The writer Anjan Sundaram remembers his frst trip to Africa, 1990

The writer Anjan Sundaram remembers his frst trip to Africa,1990

Iwas seven years old and this was one of our frst family holidays. It was a sort of ramshackle trip – my mum brought a rice cooker and we made our own food in hotel rooms; we had a lot of apprehension about the outside world.

I was born in India but grew up in Dubai. I think the defning emotion of my childhood was boredom. Dubai was an incredibly boring place at the time – just sand everywhere. I remember long hours staring out of the window, watching cars go by. There weren’t even any birds in the city. I spent a lot of time alone or with my sister, who is three years younger – photographs from that time are of her showing me things and me standing there watching her. They refect our personalities – I was the observer and she was the instigator, and that’s still our relationship now.

My dad moved to Dubai with a strange sort of dream: he had been working in Bombay (he was an accountant), but Dubai was closer to Africa, and he had always wanted to travel to Africa. This was our frst trip. We went to Jordan, and then on to Egypt – he wanted to see the pyramids. I remember going to Petra, and to the Dead Sea. When I sat in the water I screamed because it was so salty that it hurt. No one had warned me. I remember rubbing my mum’s sari on my skin, trying to get the salt of.

Later, my dad took us to Kenya and Tanzania, so my introduction to Africa was through him and his desire to see these places that were somewhat mythical in his mind. It was a very diferent Africa from the one I eventually sought out – I went to Congo. But maybe my interest in the continent was seeded by my father, and his ideas of world travel were inspiring. I’ve thought often that my dad was seeking liberation in his travels.

What I remember most from those trips is how my dad travelled: he wasn’t seeking some grand adventure or great spectacle, he was looking to immerse himself in street culture and the ordinary lives of others, whether he was drinking chai or playing board games with them. This is the way I travel too.

So it shocked me when I went away with him four years ago and found that he had completely changed. I had kept this idea of who he was and how he travelled, and when we went to Myanmar just before the country opened up – our frst trip together since my childhood – it surprised me that he’d only want to eat Indian food, and was suspicious of diferent vegetables. It jarred with my memory of him, and of our time in Jordan and Egypt, where he had thrown himself into places wherever he could fnd a little space to weave himself into the social fabric.

Bad News, by Anjan Sundaram, is published by Bloomsbury Circus at £16.99