It’s the end of 2020, and when you’ve been stuck at home for a year, with only your dog as your constant companion, Travels with Charley is a good book to read.

But this book is a lot more about Steinbeck’s road trip than about the dog.

Steinbeck romanticises everything. If so much as a tree sheds a leaf in front of him, he bursts forth with pages of ideas, thoughts and memories. Scholars have mentioned that Travels with Charley is clearly not non-fiction. And Steinbeck himself doesn’t pretend that it is non-fiction. They say he knew he was dying, and was hit with an irresistible wanderlust. With almost everything he encounters - places, people and politics alike - he stresses that these were memories that were uniquely his. And he admits that any of his opinions could be cancelled out by a single counterpoint - and of those, as many could be found as there are travellers. He never took any notes. He let mulled his memories of the road trip over well before he wrote the book.

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The original Marathi edition of Baluta has captivating cover art. It shows a sketch of a crow perched on the rim of an earthen pot, dropping pebbles in the pot, but completely oblivious to the glaring crack running down the pot. I remember that image from a copy lying in one corner of a bookshelf, but I was too young then to be interested. To me, this was just a sign of the artist trying to convey a sense of irony.

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I was first introduced to William Dalrymple in Michael Wood’s documentary, The Story of India. I watched it nearly eight years ago. The scene was shot in a Kali temple where devotees had gathered on the eve of Holi. Dalrymple is explaining what Holi means to Hindus, looking at a spot slightly off-camera. The timing of his narration is such that as soon as he finishes talking, the nearly hundred devotees in the temple throw up their hands and started dancing to chants of “Jai Mata Di” and “Holi hai”. Dalrymple then proceeds to tie a handkerchief around his head and disappears into the crowd, walking towards the shrine of Kali, just as the screen bursts with gulal. This, he does with a dexterity that a seasoned Indian, even one accustomed to crowded temples, would find hard to match.

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In Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, Steinbeck wrote that reading books is like driving a wedge in your life. The larger the wedge, the harder it is for parts to come together once the wedge is removed. The longer the book, the harder it is to close the mental gap around it. Steinbeck wrote this for East of Eden - his magnum opus. Surprisingly, this happens even with Steinbeck’s much shorter books.

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