Travel

Show Me the Place

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Show Me the Place

Searching for utopia.

We were on our way to Pondicherry in a Hindustan Ambassador, one of those classic 1950s-looking cars you see all through India. But this one had been modified, he said, so that it ran on recycled ayurvedic massage oil. He was taking me to a microbrewery in town, as if to show that this place had everything from back home and more.

Sometimes I wondered if Zuckman was stretching the truth a little. He was such an evangelist for this part of the world. He was older than me but looked more youthful; he glowed with a zealous optimism that I associated more with the corporate sector. But so far everything he’d said — about being a Sanskrit scholar, about leaving Muizenberg to come and run his software company from Auroville — had checked out…

An extract from Show Me the Place about a visit to the ‘living laboratory’ (residents don’t like the term utopia) of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Sunday Times online, 30 April 2024. Pagecast interview with Mila de Villiers.

Earlier in this piece, I describe coming across a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed in the (beautiful) Auroville Library. A science fictional utopia embedded in a real attempt at living differently – this became a kind of touchstone. It seemed like an emblem of how imaginary and actual experiments with better worlds have always nestled within, always co-existed and co-created each other. How the literary and political imagination have always depended on one other for showing that things have not always been as they are (and so could one day be otherwise again).

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Five by Three

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Five by Three

The part about the island.

There was a phone box upslope from the youth hostel. It stood out on the hillside, a dab of red against the greens and greys. It was the same colour as my bike panniers, waxy red and waterproof, that had carried everything I needed over the last weeks, through the wind and rain.

That was a good feeling. Striking camp, slotting the panniers back on the bike, being on your way. And so was rolling on and off the ferries ahead of the cars.

You watched an island approach, like this one with its terracotta cliffs and a rock pillar rising from the waves. The shoreline slowly resolved: a boatyard, a hotel on the pier, a distillery. White and grey pebbledash houses with laundry lines outside, clothes snapping in the wind.

The ferry bumped against the tyres of the pier, the ramp clunked down. The line of wet tarmac stretched out ahead, glowing when some light came through the clouds. Just a single lane with some passing places for cars, but there were none. This island was wilder and emptier than the others.

So I didn’t expect the phone box to be in use, but I could see someone, two people, through the glass slats.

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