The Quiet Indian

With the official book tour of The Man Within My Head Penguin complete,he is now back home in Japan,where he lives with wife Hiroko and where his neighbours call him the parasite. Since I am the only male who doesnt put on a three-piece suit and go to office every morning and,in fact,seem to have no gainful employment at all, he says by way of explanation.

For a parasite,Iyer has done rather well for himself. In graduate school he signed up for the Lets Go series of guidebooks,where he covered 80 towns in 90 days for less than 5 a day,eating hotdogs when lucky and sleeping in gutters when luck ran out. Since then Iyer,who says he is 100 per cent Indian by blood,has written seven nonfiction books,two novels and has been an essayist for Time for over 20 years.

The Man Within My Head,released this year,squirms away from easy categorisation. Simplistically,it tells of Iyers steadfast but morphing relationship with the British author Graham Greene The Power and the Glory,The End of the Affair,The Quiet American,etc. and his own father Raghavan N Iyer,a professor at the University of California,Santa Barbara. It slithers between the real and the assumed,between reality and dream. It illumines Iyers life in a boarding school in England,where it was rumoured that bored blindfolded seniors would jab a compass between the hands of their juniors. But it is a time and a training Iyer remains hugely grateful for. He says,Its no coincidence that those ancient British schools produce so many of the travel-writers we still read: the food is horrible,the quarters are tiny,the training is spartan and the psychological pressures severe. He credits this training for preparing him for the caves of Afghanistan,the dangerous mountains of Yemen or the extremes of North Korea.

Growing up in old-fashioned England has also cautioned him against writing too much about the self. There,he learned the world is infinitely more interesting that your petty life and concerns. Even while The Man Within My Head gurgles with the personal and confessional,it never reads quite like a memoir. Iyer says,I think I wrote a personal book in which the most personal parts are the ones in which I dont appear at all.

The book details the devastation raked by forest fires on his home in California. It describes how his father might have seen him and how he saw his father. It jolts from one faraway place to another,at times leaving the reader in a tizzy. It merges the personal with the impersonal. But through it all,it emphasises Greenes theme of foreignness and his belief in kindness.

Iyer enjoys blurring the simple categories of fiction and nonfiction as that allows the manuscript to transform into a riddle or a parable of sorts. He says,When I had a subtitle for the book,I called it An enquiry,and to me,like all my books,its the posing of a question and the unfolding of an investigation,into two central questions. One,why most of us have characters in our heads weve never met who seem to know us better than friends and family do; and how one of the figures in my head,Graham Greene,teaches me about kindness and conscience in a confused and confusing world.

The book addresses anyone who has known déjà vu,anyone who experiences but cant explain a connection with a person,place or event. The book tells of these unsolved,and perhaps unsolvable riddles,and assures us that much of the world exists beyond our grasp. It doesnt seek resolution,aware that our deepest relationships will remain complex. With Greene and with Louis,an old school friend and travel partner,Iyer shares a relationship where each is fully aware of the others strengths and weaknesses. One is glad at times of a break and very soon longs for his company again, he says of his two dearest companions.

Iyer worked eight years on this book of little over 200 pages. But the original was 90 per cent longer,which he then edited. By paring down the novel,he hopes to bestow a certain Japanese aesthetic to the book,unlike the Indian masala mix aesthetic of some of his previous works. He says,In Japan the ideal space is a near-empty room in which theres just one flower and you look at the flower so closely8230;that you feel you can see almost everything in it. Having lived in Japan for a quarter of a century now,I did want to try to draw closer to that kind of aesthetic,not of repletion,but of omission.

In his own life,Iyer has mastered the art of omission. In his popular article The Joy of Quiet The New York Times,29 December 2011,he writes he is yet to own a cell phone,hasnt ever entered Facebook or Twitter,tries not to go online till his days writing is complete and prefers to travel by foot. He says he doesnt even own a bicycle,let alone,a printer. Having hacked away the accoutrements of modern life,Iyer chooses to keep it simple and rooted.

Hiroko,who he has spent 25 years with,hushes the white noise. She has never read a word of what he has written and is unlikely to be impressed by any,believes Iyer. He explains,But she knows me better than any editor or reader could,and realises that any book Ive written is just a small hobby I use to while away the time Im not making money by writing articles.

This rootedness ensures that Iyer takes his role of a writer with a healthy pinch of salt. He realises that being a writer is no different from any other job,it is just practising a craft like plumbers or car mechanics,where the first imperative is to make a living and to support loved ones. But every worker colours their own job in hues of purpose. He recounts the incident of a plumber working in a monastery in California who said that his job wasnt satisfactory but that the customer satisfaction rate when he fixed a leaking toilet was very high. Iyer believes that his distinct ability as a traveller and a writer allows him to witness events and offer them to a reader,who might not otherwise have access to it and,maybe,even predict what will happen next.

Believing that home is a work in progress Iyer continues to travel incessantly. Through these journeys,Iyer hasnt mapped the exotic. Instead,behind the labels and stereotypes,he finds that most people are just regular,looking to protect and feed their families. He says,From a distance we see the world in terms of abstractions and simplifications,the things we can grasp,as soon as we travel to meet the world,it becomes as impossible to classify as anyone we deeply know and love.

He has just returned from the US book tour and a holiday to Hawaii with his wife. The last year found him repeatedly in Jerusalem,the place thats most possessed me in recent years,in Oman,for his mothers 80th birthday,in St Petersburg,then Paris,Singapore,Hyderabad,Arkansas and his birthplace Oxford.

With The Man Within My Head finding its own course through the world,it is time now for Iyer to return to the silence of writing or not writing his next book.