Pico Iyer : In Coversation

Pico, who has just come back after “an uplifting trip to Benares” where he had gone “visiting the ghats, the aarti, the sunset” and “experienced the whole Ganga-Jumni tehzeeb in those little lanes and shops”, is clear that the future is bright for writers here. “Writing is not so dodgy anymore. At the airport in Delhi, I saw 60 to 70 per cent people were reading something, maybe a book, maybe a newspaper or a magazine while waiting for their planes. In Japan, they would have been playing games on the mobile, in the U.S. they would have been preening!” He should know. After all, at the age of seven he migrated to California, and has stayed in Japan for long years with his partner. “I am still an outsider,” he says.

“I grew up pretending to speak Latin in California. I was born to a Tamil father and a Gujarati mom but my parents’ only common language was English. I did not hear much of Tamil or Gujarati at home. I have spent maybe a day in Chennai in my life. Growing up, I learnt about Buddhism and Christianity and for the past nine years I have been studying Islam for writing a book.”

Does he not feel like an alien everywhere? “No. You live only in passage. You are neither here nor there. It is like a little glass, half empty or half full. I refuse to feel an alien as the whole world, to some extent, is my home. When I was a little boy in Oxford, I was pretty much the only Indian in English school. It is much the same since,” he says, adding rather thoughtfully, “writers bring the world together”.