Book Extract | A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from the publisher A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile,‎ Aatish Taseer, published by ‎ Fourth Estate India/HarperCollins Publishers.

*******

Mongolia

I GREW UP in India with all the major world religions. I attended a Christian boarding school in a Hindu-majority country that is roughly tied with Pakistan for the second-largest Muslim population in the world. My mother’s family were Sikhs, and I counted among my closest friends a Jew from Bombay and Buddhists from Tibet. Pilgrimage is common to all these faiths, even as it is utterly distinctive in each. In Islam, the pilgrimage to Mecca is an ordained pillar of faith that the Prophet Muhammad performed himself. In Christianity, the culture of cherishing relics and visiting holy places is said to have begun with Saint Helena—the mother of Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity in 312—rushing off to the Holy Land in search of the True Cross. Some pilgrimages enshrine sorrow, like the Ashura in Iraq, which would be the last stop on my journey; others, like fiesta in Bolivia’s Copacabana, are pilgrimages of joy and rapture. Some are historical, like the Jewish commemoration of exile; others, like the Mecca pilgrimage, represent the repurposing of an older sanctity, in this case that of pre-Islamic Arabia. In India, which has some of the greatest scenes of pilgrimage anywhere in the world, such as the Kumbh Mela, where every twelve years the largest gathering of humanity on earth—more than 100 million—comes together at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, I had also witnessed the touching intimacy of a family or group of friends who set out for a holy place on a Sunday, just as someone might go fishing or to a national park in the United States.

It was the ordinariness of this latter kind of pilgrimage, away from the grand spectacles of Ashura and fiesta, that I had hoped to capture in Buddhist Mongolia. I had imagined springtime pilgrimages, people visiting monasteries as the weather warmed. If La Paz is the highest capital in the world, Ulaanbaatar is the coldest, with January temperatures reaching minus thirty degrees. In fact, even as I was setting out at the end of May, my guide and translator, Orgilbaatar Tsolmon, who goes by Orgil, was sending me videos of snow showers in the Mongolian capital.

My flight from New York connected through Istanbul; the first leg was ten hours, and from there we flew another eight hours in a level line across the face of Asia. The Black Sea gave way to the Caspian and, beyond, to a land of mountain, desert, and steppe. The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan and his descendants, poured over the steppe in the thirteenth century and, in the words of the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, “the caliphs fell, and the Caesars trembled on their throne,” even as representatives of the major faiths—from Islam and Nestorian Christianity to Taoism and myriad forms of Buddhism—would come before the great khans to make their case for why their particular creed ought to be the official religion of the empire.

My first glimpse of Mongolia was of rolling hills draped in thin emerald grass, of cloud shadows the size of lakes, and of raking beams of morning light breaking through a heavy sky. “Nomadism,” I scribbled in my notebook in a sleepless haze, “captures the very spiritual heart of pilgrimage, which is to wander.” If the Latin peregrinus gives us pilgrim, it also gives us peregrination.

Orgil was waiting for me at Chinggis Khaan International Airport in Ulaanbaatar with a red Nissan SUV. My first thought on seeing him, with his long hair and light beard, was of the Nepalese artist Araniko’s late thirteenth-century rendering of Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson. “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .” The Coleridge poem was the first I had committed to memory as a child, during a blackout in Delhi, but Kublai was more than the figment of an opium dream. He founded the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China and established Beijing (then known as Dadu) as its capital, and was the man whose conversion to Buddhism around 1258 brought shamanic Mongolia into the orbit of Tibetan Buddhism.

The influence of Buddhism grew sporadically for almost seven centuries in Mongolia, merging in profound ways with its ancient worship of nature—of mountains, water, the eternal blue sky. But then, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Buddhism encountered a mortal enemy: Soviet-backed Communism. The great majority of the country’s monastic institutions were leveled to the ground; some eighteen thousand monks were killed; and, in a society where about one-third of the adult male population were lamas (though not all living in monasteries), Buddhism was ripped out root and branch.

In 1990, with the fall of Communism, religious freedom was established in Mongolia and Buddhism was allowed to be practiced again. My first destination was the Khamar Monastery, three hundred miles south in the Gobi Desert, which had been all but destroyed in 1938. It was said to be situated at one of the portals to Shambhala—a mythical kingdom of peace and tranquility in the Buddhist imagining—and had been founded in the century before by an artist, saint, and sybarite called Danzanravjaa, or Ravjaa, known as the lama of the Gobi. Bolivia had given me new respect for the survival of the sacred, despite great political and historical upheavals, and I was curious to see what pilgrimage would look like in a place where it had been stamped out for generations—curious to see the old pilgrim routes leading back to the locus of sanctity, like neural pathways reforming around an area of trauma.

MONGOLIA, BROADLY SPEAKING, is a country with half the landmass of India and a population smaller than that of Los Angeles proper—some 3.3 million people—of which about half live in Ulaanbaatar alone. As we left the capital’s new Japanese-built airport armed with supplies of chips, Snickers, Coke Zeros, and vodka as offerings, I gained a first impression of an unnerving emptiness. After some initial settlements of white yurts, or gers, as they’re known here, and houses with brightly colored corrugated roofs behind dark wooden stockades, all signs of habitation fell away. On that morning in late May, spectral wisps of snow blew over the long two-lane highway, and the wind was so strong that I found it difficult to put my jacket on outside the car.

Amid what seemed like trackless wastes, there periodically appeared the giant ragged form of an ovoo, or cairn. Its beanpole of a body was bandaged in blue khadags (prayer scarves), its stony mound of a base littered with vodka bottles and the occasional skull of a dead animal. The ovoo is a monument to the spirits of the natural world, known here as nagas and savdags. Orgil, following the custom of honoring these easily offended beings, lest they punish you for your neglect, honked three times as we went by. “This is the Gen Z way,” he said, grinning, “but I prefer the old way,” which involves circling the ovoo on foot three times in a clockwise motion.

But it was too cold to stop. It was too cold to smoke, too cold to take a pee. The temperature was only in the low thirties, but the wind bit through me, and it was hard to believe that this was a relatively mild spring day by Mongolian standards. Outside Choir, a dust-bitten town halfway to the monastery, we inhaled a lunch of mutton broth and dumplings, fried rice and a meat-stuffed pastry called a khuushuur. Then we drove on, another four hours. The land turned arid and flat. Double-humped Bactrian camels appeared along the side of the road.

An enticing band of opalescent sky offered the relief of a horizon after hours of rain and snow.

Orgil, in between telling me of his days in a metal band, when “I drank beers left and right,” would occasionally grow serious. “During Communism,” he said, “we lost our national identity.” The purges of the 1930s plundered the country’s monasteries and temples—there had been some seven hundred in the nineteenth century—which Orgil described as repositories of folklore, history, traditional medicine, and learning. Mongolia, after winning independence from Qing China in 1911, began those early decades of the twentieth century as a feudal theocracy with a godlike figure, akin to the Dalai Lama, called the Bogd Khan, at its helm, overseeing around eighty thousand monks. (The Dalai Lama recently introduced a Mongolian child as the tenth reincarnation of the Bogd.) “They shot all the head lamas,” Orgil said. “They murdered all the teachers.” The fires from the monasteries were rumored to have burned for weeks. Christopher Kaplonski, a social anthropologist who has conducted research in Mongolia, has written that, though the total number of Mongolians killed between 1937 and 1939 is unknown, “credible estimates range from 35,000 to 45,000.”

As evening fell, we arrived at the ger camp on the edge of the Gobi, a short drive from the Khamar Monastery. We were the only ones there. Orgil had made me worried that there would be no pilgrims at all. Bolivia was a lesson in the imperishability of the sacred, but it had also shown me how places of pilgrimage, like the sacred crag on the Island of the Sun, could die. If you ban a religion for more than half a century, murder its clergy, and raze its monasteries, as the Communists had in Mongolia, then maybe you do deal it a death blow?

I was full of dark thoughts when the ger camp began magically to fill. I’d just finished a dinner of banshtai tsai, dumplings in a goat milk

and tea broth, and retired to my ger, where I was watching the wood-burning stove cast shadows on the wooden lattice and felt walls, when I heard electronic music blaring into the Gobi. I stepped outside to see the neat rows of gers now brightly lit, noise and chatter pouring out of their doorways. Bottles of soda were being ferried back and forth and mixed with vodka. Prim, lightly made-up girls sat on the edges of what looked like the Mongolian equivalent of a frat party. “Who are these people?” I asked Orgil in amazement. “Pilgrims,” he answered. Some were part of a construction company, others students with exams on the horizon. They had come to draw energy from Shambhala. The rites the next morning were to begin before dawn, yet the pilgrim parties, with their Chaucerian feeling of intimacy among strangers, continued raucously into the night.

Just before daybreak, at 4:20 a.m., we joined a cavalcade of SUVs off-roading through the desert, drawing ruby-red parabolas over the dunes. Our first stop was a fertility shrine near the monastery. On a hill were two mounds of sand and rock with stone finials, connected by a beam that was wrapped in the blue prayer cloths. Women in puffer jackets with cartons of milk went back and forth between the shrine and the edge of the hill, casting their offerings of milk into the air. Orgil told me that no man could perform the rite unless his mother had died in the past forty-nine days, in which case he could perform it on behalf of her spirit.

The sun rose over the Gobi, showing reddish earth and black-edged dunes. The sky was a cold, motionless blue. While the women performed the ritual, I spoke to a group of men in their late thirties and early forties who worked for a real estate company in Ulaanbaatar. One was an economist, another a lawyer, a third a businessman. They had arrived by train from the capital. “I came here to recharge my energy and cleanse my spirit,” said Egi, the economist. (Mongolians use patronymics rather than Western-style surnames; in conversation, people often go by just one name.) “This place is a world energy center.” When I asked if the ritual had been handed down to him by his parents, he said, “They knew about it, but they were not authorized to come. We are the lucky generation.” He added: “This Shambhala reminds us that we are not just ordinary nomads. We had an enlightened one [Danzanravjaa] live among us.” Since the transition to the democratic era, Egi said, “Mongolian people have come to know that we have a great religious and cultural heritage.”

Munkhdul, the businessman, said in halting English, “It’s a reconnection in modern times to the past of our life.” Some moments later, our band of pilgrims (about fifty to one hundred) reconvened outside the gateway to the Shambhala complex, where a pair of mesmeric half-closed eyes, painted on a wall of pinkish orange, gazed out at us, symbolizing the inward-turned sagacity of the Buddha. Stepping across the threshold, we found ourselves in a rectangular enclosure of red earth marked out by a perimeter of white stupas. It was like being in a Zen garden, where one proceeded from one station to another, performing a series of rituals and rites under an open sky. In the distance, the level sands of the Gobi fell away as far as the eye could see. It was an austere, heart-stopping glimpse of the void.

Our guide, Haidav, was from the Gobi region. In his early thirties now, he had been selected as a boy by Gandantegchinlen (often referred to simply as Gandan), the country’s main monastery in Ulaanbaatar, to spend four years in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, where, at a center of Tibetan Buddhism—the Namdroling Monastery, popularly known as the Golden Temple—he had been educated in the religion of his forefathers with the express aim of reintroducing it to Mongolia.

As he led us into the Shambhala, he seemed less like a guide than like a monk reeducating his countrymen about a faith whose core precepts, such as the belief in karma and reincarnation, had survived the ravages of Communism but whose rituals had to be relearned from scratch. Our group was composed almost entirely of Mongolians, but no one knew what to do at the various stations any more than I did.

At the genie’s belly, a low mound of dark rocks, Haidav told us to exhale all of our sins and bad thoughts, intentional and unintentional. At the site of Danzanravjaa’s ger, which was just a circle in the sand, we offered handfuls of grain. We wished that “with the help of the enlightened one, we would be reborn into the Shambhala.” Then we went to three other circles representing past, present, and future.

Haidav told us to walk not through but around them. We had open bottles of vodka in our hands and made offerings into the air. (Milk and vodka! It was a combination I would encounter time and again in this nomadic post-Soviet society.) Haidav told us not to wish formoney or material things but only that which was regenerative—a child, rain, or power. He placed a special emphasis on looking in, on harmony and balance. He said that all the bad things that happen to us, whether ill health or failure in our careers, were emanations of what was within and, in cleansing the inner sphere, we could succeed in the outer.

If pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism, a way for human beings to grasp spiritual truths, the Shambhala felt almost like a cosmogram or mandala, a metaphysical scheme writ small. We came to a circle of red rocks that was the energy heart of the whole enclosure. Here, we sat down. Some lay on the rocks and rolled from side to side. The aim was to draw in the energy of the place. I talked to Samdanbazar, a seventy-eight-year-old herder from Töv Province, in the environs of Ulaanbaatar. She wore a gold-and-purple deel, a long coat of sorts, fur lined in the winter, with tiny earrings, her dyed hair whitening at the roots. Watching her roll back and forth, taking such obvious pleasure in the rite, I had to ask what it had been like to be denied all this for the first forty-five years of her life. “We had to hide everything,” she said. “My father was a lama, so we had to hide our thangkas [Tibetan Buddhist cloth paintings], Buddhas, and religious artifacts.”

Our last station was the Golden Skull Hill, where a central ovoo overlooked the desert beyond. There we chanted, “Um sain amgalan boltugai”—“may there be peace with you”—and sang “Ulemjiin Chanar” (“Perfect Qualities”), a Mongolian folk song that Danzanravjaa had composed himself. Haidav was almost scolding in the care with which he instructed us to sing as a chorus. “Whatever your failures,” he said at the end of our morning at the Shambhala, “it’s because of your mind.”

THE EMPHASIS ON interiority, on isolating the self as the site for spiritual advancement and failure, felt very different from the Christian pilgrimage in Bolivia. The focus there had been outward: on Mary, her miracles, on what she could give you. Here, almost everyone spoke of enlightenment from within and of certain corrosive human emotions, anger being among the gravest of them, that would impede that progress. In Mongolia, the texture of sin felt less like a crime against God than against oneself. Three symbols are often associated with Danzanravjaa’s life and thought: a female figure representing his love of pleasure; a swan symbolizing the arts; and, lastly, a scorpion signifying the human potential for self-destructiveness. Outside our ger camp, there was a giant metal sculpture of a black scorpion, its tail raised, surrounded by desert sands on all sides. It stood as a reminder of the cardinal sin in the Buddhist scheme: rage, which, like the myth of the scorpion, makes us our own worst enemies, liable to sting ourselves in the head.

It was Haidav who first told me of the family of priests who had taken a solemn vow in 1856 to preserve the artifacts of Ravjaa, even as I had grown more interested in the role of relics in pilgrimage after witnessing the power of Yupanqui’s Virgin in Bolivia.

At 7:00 a.m., on my last morning in the Gobi, I met Altan-Ochir Altangarel, seventh in the line of priests who had sworn to be protectors of Ravjaa’s possessions, outside the Danzanravjaa Museum in the desert town of Sainshand. I had not expected the living descendant of Ravjaa’s nineteenth-century trustee to be dressed like a Brooklyn hipster. He was in his early thirties, in skinny black jeans, with vintage glasses framing his arresting blue eyes. If the dharma of Altan-Ochir’s family was to protect Ravjaa’s relics, it had been tested to the extreme. Altan-Ochir’s great-grandfather was arrested by the Communists.

When he got out, he hid Ravjaa’s things in the desert. The location was neither written down nor revealed to anyone save Altan-Ochir’s father (Zoldon) who was told in 1965, when he was five. Zoldon learned the mantras and sutras (sacred texts) in secret. “He would hide his incense stick in a cigarette,” Altan-Ochir said. When Communism fell, Ravjaa’s artifacts were recovered and housed in the museum we were in. It was an extremely rare instance of Mongolian Buddhism recovering the rich material culture it had lost, and it begged the question of why a religion so disdainful of the material world as Buddhism should fetishize relics, here the tooth of the Buddha, there Ravjaa’s possessions. “The first thing of anything is materialistic,” Altan-Ochir answered easily, “but turning the materialistic thing into wisdom is the key to Buddhism.” What was true of relics was true of  pilgrimage, too. “Human beings are pretty unique,” Altan-Ochir said, with a smile, as if aware that the curated walk through the Shambhala was a mere instrument of inner realization. “They always need to do something to truly believe. The Shambhala allows them to do that.”

I rose to leave. Altan-Ochir asked I light seven brass lamps to honor our meeting, then, in a jade cup that had belonged to Ravjaa, he poured out some holy water that was infused ever so slightly with the milk-distilled vodka Mongolians cherish. With this, Orgil and I took our leave, speeding out of the desert into the steppe beyond.

**********Aatish Taseer, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile,‎ Fourth Estate India/HarperCollins Publishers, 2025. Hb. Pp. 216

In 2019, writer and journalist, Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India was revoked by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. As a result, Aatish, a British citizen, has been unable to visit India, the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity and, in the process, compelled him to ask broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and nationality. According to Wikipedia, Aatish Taseer became a US citizen on 27 July 2020.

In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist facade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated here, is practiced so little. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?
In this blend of travelogue and memoir, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes a politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and delves deep into the heart of the migrations that define our multicultural world.

He acknowledges the “ambition, inspiration and, at times, sheer relentlessness of Hanya Yanagihara” without whom this book would not have been possible. Hanya Yanagihara is an incredibly powerful writer in her own right, with a powerful eye for detail, but more than that, she has the knack of embodying her written word with a force, an energy, that makes her works unforgettable. It is a rare talent. Aatish is fortunate to have her as his mentor. As he asks, who else would commission an eighteen-thousand-word piece on pilgrimage? In A Return to Self. Aatish Taseer has truly transformed as a writer. As writer and academic Amitava Kumar puts it eloquently, “Writers I admire travel to discover other states of mind. But the even more admirable ones travel also to find new parts of their most authentic selves. In these pages, Taseer is such a traveller: the maps he is working with are those of the world, and also of the body, the soul, and the senses. His findings are fascinating and rich.” The book extract that has been published here is from Aatish Taseer’s trip to Mongolia. The peace at the centre of this travelogue is extremely powerful and this section of the book begs to be read over and over again.

Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands; the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon; and the memoir and travelogue The Twice-Born. He is also the translator, from the Urdu, of Manto: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Born in England, raised in New Delhi, and educated in the United States, Taseer now lives in New York.