My father went nearly everywhere. He is wearing the same white shirt in most of it, standing slightly too far from the thing he came to see. Hardly any of them are dated.
35 photographs.
Papaji and Mataji at the Cape of Good Hope, with Dr and Mrs Agarwal. The sign claims only the south-westernmost point of Africa, and it is right to be careful. The southernmost is Cape Agulhas, a hundred and fifty kilometres east, and that is where the two oceans are actually divided.
Papaji at Giza, standing like a man waiting for the 176 to Penge. The Great Pyramid was the tallest thing anybody had ever built for three thousand eight hundred years, until Lincoln Cathedral went up in 1311.
Papaji walking away from us across Tiananmen Square, a red bag in his hand, under a row of red flags, towards Chairman Mao. That portrait is six metres tall and it is taken down and replaced with a fresh one every year, in the middle of the night, before National Day.
Papaji in Nara, being robbed by a deer. They bow to you there. It is not manners. Somebody fed them for it once and they have never forgotten.
Tahiti. Papaji hired a Talbot. Mataji and Papaji, driving across the world, as usual. Peugeot had picked up the Talbot name along with the whole of Chrysler Europe, in 1978, for one dollar.
Papaji on the steppe, watching a ger camp from a very long way off. Every door down there is facing south. They always are. And the whole camp can be taken down in half an hour.
Papaji and Mataji beside a green-skinned train, a Type 22, the carriage that carried most of China for forty years.
Papaji in an imperial garden in Beijing.
Papaji in Red Square. The long building behind him was the largest hotel in the world, three thousand rooms of it. They pulled it down in 2006.
The rest of it
Papaji at Lake Inawashiro. That boat is a turtle. It has been going round the lake for sixty years and it is still going round it now.Papaji at the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Inside, the Emerald Buddha has three sets of robes, one for each season, and they are changed by the King of Thailand himself. Nobody else is allowed to touch it.Papaji outside the Palacio Nacional in Guatemala City.Papaji at Tikal. They filmed the rebel base here, for Star Wars, in 1977, and Lucas is supposed to have got the idea from a travel poster.Papaji and Mataji at Tikal, with the temple coming up out of the jungle behind them.Papaji at Monte Alban. The Zapotecs did not find this flat place. They levelled the top off a mountain to make it, four hundred metres above the valley, about five hundred years before Christ.Papaji in Brasilia. Niemeyer’s columns are behind him, and so is one of the largest car parks I have ever seen. The whole city went up in forty-one months.Papaji and Mataji at a temple gate in Bali. The Balinese build them as a mountain cut clean in half, and they leave the gap open all the way up to the sky, so that nothing stands between the temple and the gods.Papaji in New Zealand, at the house where the waka is kept. A war canoe is carved out of a single tree, and the biggest of them needs seventy-six paddlers to move it.Papaji on the steppe, in front of a herd of horses. There are more horses in Mongolia than there are Mongolians.Papaji on the Great Wall at Badaling. It was the first stretch they ever opened to the public, in 1957, and it is still the one everybody goes to.Papaji and Mataji in the dunes, in North Africa. We thought this was Rajasthan for years. It is not: the charm hanging under the camel’s jaw is a khamsa, a Hand of Fatima, and it belongs to the other side of the world.Papaji and Mataji above the badlands, in North Africa. Six thousand years ago this was green: rivers, lakes, hippos, giraffe. The people who lived here painted them onto the rocks, and the paintings outlasted the water.Papaji crossing to a coral island in the Pacific. Reefs are less than one hundredth of the ocean floor, and about a quarter of everything alive in the sea lives on them.Papaji at Horta, in the Azores. That is Pico across the water, on the next island: the highest mountain in Portugal, and it last erupted in 1720.Papaji and two of us on a street in Europe, around 1971. Ravi is five. I am nine.Papaji at a viewpoint on Sao Miguel, holding the map.Papaji at Furnas. The ground there is hot enough to cook in, and they bury the stew in it for six hours.Papaji above Cape Town.Papaji barefoot on the sand, his shoes left behind him, the hills of Rio at the end of the beach.Papaji in the Seychelles, in a hired Mini Moke. The British Army turned the thing down, the ground clearance was hopeless off-road, so they sold it to tourists instead.Papaji above Lake Mohave, on the Arizona and Nevada line. Out in those mountains is Spirit Mountain, which about a dozen tribes of the lower Colorado hold to be the place where the world began. America made it a national monument in 2023.Papaji at Vantage, in Washington State, under fifteen steel horses galloping along the ridge. They were put there in 1990, for the hundredth birthday of the state, as a memorial to the wild horses that used to run on that ground.Papaji in Minneapolis, some time in the nineties. Dayton’s is behind him, and the name came off that building in 2001. The same family had already opened a little discount shop, in 1962, and called it Target.Papaji on the quay on the Amazon.Papaji and Mataji at the Mapa en Relieve in Guatemala City: the whole country laid out in concrete, eighteen hundred square metres of it, poured in 1905.