Coils of the Yamuna

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

John Weier is a professor and poet. He is also a world traveler but
admits that he is a tad squeamish about malaria, human feces underfoot,
and being followed around by vultures. It is his honesty at being so
easily nauseated that makes this travel journal feel like an honest, if
not particularly open-minded, account of his recent trip through
northern India. This was Weier’s second trip to the subcontinent; in
the mid-1970s, he spent several months traveling through India as part
of completing a degree in religious studies. Weier has several new
agendas on his second visit. He is curious to see how much India has
changed since his last visit. He is also an enthusiastic bird watcher
and, vultures excluded, he waxes ecstatic about minivets, leaf warblers,
ruddy shelducks, tufted pochards, fire-capped tits, gadwalls, wigeons,
shovellers, collared scops-owls, scaly-bellied green woodpeckers, and a
hundred other bird species throughout this slim volume. Weier’s two
teenage children from a previous marriage were also in India on their
own quest; the author hoped to catch up with them during his visit and
compare notes.

The book contains poetry by Weier, promotional hype taken directly from
travel brochures, historical accounts of India by other European
travelers (including Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama), and even a Winnipeg
Health Department’s recipe for do-it-yourself diarrhea relief.

Weier’s poems have some genuine moments of true insight about how
Westerners perceive India and how Indians perceive Westerners.
Unfortunately, he is also prone to making sweeping generalizations such
as in his prose poem “Hindu Poet 6”: “Yet Hindus nurture a
tolerance that can’t be found among Christians. Hindus are happy to
practice Hinduism, or Islam, or Christianity, Buddhism. Why not? The
goal of all religions is the same.” This superficial observation seems
almost thrown in to counterbalance the author’s many comments about
India’s filth, swarming beggars, and bad hotel rooms. Weier obviously
did not intend his book to offend, but the limited format of the book
has doomed the content to coming off somewhat shallow and ill-informed.