Travels With Amy

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi travels through Rajasthan with American legend, Amy Tan. In a Bazaar exclusive he paints an intimate portrait of one of contemporary literature’s more astute and enduring voices.

IN AN ESSAY ON HIS TRAVELS WITH BRUCE CHATWIN, ACROSS AUSTRALIA, Salman Rushdie said that when you travel with someone you can either hate them fully—or fall in love for life. At the start of our trip through Rajasthan, I remember turning to Amy Tan—spiritual forebear, fellow traveller—as we negotiated a maze of thousands of candles flanking the path to the Penguin Random House party in Jaipur. Her wise, fine face, in candlelit tones, radiated an awareness of life as imperfect and difficult but also essentially fair and terrifyingly beautiful.

We first met 10 years ago in California, and our reunion in India felt auspicious. We seemed to sense this was something to hold on to—a shared awareness of the moment, its breadth and contained mystery, and of us crossing its threshold, which is to say: We were now going to the party. The party, fabulous as it was, left only faint impressions (an agent I’d shouted at; small earthen pots of biryani) but the precise moment before we entered it—a travelling crew of four, including Tan’s dashing husband, Lou DeMattei, and their friend Duncan Clark—carries all the light of our trip, a trick of time wedged between memory and imagination, half remembered, entirely felt.

We were going someplace special, we knew; and we had lived in special hours. What would we remember?

It was her familiar face—corralled perfectly in smart, foxy hair—that I looked on during our session at the Jaipur Literature Festival a few days before, where she told me about the time her mother pressed a meat cleaver against her neck, threatening to kill her, a memory suppressed until its sudden surfacing at a writer’s retreat. “It felt like the end of love,” she said before thousands of her readers. “It could have been the end of life.”