A woman’s wait ended as her son came out and ran the last few steps into her open arms. As the boy cheered up his mother, she tried to beat back tears. He gathered his luggage. She rubbed her eyes to stop another pang of emotion and a beaming face took over. In the relative stillness of the night at the arrival gate of the airport, a warmth had settled in.

The drive to the Cliff, Varkala — around an hour and half at night — was bereft of cars zipping past or flying fuel-guzzling bikes, as if the road had been left for the night-trippers, making the coastal town the undisputed setting for India’s first travel literary festival ‘Yaanam 2025’, with the theme ‘Celebrating Words and Wanderlust’.

The first edition of the three-day annual fete from October 17 in Varkala, inaugurated by Kerala Tourism Minister P A Mohamed Riyas, would move to various locations across Kerala in succeeding editions, showcasing the state as a tourism hub while celebrating storytellers who travel and travellers who tell stories.

Travel writing, said Booker winner Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, “could be anything… political, subjective and sometimes, it reveals who the author really is rather than the destination.”

On the period of conflict in his country, he said for his generation “it seemed like a forever-war”, but after it ended in 2009, he thought “what if the dead could speak… a conscious effort to time-travel to that period” — the genesis of his book The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the afterlife noir about a journalist murdered amid the sectarian strife, that won him the award in 2022.

Recalling the zeitgeist as he wrote the book, he said, “… We had the Yahapalana (good governance) between 2015 and 2019… thought things were going to be better… Are people going to believe these things (in the book) happened, I thought. By 2022, we had the Easter attacks, people on the streets, total dystopia… so when the book came out at that time it was seen as a contemporary novel…”

Sabin Iqbal, author and festival curator, who grew up in Varkala, said, “Writing gave me an emotional cuckoon to be in… my escape route.”

“Writing is like Test cricket,” said Karunatilaka who got to the end of Seven Moons “and threw it away and started again four times”.

Andrew Fidel Fernando, a senior cricket writer and author of Upon a Sleepless Isle, the only non-fiction book to win the Gratiaen Award, who also grew up when the island nation was firefighting, said, “Really good travel-writing can contextualise a place and its place in the world… you notice a phenomenon in your country and then compare it across borders, geographies and timelines, and figure out why that’s happening…”

For award-winning foreign correspondent and author Pallavi Aiyar, crossing cultures is about “expanding the sense of self, acquiring new lenses… an agglomerative process…”

After the northeast monsoon set in over Kerala Thursday, bringing intermittent downpour in Varkala, the gloominess was gone Saturday.

As delegates and audiences interacted around the hall, a board outside at the entrance displayed a quote from celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain: “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.”

The reporter is here at the invitation of the Kerala Tourism Department