“I traveled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.”
— William Wordsworth, 1799

Dilip D’Souza, like Wordsworth, has turned on their heads the clichéd sayings about how we travel to learn about other peoples and places. We do, no doubt. Yet D’Souza, in “Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America,” shows that the intelligent, open-eyed and open-eared traveler gains even greater understanding of his home country and people as he journeys abroad.

As D’Souza spent 10 years studying and working in the United States before returning to India in 1992, he has, perhaps, a better understanding of both countries than most travelers. Yet, he has something more. The ability to observe detail and describe it in an original way, to make connections and comparisons intelligibly, to write wittily, and within a few pages engage the reader in the life and story of a character. That is because D’Souza is brave enough to not only backpack alone in Africa for three months but to roll into a string of campgrounds,
roadside cafes and small towns across America and strike up a conversation with…well, just anyone. It’s the trait of a true journalist, though D’Souza’s background is in computer science.

And in these conversations, D’Souza listened, found what was unique and interesting about individuals including motorcycle-riding missionaries; a feuding couple looking for, and finding, a wireless connection in a desert campground; survivors of Hurricane Katrina, descendants of pioneers, soldiers’ grieving families, a buxom and bored model, a blind painter.… The writer has reserved judgment and found that gives him deep insights into Americans and Indians, as well. In other words, he learned more about the human family and its connections and complexities. And he shares this with the reader, while providing scenes meant to elicit out-and-out laughter, awe and wonder, and I-want-to-go-there-too responses. 

One reason for writing his book, brought out in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers, “is that stereotypes need busting,” writes D’Souza. He presented photographs from his travels at the American Center in New Delhi this summer. He regards America as “a familiar second home, one I always delight in visiting.” He finds the United States thought-provoking, sometimes kooky, and generally audacious. Of home, he writes, “You could have been an Indian for half a century, yet you can always find one more stone to pick up under which lies one more thing about India you never heard of.” So D’Souza has found out some things about India he never realized, by traveling across America, and he has mined golden nuggets about American life, culture and history by searching for them with Indian eyes.

Both nations have flaws. D’Souza fights cynicism by searching for audacity and beauty. He first recorded incredible beauty in the Land Between the Lakes, in India in Bangalore, where 20 years ago he photographed “birds rising through a quilt of mist laid on the river…the landscape reduced to soft silhouettes by the late afternoon sun, black and shimmering….”

That memory drew him later to another Land Between the Lakes, a wildlife refuge that spreads over the border between the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. He called ahead from India to reserve a spot for the last viewing trip of the season, when rangers take visitors to see the American bald eagles, which spend the winter there. Car problems deprived him of the eagle sighting, but “Give up one American icon, I always say, pick up another.” Instead, he saw bison, remnants of those mammoth herds that used to race across the American prairie before they were hunted nearly to extinction. There are bison at Land Between the Lakes because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recreated the prairie, rescuing bison and elk from disappearing by raising captive herds. The vegetation has been restored to provide the animals’ natural habitat in the way it looked when Americans first began moving west.

“Only in America?” D’Souza comments. “Don’t just set aside land for a refuge, but actually transport it back a couple of hundred years.” Readers can share D’Souza’s feeling as he spots the herd of 32 bison, grazing almost within reach as he turns off his car engine and listens. “A quiet sound slowly worked into my consciousness. First heard, I think of it as gusts of soft wind through the trees. …It’s the sound the nearest animal is making with his jaw. Munch chew munch, grazing the prairie one mouthful at a time.”

Walking among the trees, he ponders the bison and all the work involved in preserving them and their food. They will never again roam across the plains in vast herds. The market for their hide and meat is gone. “Why bother with this small captive herd of bison, why care about restoring a small patch of land to the way it once was?” He concludes, as George Mallory did, when asked why one should climb Mount Everest. “Why save the bison? Because it was once here. Why restore the prairie? Because it, too, was once here.”

And that is where great beauty meets audacity, something D’Souza describes as “a theme song,” heard as he travels across the United States. “…It tells a story of gumption: the moxie, the chutzpah, of turning vague ideas into bold reality.”

That brings our traveler to other examples of this gumption: the causeway into New Orleans, Louisiana, a long, straight bridge that runs 40 kilometers across Lake Pontchartrain, north of the city. D’Souza drove out into that vast blueness, where no land was visible in any direction, only other cars on the manmade slip of concrete and steel. “It’s not unusual, I’m sure, to remark on the awe you feel in the middle of a long bridge,” D’Souza shares. “But it marks the audacity of the original thought: Let’s fling a road thirty miles across this water….”

Another example is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Parts of three states—Delaware, Maryland and Virginia—constitute a peninsula that is the eastern shore of the bay. “If you’re merely human, it was once a journey of several hundred miles, long and laborious, around the bay. Which set somebody thinking, why not a bridge across the mouth of the bay, so we can cross as a crow would?” That is, about 37 kilometers in a straight direction. The complication: the use of the bay as one of the world’s great shipping channels. A bridge high enough for ships to go under it would have been impractical, a drawbridge perhaps to slow for ships or cars.

“What’s the answer? Easy: the bridge turns into a tunnel turns into a bridge,” D’Souza tells us. “Twice in that...stretch, the road actually disappears underwater. Seen from the air, long fingers snake out from either shore. Lonesome in between, a shadow of the fingers, is a span by itself.” The writer says he has “driven this marvel twice,” feeling an “involuntary chill as we burrowed into the tunnels at fifty-five” miles per hour. “The sea above me: what a thought, what a measure of chutzpah.”

One of the most beautiful, and poignant, vignettes D’Souza includes is about Raphine, in western Virginia. A small town off one of the small state routes that the writer found presented more interesting and memorable scenes and experiences than the straight and speedy interstate highways. D’Souza drove into town in the wake of a massive February snowstorm that had left the winter-bared trees covered in fairy-tale white. “When snows and ice fell from the skies, they coated the naked branches and twigs of the trees in films of water that immediately turned to ice,” he writes. “The branches and twigs are completely encased in ice. …The sun shines through the branches, off the branches, on trees all around me. It’s like I’m surrounded by a forest of delicately carved glass, or silver filigree. I’m inexplicably reminded of the Hyderabadi craft of bidri…The trees on the heights must all be similarly filigreed too, because the impression is of silver clouds settled on the hilltops.”
Read it all.