COBRA IN THE BATH
Adventures in Less Travelled Lands
Miles Morland
Bloomsbury Publishing
384 pages; Rs 499
This book is hard to review. At best it can be described as the experiences of a voluntary vagabond through almost seven decades of his life. Part-memoir and part-travelogue, it is one of those rare books that talks about everything and nothing.
The book is divided into four parts that cover different phases of the author's life. The first part, "Cobra in the Bath", is about Miles Morland's childhood and growing up in different places in India, England and West Asia. His glamorous mother ("the most dangerous woman in India") divorces his naval father, and marries a one-legged salesman. This marriage (and his mother's other romantic interests) results in Mr Morland spending his childhood in such exotic locales as Tehran, Beirut and Baghdad.
The recollections and anecdotes in this section range from funny to scary to absurd. Mr Morland remembers the American cars of Tehran, his family's estate in Mehmoudieh and the idiosyncrasies of their servant Ali. He finds himself trapped in alien streets at night facing fires, dogs and much more. The author is able to deftly capture the excitement of childhood, not least because he is often entertained by his own past.
The second part of the book, "The Door Closes", is about Mr Morland's school days where he finds himself in a British boy's boarding school at age seven. These days are filled with typical boarding school experiences of floggings, bad food and expunging any interest in learning. Radley, a Victorian foundation school for "young men", was the kind of school that "went on training people to go out and govern the darkies for years after there were no darkies left to govern" - an entertainingly scathing comment on the colonial nature of British education long after the decline of colonialism. Mr Morland survives school to attend Oxford University, which he finds intellectually stimulating, but where he excels in nothing more than rowing.
The next section of the memoir, "The Grown Up World", maps the vagaries, inconsistencies and frivolities of Mr Morland's young adult existence. After a misspent youth at Oxford, he finds himself pretending to write a book, while actually doing nothing of much consequence except holidaying. He falls in love with an engaged woman while on vacation in Greece, gets rejected by her father, contemplates becoming a lawyer, and bumbles along to become a journalist and, eventually, a professional in the financial world.
His personal life is equally colourful; he falls in love again, this time with a married woman called Guislane - whom he eventually marries. After two children, shifting jobs and countries, Mr Morland finds himself divorced because of his tendency to over-work. Three years later, he finds himself re-married to his ex-wife and determined to quit his job with the sole ambition to "be free and not to work for anyone else ever again."
It is at this point that his wanderlust takes over and the adventures of his many travels begin. His wife and he decide to walk 550 km for 27 days, which resulted in Mr Morland's first book, The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank And Went For A Walk In France. At this point in the memoir, the author is an established vagabond. He loves being a witness to history and to see things first hand. This insatiable curiosity leads him to get tourist visas to visit Communist Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia at the end of 1989. Mr Morland finds himself on the train to Bucharest the day Nicolae Ceausescu closed the borders to foreigners. After interrogation, he is let off the train at gunpoint.
The author also discovers a new career in financial consultancy, which enables him to travel across Africa and West Asia and collect astounding stories from each of his trips. Discovering a passion for motorcycles in the fourth part of the book, "I Buy a Motorbike", Mr Morland travels all the way to Turkey, India and Japan (among others), all the while musing over life and death, the techniques of riding a bike and describing his experiences on the road.
Mr Morland's recollections of 9/11 and the World Trade Center and its impact on New York city and the world at large are among the most well written bits in the book. He dedicates a chapter to his daughter's funeral, delicately celebrating her life and lamenting her loss.
Cobra in the Bath is a memoir that is epic in its proportion, filled with irrelevant and fun anecdotes, adventures, travels, new lands, motorbike rides and some tragedies. A review does not do justice to the breadth of experiences it encapsulates. The strength of Mr Morland's memoir is that he does not portray his life as a journey full of introspection and philosophical musings geared towards a meaningful end or an epiphany. Like most memoirs, the book does not have a real plot. It is a techni-coloured representation of a life, filled with multiple chapters and changes, each mundane and equally profound.
Mr Morland's deadpan humour, self-deprecating wit and skills as a storyteller keep the reader hooked. To sum it up, Cobra in the Bath, like its title suggests, is about finding the bizarre and exotic in the mundane. It is about the inconsistency and imperfections of life and, more significantly, about moving with good humour onto a new chapter when the pages turn.
