The Calcutta-London Bus Line, better known as "the Indiaman," an overland bus service that operated from the 1950s-1970s.

The bus connected India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Italy, Austria, Germany, France, and the UK.

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The story of the Indiaman is usually told from the Western perspective.

For Western travelers, the stretch from Turkey through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was the Hippie Trail, luring off the beaten path travelers with a penchant for hashish.

For those heading West, the trail was an ordinary bus line connecting them to useful destinations.

In 1958, my 6-year-old father took a similar trip: my grandfather and him boarded a train in Tehran headed to Istanbul, disembarked at Haydarpaşa Station along the Bosphorus ...

... and took the ferry across to the European side of Istanbul, and continued their journey, stopping in Sofia, Bulgaria and Geneva before reaching their final destination, the home of a distant cousin studying in Hamburg.

Here's my Dad in Geneva, posing with random Europeans

World War II had ended only a few years before; much of Europe was still in the process of reconstruction. Chunks of German and Yugoslav and Bulgarian cities sat empty, a reminder of the devastating bombing raids of the 20th century's bloodiest war.

While for Europeans the journey was an escape from the strictures of their post-War lives, for Asians heading West, the trip to Europe offered a glimpse of how Western "progress" was intertwined with genocidal industrialized violence, the scars of war still visible up close.

On the way back, they stopped at the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq.

The year was 1958.

As they set out to return to Tehran, a military coup overthrew Iraq's monarchy, previously installed by the British.

Little did they know, Iraq's history would change forever.

I tell this story because I think there's a lot more to the story of this bus line connecting Calcutta and London than the "Hippie Trail."

Instead of only asking what Western backpackers saw, let's also ask what South Asians and Middle Eastern voyagers saw as they traveled.