SUN AFTER DARK: FLIGHTS INTO THE FOREIGN By Pico Iyer, Viking, Rs 395

Sun After Dark is Pico Iyer’s latest collection of explorations, travels deep into the heart of darkness in the midst of life-giving sunlight. Iyer recalls Camus writing, in his preface to his Lyrical and Critical Essays, that the great blessing of his upbringing was that he was born “halfway between poverty and the sun”. Through all his own travels, writes Iyer, “their end point, always, is the deeper question of what we take to be real and how, as Camus puts it, we put the sunlight in the same frame as the suffering”. And so Iyer moves from Bolivia to Dharamsala, from Cambodia to California, and brings us new and old questions about maps and trajectories, strangeness and universality. As he says, “Travel remains a journey into what we can’t explain, or explain away.”

The first essay in the collection, “A gathering around in perplexity”, is about a visit to a Zen retreat in the California mountains, the Mount Baldy Zen Center, to visit “the icon who’s been entertained by everyone from Prince Charles and Georges Pompidou to Joni Mitchell and Michelle Phillips...who’s inspired not one tribute album but dozens” — Leonard Cohen. Cohen hasn’t quite given up the world — he still has a duplex apartment in the Real World Outside, still writes songs, and inspires “a new generation of grunge poets” — but then here he is, at this rohatsu or winter retreat, on a California mountaintop in December, with 30-odd Zen students who will sit in meditation for 168 hours.

The truths that Cohen is shown as discovering may seem self-evident, even simplistic — “The older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love that you need” — but they are truths that can so easily be lost sight of. Just as, accompanying Iyer on a visit to the dalai lama in Dharamsala and reading about a leader and a people in exile, we are reminded of the importance of the little things — “repairing old watches, tending to sick parrots, and...making broken things whole once again”.

But the sunlight doesn’t always bring life-giving warmth: in the daily despair of Phnom Penh, where schoolgirls sell themselves for two dollars a visit, it seems to bring “new shadows” and old memories.

Iyer is at his best when he is recording the concrete details of his restless travels: the pink fluorescent lighting in Singapore’s Little India, “muezzin time” in Damascus, “the shrill whine of cicada bells” in Angkor, and a 45-minute credit card transaction on godforsaken Easter Island, at the end of which the young lady behind the cash counter gives him a delighted kiss.

Foreignness, it seems, is a condition in a changing world. In Haiti, sitting in a hotel in suburban Port-au-Prince, Iyer reflects upon “a world where so many people live in the middle of the Other; each of us...unprotected in different ways”. And in “A foreigner at home”, he looks at the not-quite-English Englishness of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction in the novel, When We Were Orphans.

The best essay in the volume is about India, which he calls “the most chattery country in the world”. Tracing “the hybrid forms of this unlikely tongue” known as Indian English, Iyer observes one culture getting under the skin of another: “We start, perhaps, by laughing at the follies of another culture’s misappropriations. We move towards bewilderment, as we sense that we’re not quite in the culture we left, and yet not in the one we think we’re going to. And we end up somewhere completely different, not quite irony and not quite romance.”