Pico Iyer

Flights Into the Foreign

Sun After Dark

Nimish

Where do I even start with Pico Iyer?

I always used to read travel writing literature as a destination-specific story, informing me about a place or the adventures had along or during the journey. While that still holds fort for me, off late it's the 'Why we travel?' question that I seek answers to. Iyer's work always gives nuanced responses to that question. 

His work stands out amidst the travel writers in the sense that his writings are also about the inner journeys one undertakes during the external wanderings. 'Sun after Dark: Flights into the Foreign' is yet another fine example of that oeuvre. He weaves it into beautiful prose and gives a resonance to the thoughts you may have had on some trip to some place, planned or otherwise.

Unlike his other books such as 'Video Night in Kathmandu' or 'Falling Off the Map' or even 'The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto', in this book, the place just happens to be incidental whereas it's the layered perspective he brings out from these destinations that make the story.

It is a collection of travel stories, philosophical essays and slice-of-life profiles of people encountered during the travels. And keeping in the vein of 'Falling off the map', Iyer ventures to some remote places on the planet. Easter Island, on a new year's eve, anyone?

What's more interesting though is the places or subjects he revisits: Japan (he has been living there), India, Tibet, personalities such as the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen. This revisiting gives interesting insights into a place and the personalities. The chapter on Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer-song writer turned Buddhist monk's right hand man, wonderfully explores the reasons behind the transformation of the person. The Dalai Lama, on whom Iyer has written a separate book altogether (The Open Road), straddles the world of monastic duties, keeping the exiled Tibetan flock together, addressing huge crowds, being in celebrities' list of friends and more. Who's the person behind the personality? The chapter "Making kindness stand to reason" explores just that.

In the essay "Nightwalking", one of my favourite in the book, Iyer explores that state of limbo that is somewhere between a jet-lag and re-adjusting to your home or foreign settings. The virtues of being on the same time setting of your home country to the absolute failure of trying to fight jet lag as you age, Iyer wonderfully explains that feeling of being in that wierd frame of mind that follows a return from a long journey. "A Far off Affair" showcases India in an interesting light, through the typos in the sentences on notice boards or language in daily parlance, and not just stopping there but trying to dig in to the etymological histories. "Happy hour in the heart of Darkness" set in Cambodia, debates on the ethics of travel to places where you could be enriching an extremist government. 

Each essay is full of insights which need to be read and pondered over. 

Would like to end with one (of the many many lines) that stuck with me after I was done with the book: Says Iyer, "The physical aspect of travel is, for me, the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don't know, and may never know." 

We have all come across these shadows, at some point in our travels. 

Iyer does the hard work of putting them into words.

Sun After Dark Flights Into the Foreign

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