Reading on the road: India, Evelyn Waugh, and that thing called inspiration.

“But, as the years passed, I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand–in a word, the inspiration.”

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

There was a lot to love about the Z Hotel in Puri, Orissa–as a former maharaja’s home, it featured a wide wooden staircase, high beamed ceilings, and a six-bed female dorm that cost an unbeatable two dollars a night.

But what won my heart over most was a lending library housed in two glass cabinets in the lounge. Even the cabinet doors were kept locked, so you know they meant business.

One half was filled with foreign titles; the other side housed the English collection, which included Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Orwell’s 1984 and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What caught my eye though was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I vaguely remembered a recent film re-make and thought I’d give it a go.

As I got swept deeper and deeper into the dramas of the Flyte family, I wondered if it was right that I should be spending my time by the Indian seaside reading about upper-class England in the early 20th century. My headspace didn’t seem to line up with my physical surroundings. Should I have started Shantaram for a second time instead?

And yet I found Waugh’s descriptive passages to be incredibly evocative–even if they were of places far removed from India. When protagonist Charles visits Morocco for the first time, he writes:

 “Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the staples of France–Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Lourve–I had thought it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars; where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke–now I knew what had drawn Sebastian here and held him so long.”

As I’d go to jot down notes throughout the day, I would find that the rhythm and cadence of Waugh’s prose had actually, to some extent, unlocked my own writing about Puri. Something about his winding, leisurely sentences matched the vibe of the easy-going beachside village.

I realized that it wasn’t the first time I’d been hooked to a book whose subject was seemingly incongruous to the place I was visiting. There was Breaking Dawn in Paris (let’s keep that one between you and me), and also Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica that I couldn’t put down in not-so-freezing Portugal.

And so as I finished up Brideshead Revisited over a plate of honeyed banana pancakes (another incongruity, perhaps?), I decided that sometimes, inspiration can come in all forms…and places.

Have you ever read a novel or book about one country while traveling through another?