Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I wanted to cry. I also wanted to drop-kick the computer into Shiokoji Street. Instead, I walked, my throat aching, my eyes burning. I went to my hotel room and, in great pain, working slowly in longhand, began to write a version of my vanished piece.

***

SO THAT I COULD VENT my frustration, I called Pico Iyer, who lived not far away in the ancient Japanese city of Nara. We met and I raged for an hour or more. He was the perfect listener—sympathetic, serene, uncritical, attentive, computer-hating. When I was finished, he said, "You don't travel with a computer? Neither do I."

He used a small notebook and, like me, a preferred brand of ballpoint pen. He had lived in Japan for nine years, though he claimed not to know much about the country and didn't speak Japanese. To me he was the complete traveler—highly educated, humorous, detached, portable, positive, alert, subtle, a great noticer and listener, calm, humane, and fluent in his prose. And he had been everywhere. He is best known for his book Video Night in Kathmandu, but he had also written a highly regarded book about Cuba. Though he is reserved, his book

The Global Soul is his most revealing. It is an examination of homelessness, in the sense of being without a country, the condition of living with sentiments of residence but without roots, the state of being "a permanent alien." It was an entirely new definition—not an exile or a nomad or an expatriate, but a global soul.

Being slightly built, taking up so little space, Pico was almost invisible—a great quality for a traveler. He was born in India and brought as a child to England, where his father taught at Oxford; he was educated at Eton and Oxford, and afterwards Harvard. Meanwhile his parents had emigrated to California, where his father had taught for a while and then (so I'd heard) become a guru in Santa Barbara.

When we met in Kyoto I said I had to unburden myself. I was nearly always happier traveling alone, but it was a great help to me that at a crucial stage of my solitary trip I had Pico to listen to me howl on the subject of a deleted computer file.

"It's happened to me," he said. "I know how you feel."

I unburdened myself, raging, as we strolled past the temples, gardens, and teahouses of ancient Maruyama Park, for which Kyoto is justifiably famous. I was calmed by Pico's sympathy and by the orderly gardens of Shoren-in Temple, the odor of sanctity in the sacred groves.

Although we spent the entire day and most of the evening walking in this historic district, a parallel narrative was unrolling. We talked about the temples, the shrines, the squat wooden teahouses, the narrow lanes, the Buddha statues and bodhisattvas, the hillsides of spiky pines and fat culms of running bamboo. But we also talked about our common interests: travel, England, marriage, Hawaii and the Pacific, publishers, magazine assignments, book tours, what we were writing now, and, as writers always do when together, of money and other writers.

Walking in our stocking feet through the Shoren-in Temple, passing from room to room, the successive rooms giving onto beautifully proportioned monks' cells with pictorial screens and views of dwarf pines and stone lanterns, Pico was saying, "Which of his books do you think are his best?"

"Biswas, hands down, and Mr. Stone, and the essays and journalism of the 1970s. But he's—"

"For me, The Enigma of Arrival—look how these shoji doors are infinitely expandable. It was how I felt. I understood his sense of loss, and the childhood, the school days. He's alienated."

"I was going to say he's a horse's ass. He's so cruel to people, so unappreciative. He was awful to his wife. He has no sympathy. I know that sounds superficial. What I mean is, he's a very fearful man."

"He was kind to me," Pico said.

I didn't say so, but I could see his affinity with Naipaul, who had once confided to me the misery of being a slightly built Indian among big English louts—how he'd been heckled and abused. As soon as he could afford it, Naipaul had stopped taking underground trains in London, sticking to the isolation and safety of taxis. And Naipaul would have related to Pico's writing, in The Global Soul: "Having grown up simultaneously in three cultures, none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the sense of being loosed from time as much as from space—I had no history, I could feel, and lived under the burden of no home."

He said, "Shall we go outside? The garden's really lovely."

I looked through the low doorway to the gravel path and the Zen arrangement of raked gravel and miniature bushes.

"Sculpted and controlled," I said.

"That's the whole of Japanese culture. Sculpted and controlled. Look at this sign." It was in English, and he read it slowly: "'When you walk a garden there is a case you have to return.'"

"Meaning?"

"It would take Borges to make sense of these ambiguities. You met him, didn't you?"