the book but the book was writing me,” says the 30-year-old New Zealander.
For Marks, life is all about the lure and the romance of the long and winding road. He works for six to nine months a year, in Hong Kong, London and Sydney in IT, finance and marketing, just to scrape enough to finance his expedition to some exotic city or a lonely, hazardous trip to the middle of nowhere for the next six months. “My passion is to travel and work in different places,” he states, matter-of-factly.
He has travelled across Asia, from Myanmar to Taiwan, Western Europe and East Africa. “I didn’t have a lot of expectations of India but when I finally landed up here in 1998 it affected me in a stronger way than the 40 countries that I visited ever did. None of them seized all parts of my imagination as India did,” he confesses.
Marks returned for six months and then for a year. The result was The Highway — a purely fictional but universal depiction of what happens to a lot of people (westerners) who visit India. Marks’s “escapades” in the Indian subcontinent include a 16,000 km motorcycle journey across the Himalayas from Pakistan’s border with China on the Karakoram Highway to Nepal, flying a para-glider 50 km across the Himalayan foothills before spiral-diving over the Dalai Lama’s abode in Dharamshala, visiting the site of Buddha’s birth in Lumbini, a series of 10-day Tibetan Buddhist meditation retreats, studying hatha and ashtanga yoga at Rishikesh, Mysore and Sri Lanka, getting “ecstatic” on trance in Goa and a fortnight’s stint as a Bollywood extra in Raj Kumar Santoshi’s The Legend of Bhagat Singh.
“India is an assault on the senses in more ways than one. In Africa it is mostly a primal state of existence but here you have the grandeur of the Himalayas, a galaxy of deities and religions, jungles and beaches — a lot of diversity in a small space,” he said. In New Zealand things are just 150 years old. So Europe, where buildings are 500 years old, was a revelation. But India, with its monuments and civilisation going back some 2000 years in time, is mind-boggling.
To one who didn’t have much of a religious upbringing and was only exposed to the intellectualism and materialism of the West earlier, getting familiar with Buddhist concepts like karma and reincarnation in India was a major help with self-discovery, at a more multi-dimensional level than he had been brought up with. In short, he has travelled the distance and bridged the gap.
Marks writes occasional travel pieces but still swears by fiction. He is constantly reading while on the road — in fact, reading forms an integral part of his journey. India will be a recurring theme in his future plans, he insists. “Ever since I came to India I have been coming back again and again. India is a place I want to continue coming back to for the rest of my travel life,” he concludes.
Mario Rodrigues is The Statesman’s Mumbai-based special representative
