The Land Beyond Sleep

From that extreme, if it can be so termed, Iyer has over the years, book by book, navigated to the other end: to locate the unfamiliar, the foreign, in the known. The man who once found nooks of commonality in Japan The Lady and the Monk and in Cuba Cuba and the Night, who struck out to destinations off the beaten track Falling Off the Map now seeks new ways of seeing common sights.

It began with The Global Soul four years ago, when Iyer spent time in the new caravanserais for his cosmopolitan, accelerated world: airport complexes which are bustling communities by themselves, megamalls, cities like Toronto where various cultures blend to produce something spectacularly novel yet achingly familiar.

The exploration carried through to a novel that followed, Abandon, about a professor finding ancient mysteries in a secret world of Sufis in modern-day California. Yet, here two movements were visible. The tensions among the dispossessed in distant lands, among those who were at a remove from the movements of the Global Soul, were palpable.

In these essays at hand, Iyer visits that divide. He goes to Cambodia where tourists do a circuit that includes the many-splendoured Angkor Wat as well as mountains of skulls accumulated by the Khmer Rouge, where facile and comforting notions of right and wrong fragment. When a little girl begs for alms, he realises that the money could help sustain Khmer Rouge guerrillas, but what8217;s the choice? 8220;To withhold money from her might be to hasten her decline.8221; In Easter Island, in Haiti, certitudes collapse. To travel far and wide is not just an exercise in New Age self-growth, it is an important challenge in these globalised times: it is a necessary undertaking to ensure that those being left behind are heard, that their problems are addressed.

Yet, if this book has no identifiable point of departure or arrival, it certainly has a definite halt, a location and an opportunity to catch one8217;s breath and recharge. In a chapter called Nightwalking, Iyer utilises the frequent traveler8217;s accessory, jet lag, to acquire fresh lenses. 8220;Things carry a different value, a different heft, when you8217;re jet-lagged,8221; he writes, 8220;but there8217;s no counter on which the exchange rates are posted.8221; Jet lag, he hazards, releases him from the illusion of the self. As he sleeplessly prowls around his everyday worlds, the familiar becomes almost foreign. Inequalities he8217;d take for granted in a normal working day are now starkly highlighted.

These double-image, jangled, jet-lagged interregnums serve as launching pads for ever more novel journeys 8212; into the writings W.S. Sebald, for instance, or into meditation sessions. To travel with Iyer is to explore the colours of a constantly turning kaleidoscope.