As a war-torn West Asia trembles under the weight of relentless conflict, its devastation spills across the globe, inflating the price of bread and deepening the suffering of the poor. One is reminded that fear travels far beyond the battlefield, seeping deep into the ordinary rhythms of life.

It is in this climate of dread that I find myself sitting on the banks of Lake Lucerne, in a village called Brunnen. Across the water I can see the Bürgenstock, the high mountain and luxury alpine resort, where J.D. Vance is said to have met the Iranian delegation in search of some resolution to the crisis between Iran and America. The bright day is darkening into evening, a cool wind moving in steadily, and in my lap lies Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a novel I have returned to after many years. Some books simply do not age. They deepen their hold instead.

And so, this evening, I find myself thinking of Paton’s novel, so often read as a lament for apartheid, but which is also something more enduring in the form of a meditation on what fear does to a nation, and to the child not yet born who inherits that unwarranted fear. That warning feels uncannily contemporary tonight, as I sit anguished at the world’s unbridled belligerence, its sectarian violence, and the merciless toll of Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran.

As I read, my mind travels southward to apartheid South Africa, to the long brutality that Alan Paton had spent his life resisting. And then, almost by accident, I find something I had completely forgotten, a yellowing newspaper cutting tucked into the back of the book, a piece by Anne Paton, Alan Paton’s wife, entitled Fly, My Beloved Country. It was written nearly three decades ago, describing why she had been compelled to leave the country she loved. She had never wanted to leave. But it had become impossible to stay. I sensed intense grief in that statement.

It is not Paton’s novel alone that haunts me now. It is the imagined, almost mythic, departure of Anne Paton from a continent already scarred by injustice. In my mind, her exit becomes a mirror of another great African farewell. Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa reminds me of the touching scene where, after the death of her lover, Denys Hatton, she sits in a small plane, looking down at the endless savannah, the animals moving in silent procession.  In my memory, the haunting notes of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Minor swirl around her, its music at once tender and desolate, as though carrying the weight of leaving itself. The clarinet, an instrument of call and response, mirrors the dialogue between the departing individual and the land she leaves behind. It seems to ask, “Will you remember me?” and answers, “I will, even if I cannot stay.”

Reading Anne Paton again during my sojourn here surrounded by the Uri Alps in a quaint village on the lake, I am struck by the dignity of Anne’s grief. Overwhelming rage and accusations would have been the usual response. But her departure resonates, inevitably, with a sense of the loss of a beloved country as the land recedes, still beautiful, still beloved, but no longer inhabitable. The moment of departure has always stayed with me as an ache of a dream that ruptures, the lover gone, the farm lost, the illusion of settlement undone.

Personal elegy

The film and book Out of Africa blend in my imagination resounding with the concerto arousing the gloom of Anne and Karen, both suspended between earth and sky, watching a world they loved and lost, and wondering whether any of it will ever be whole again. That image has become, for me, a personal elegy for every departure, every forced or chosen exile that leaves behind a landscape of both beauty and longing.

From England, where I was then based, the news from South Africa began to arrive in fragments, images of violence, of social breakdown, of a state increasingly unable to guarantee safety. This was no longer the South Africa of freedom one had dreamt of, nor even the morally legible brutality of apartheid. It was something far more dispiriting.

To love a country in such a moment is to experience that love as pain. Anne Paton’s admission captures the tragedy of nations that fail those who love them most. Departure, in such cases, becomes a compulsion, a breakaway, a form of interior exile.

For me, this is not a story confined to South Africa. It is a pattern that recurs across societies where political freedom arrives without the institutional and moral structures required to sustain it. And that is Paton’s enduring relevance. To love a country deeply is to risk being wounded by it. The greater the attachment, the sharper the loss. Perhaps that is the most difficult truth of all.

It returns now when I think of Anne Paton, the same quiet devastation, the same reluctant severance. Life continues, as it must, but something irrevocable has been left behind. As I close this piece, I hear, in my mind, that distant clarinet. It reminds me that every departure carries with it a promise of return, however distant, and that the landscapes we leave behind continue to shape us, long after we have gone. In remembering Anne Paton’s flight, and in recalling Blixen’s solitary plane ride, I am reminded that to love a place is to accept its inevitable loss, and to mourn that loss is, in its own way, a tribute to the enduring beauty of the beloved country.

I kept that newspaper cutting. I carry it still.

shelleywalia@gmail.com

Published - August 13, 2026 12:41 pm IST