The perfect travel companions let you be yourself. They don’t make too much noise; they do not fuss and fidget. They do not want to wake up too early, and they will eat anything for lunch. They will pretend to be interested in you and your obscure, slightly embarrassing hobbies. They will stay up late with you and will not talk too loudly first thing in the morning. It takes years of training to bring a spouse to such levels of silent understanding and there are no guarantees that he or she will not learn new and devious ways to annoy you as the years go by. It is for this reason that I believe that the best travelling companion is neither friend nor lover, but a book. Slipped into a back pocket, placed discreetly in a handbag, resting peacefully within a neatly packed suitcase and, yes, even hovering weightlessly within a smartphone or tablet — a good book is the perfect travel companion.

The contradiction of the quintessential travel book is that it cannot be too interesting. It cannot drag you too far off into worlds beyond the page, because you really do have other things to do. A good traveller has to be alive to the world, observant of its nuances, sensitive to its charms. Any traveller who loves to read must be careful not to fall into the trap of just reading and not doing anything else while on vacation. A week spent lying in bed reading is truly a week well spent but, perhaps, a week best spent at home. The most well-planned travel itinerary can be thoroughly demolished by an absorbing book, a comfy chair and a quiet balcony.

The ideal book to travel with, however, has to be engaging enough to tide you over all the terribly boring parts of travel. Airports filled with noisy children who have disturbing amounts of energy. Queues of loud-mouthed businessmen who force you to listen to their tedious, unending phone conversations. Traffic jams in hot cabs that smell like toe jam and sweat. While travel can mean adventure and wonder, it can also mean endless delays and sleepless nights in garish hotel rooms with too-hard beds and noisy air-conditioners. On days when you have seen too many faces of strangers on the road, when the sky is an unfamiliar colour, when your body and the clock will not sync at all, that is when you need a good book.

Choosing the right book can be tricky. When we travel, there is always that temptation to reinvent ourselves, to become someone new. When we go to a new place, nobody knows us, no one cares; we could be anyone. We tentatively try out things we may not try at home — boots, oversized sunglasses, denim shorts. Dare we become that person who reads Joyce? Is this the right time to tackle Faulkner?

Do not let the magic of travel trick you into thinking that you will become a better person on your holidays. That you will somehow be able to focus and delve deep into Russian literature in a way that you never could at home. Put down The Brothers Karamazov. Accept that this is not the right time to make that fifth stab at War and Peace. Perhaps, you never will read Middlemarch.

Travel inevitably shakes off our complacency, throws us off balance. It forces us to trust the unknown. It makes us eat peculiar foods and handle strange currency. We must now re-examine ourselves and our place in the world. When far from home, wandering down unfamiliar roads, stick to the things you love. The authors who feel like old friends, those books you can escape into effortlessly.

And what could be an easier escape than a short story collection — the ideal thing to travel with; just the right length to distract, yet not too long to keep you from sleeping. Don’t like the story you are reading? Skip to the next one. In the hands of masters like Alice Munro, John Cheever and Ruskin Bond, the short story bristles with life. Each story touched with a trace of longing for escape that all wandering souls recognise. For those looking for something not so swirling with emotion, the short collections of Agatha Christie or PG Wodehouse, even after all these years, will not let you down. Poirot’s tight shoes and Miss Marple’s gentle murmurings will soon have you in a restful frame of mind. Jeeves and Wooster will soon make you smile to yourself, reminding you of all the silly uncomplicated things in this world.

Equally certain to never disappoint on a long journey is a book of poetry — language distilled to its most powerful form. Travel with Rumi, who wants us all to keep walking even if there is no place to go to. Pack up AK Ramanujan and his wonderful contemplations of six-faced gods and dried-up rivers. Try Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing and discover that fine, dancing line between poetry and song-writing (further confounded by the fact that it is illustrated by the author). Carry Mary Oliver with you and listen to her as she tells you that the only life you can save is your own. Let the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam remind you that we are all crawling underneath this bowl of sky, and listen to Kamala Das when she tells us what our bones will smell like when we are gone. Don’t forget your toothbrush, but, more importantly, don’t forget the poets.

Despite all this lofty advice, both of us know that I too am a traveller, learning as I go, equally unsure of what to pack. Perhaps the perfect book for you and your journey will be filled with recipes. Perhaps it is a graphic novel about time travel or a treatise on the nature of warfare. The world is big enough to contain all these things. When we travel, we push those boundaries even further. And a good book kept close means we’ll never get too lonely along the way.

(Snigdha Manickavel is a Hyderabad-based writer)

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