PAPERWALLAH. All our Sancho Panzas

Even when travelling alone, I’m rarely unaccompanied.

In my handbag, a book. Perhaps another in my suitcase, because what if I finish one, and have no other, and the place I’m travelling to has (horror of horrors) no bookshop. Or perhaps I’m travelling to a non-English-speaking part of the world, and it’s difficult to find something I can read in a language I understand. So, like with mostly everything else in life, always one, but preferably two. That’s what we do, most of my reader/writer friends and I. My point of interest, though, lies somewhat tangentially, elsewhere. How do we pick the books with whom we travel?

I imagine that mostly we carry what we are already in the midst of reading. For convenience and continuation; but not always.

For me, there is a moment when I stand before my bookshelf, wondering how to pair the journey with a text. What do I carry for a trip to the mountains? Somehow, it often tends to be crime. Robert Galbraith in Lansdowne. Tana French in Mashobra. A Christie for Nainital. For the beach? Oddly enough, something terrifically thick and expansive. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries for Mandrem. Dostoevsky on Brighton’s pebbly shore.

When do I carry poetry? The answer is simple. Always.

Camus, of course, must only be read in a coffee shop. Preferably independent. Preferably somewhere along Rue de la Huchette in Paris. Or London’s Covent Garden. Nothing like a strong artisanal black to comfort you in your moments of bleak understanding of The Myth of Sisyphus .

Yet, even more memorable than the books I carry with me, are the ones I pick up along the way. From the shelf of a tiny café in Hampi, I plucked George Orwell’s Burmese Days , and read of jungles and hunts and colonial clubs, in a landscape as far removed from tropical Burma as it could possibly be. In Cambridge, accompanying my sister on a medical conference, and unable to afford museum entry fees and, well, anything else, I spied Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a discount pile at Foyles on the high street. I sat by the River Cam, reading of a father and son’s journey through a desolate post-apocalyptic world scourged by an unknown catastrophe. All this on a gorgeously sunny April day, when the grass and weeping willows and water seemed lit magically from within. (I don’t think I’m the kind of reader who would read Istanbul in Istanbul. Literature is travelling. How can you be transported if you are already in the place?) In Mussoorie, Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge . In Paris, I had Sylvia Plath. Bought at Shakespeare & Co (because, where else?). And since the lines outside every museum wound from there to China, I found a bench by the river, and settled for the afternoon, book and baguette in hand.

At times, your (human) travel companions are also readers, and you find yourselves talking into late hours about books. The Mahabharata narrated in its almost entirety on a ghat in Rishikesh, as the evening hovered above us, and flowers and diyas drifted past from the completed arati s. Ursula Le Guin in Udaipur, over cups and cups of well-brewed tea. Herman Melville in Lisbon, after a chance encounter in a shared dormitory. A young reader and traveller from Alberta who remains a friend.

At times, the only words I have are my own. An old Moleskine (bought at an admittedly younger, more pretentious age), filled with notes and ramblings. In the summer of 2010, I travelled through Switzerland alone on a residency, with Moleskine and iPod for company. Snippets of poetry. Ambitious attempts at Chatwin-style travelogue. But more precious than all my ramblings are the items in the pocket at the back of the notebook. A feather given to me by a ceramic artist in Lucerne: “May your life always be as light as this.” A hand-drawn map to Pessoa’s house by a friend of a friend in Aveiro. Another map to a secret Caravaggio painting in Rome by a lover’s uncle. Tickets to Capella Palatina Giardini Reali in Palermo.

Sometimes, the only book you need is your own.

Yet there must be a reason why all across the world exist book cafés where you can pick up a book and leave one behind. Where the transaction is literary rather than monetary. There is a thrill, I think, and an intimacy. Of a book moving from hand to hand, backpack to backpack. Café to café. This way books travel too, and collect their own biographies. I wish airports could also be converted. That instead of giant malls, they were giant libraries. Endless shelves categorised according to language, length of flight, and reading speed. Issue a book in New Delhi, return it in Berlin. And if that seems too much — what would I pick? There’s too many to select from! Maybe, like in a certain book about a certain young wizard, you do not choose the book. And perhaps this is true at all times. The book chooses you.

COMMENT NOW