The Silk Road Doesn't Allow Maps. The Road Is The Journey

Nothing warned me there would be no maps. I would have to depend on the kindness of strangers. There would be long cold nights with only the stars for company.
Deserts would unroll like carpets at every turn. Too often I would glimpse the abyss a bare footstep away.
But always, always, there would be a haven, a sarai to shelter for the night, to wait out the storm, to share a meal, to exchange a story.

Key Points

For more than a thousand years, the Silk Road traded in knowledge.

Everybody has a Silk Road. I travelled the world through books for years … and then discovered the unending library at my doorstep. I began to read with my camera, every image a book. The Silk Road is the instant. The instant is the journey. The camera is my blink of discovery.

If a movie is an illusion of continuity, a photograph is an illusion of stillness. In my many attempts to record the natural world I have been defeated by that illusion.

The static image is a cohesion, an infinitude of minute changes. There must be some grand physics in here, but that's beyond me. Instead, I concentrate on the slightest change of light or position that can alter the perception of structure.

This thought continues to trouble me -- what is illusory and what is real?

Scars and Memory

Scars are memory anesthetized. Does this broken-hearted tree feel the same as me? The human heart is easily read. Not so, with trees. It takes a poet's scimitar to wound both equally: O trees of life, what are your signs of winter?

This tree's broken heart marks the place where a branch was crudely avulsed. I'm a surgeon, licensed to injure, in order to heal. All injury leaves a scar. Somewhere in the territory I have travelled is a spot that cannot feel. A spot that has lost its sentience. In time that scar will remodel itself, and I may think, 'The wound has healed well.'

But healed well is not the same as well healed.

Perhaps this tree's injury was not intentional, but an accident of wind and weather. And yes, the wound has healed well. But is the tree well healed?

What came bursting out of the tree's carapace?

What anguish did the tree try so hard to tell?

The Ark of Bukhara: Walls and Memory

When is a wall not a wall? When it is fluid. Bukhara's Ark or Wall may well have been designed by Frank Gehry. It is a tsunami of brick, breathless... despite the punctuation of windows. I didn't want to enter it. Entering it would mean fragmenting its tidal narrative. The Ark has a story for every brick. It is Bukhara's memory vault.

The immense brickwork of the Ark required annual repairs for which the denizens of Bukhara were taxed. Ismail, the first Samanid ruler of Bukhara, abrogated the tax.

But what was Bukhara without its Wall?

'You don't need bricks,' said Ismail, 'I am your Wall.'

Strange, isn't it, that we still do not see the futility of walls? Stranger still that we haven't yet noticed the irrelevance of war.

The Photographer's Eye

'What camera do you use?' I'm often asked.

That's rather like asking me what computer I write with or what surgical blade I use to incise. Irrelevant, really. A camera is just a handheld eye with none of the eye's discretion. The eye's discretion is directed by the instant of thought we call perception. That is quicker than the camera's blink, faster than the word that describes it.

How can the camera matter? One uses what's at hand. Every photographer of my age has travelled the lot -- from the pinhole to the iPhone, with the same momentary dislocation a writer feels in making the transition from pencil to pen to typewriter to computer.

The Unmapped Road

The Silk Road does not allow maps. The road is the journey. It can only be mapped by what I see.

Nothing warned me there would be no maps. I would have to depend on the kindness of strangers. There would be long cold nights with only the stars for company. Deserts would unroll like carpets at every turn. Too often I would glimpse the abyss a bare footstep away. But always, always, there would be a haven, a sarai to shelter for the night, to wait out the storm, to share a meal, to exchange a story. And who can tell what awaits at journey's end?

Within a photograph, as within a poem, is the private space of thought. The Silk Road is my refuge from injustice. Away from it life drops its politesse and watches grimly the inevitable slouch towards mortality. There is no divine protection against that. So all cultures have devised spells, mantras, amulets.

Apotropaics do not work on the Silk Road. One must hazard all, else the journey ends.

Ishrat Syed is a surgeon. My Silk Road, which concluded its week-long successful run at the Jehangir Art Gallery earlier this week, is the sixth exhibition of his photographs.
Dr Syed and the pediatric surgeon Dr Kalpana Swaminathan write together as Kalpish Ratna.
Twice in Nalanda, their newest novel, is published this month.