Why I Will Keep Returning to Aatish Taseer’s New Book

A few days before my arrival in Sri Lanka, my grandmother in whose house I first tasted oudh, and who would have me gather harsinghar for her prayers, had died without seeing me. My exile from India made it impossible for me to return for her funeral. My husband put his arms around me and offered to take me to an Indian restaurant on the Upper West Side that night to honour my poor departed nani. It was all that could be done, but it was too little.”

So mourns Aatish Taseer the loss of home in A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile. In a poignant moment within the chapter on his journey to Sri Lanka, he really asks the question: what does exile really mean? What when you can stand right at the doorstep of a house—as he experiences in Sri Lanka—and consider the reality of never being able to step inside? Over two hundred pages, Taseer turns the notion inside out with a thoroughly sensory exploration of the Other. He’s in Mexico, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Bolivia—searching for a meaning of home and belonging that now eludes him.

Like a true sensualist, and virtuoso of the written word, Taseer conjures up evocative foils to the prison of banishment. His words linger, his words haunt—and that is probably why this feels like a book one will feel compelled to keep returning to.

Taseer, who is one of the two culturally contentious writers from India with a long-anticipated book out in the current moment (alongside Arundhati Roy), had his OCI revoked in 2019 by the Indian government. Like Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, A Return to Self is a gnawing memoir that speaks of identity, fragmentation and fraught terrains of the mind. Son of Salman Taseer, the late Pakistani businessman and politician, and journalist Tavleen Singh, Taseer finds himself standing at various crossroads and weighing his own newfound place in the world.

“To lose one’s country is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home,” he writes in the introduction. But admirably, Taseer doesn’t hold on too sentimentally to the notion of a lost home. The epigraph—from Thomas Mann—confirms: “When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.”

And indeed, A Return to Self is an exercise for the exiled to find shelter in places away from what was once yours. In “The Ghosts of Al-Andalus: Spain”, he writes of the amazement borne of one’s encounters with erasure—such as when he muses upon the country as “a land of churches upon mosques upon churches” (“There’s nothing more natural, not to mention practical, when conquest is swift and building materials scarce, than to repurpose the sacred to fit the demands of a new time”). In the concluding chapter where he recounts, in affecting prose and reportage, pilgrimages to Bolivia, Iraq and Mongolia, Taseer confronts the complicated nature of these impassioned religious journeys. But at the close, he comes away with the comforting realisation that in its insistence on faith without objective, the pilgrimage elevates the notion of travel.

“¿Por qué arroz?” (“But why rice?”) asks the mezcalero Eduardo “Lalo” Angeles. Taseer employs the question as a poetic refrain throughout the chapter titled “Against the Grain: Mexico”—and with each use, the alienation grows more pronounced. In the same chapter, he draws a comparison between India and Mexico, where fissures of culture and identity converge in their shared colonial histories. Quoting Octavio Paz, who wrote, “The nations of ancient Mexico lived in constant war, one against the other, that is, a civilization different from their own”, he posits that Islamic invasions and British rule in India caused a similar “anxiety” about identity and belonging.

I quite enjoyed the second chapter, “A Journey of the Senses: Perfume”—that becomes, in a way, a culmination of the question of sexual identity that the author raises in the book’s introduction. Taseer travels back in time to his childhood in Delhi, where he discovered oudh and its alluring seductive power for the senses. The West’s cultural orientalisation of East—through perfume—for its own sexual liberation is a captivating discovery. In a book that otherwise speaks of places other than home becoming home, it's a bit of an indulgence for the format. It would have been interesting had this chapter occurred in the middle, like a cincher between two halves.

Through my reading of the book, I was reminded of distinct moments of self-reflection I’ve felt in the past five years reading Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, Pico Iyer’s Falling Off The Map, Bruce Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The commonality, of course, being the fact that deep observation often turns physical landmarks into places of the mind.

The famous last line of The Great Gatsby goes, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Much like Fitzgerald’s dreamers, the author moves forward across countries and cultures, but the undertow of exile keeps dragging him back into questions of origin and belonging.

Having said that, Taseer’s scholarship and the questions of history that he raises make it more than just a personal book—an important contribution in the reinvention of the travelogue as something political. What stories do history’s palimpsests conceal? Is the food you eat as something terrestrially, genetically yours, really so? Could landscape be mere landscape? To answer them, you must return to yourself.