Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Author: admin

Our Lady of Lawson

To live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. My sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation — me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish — that I belong to an alien species. I grew up in England, I tell them, on boarding-school food, no less; I like Japan at some level deeper than the visible (or edible). They look away and try not to scream.

Yet the habit that has won me complete excommunication on both sides of the world is my readiness to eat (twice a day) from Lawson, my tiny local convenience store in Nara, the old Japanese capital. A convenience store speaks to many of us of all that is questionable in modern Japan: a soulless, synthetic, one-size-fits-all lifestyle that the efficiency-loving country has perfected to the nth degree. It marks, most would say, the end of family, tradition and community as well as the advent of a homogenized future that has many people running for ”slow food.”

The convenience store is a model of Japan in miniature: the triumph of function over fuss and of ease over embarrassment. Just as you can buy whiskey, eggs, pornography and even (it is said) women’s underwear in vending machines, so you can all but live in convenience stores. I pay my phone bills and send my packages through the local branch of the national Lawson chain (named after the defunct American Lawson); I buy my bus cards there and tickets for Neil Young concerts. I make the convenience store my de facto office, lingering by the photocopier for hours on end and then faxing an article, say, to New York. Yet the first law of Japan, even in Lawson, is that nothing is what it seems, and that you can find all the cultures of the world here, made Japanese and strange. Here, in the four thin aisles of my local store, are the McVitie’s digestives of my youth — turned into bite-size afterthoughts. Here are Milky Bar chocolates, converted into bullet-size pellets. Here are Mentos in shades of lime and grape, cans of ”Strawberry Milk Tea” and the Smarties I used to collect as a boy, refashioned as ”Marble Chocolate.” Were Marcel Proust to come to Lawson, he would find his madeleines daily but made smaller, sweeter and mnemonically new.

It’s common to hear that Japan has created a promiscuous anthology of the world’s best styles. And the convenience store is the center of this. Tubs of Earl Grey ice cream, sticks of mangosteen chewing gum, green-tea-flavored KitKat bars: they’re all here in abundance (though, in fashion-victimized Japan, no sooner have I developed a fondness for KissMint chewing gum ”for Etiquette” than it has been supplanted by ice creams in the shape of watermelon slices). And even the smallest chocolate bar comes with an English-language inscription that, in the Japanese way, makes no sense whatsoever, yet confers on everything the perfume of an enigmatic fairy tale: ”A lovely and tiny twig,” says my box of Koeda chocolates, ”is a heroine’s treasured chocolate born in the forest.”

In modern Japan, the convenience store is taken to be the spiritual home of the boys in hip-hop shorts and the girls with shocking yellow hair and artificial tans, who try with their every move — eating in the street, squatting on the sidewalk — to show that they take their cues from 50 Cent and not Mrs. Suzuki. The door of my local Lawson has badges to denote police surveillance, and where the great 20th-century novelist Junichiro Tanizaki praised shadows (nuance, ambiguity, the lure of the half-seen) as the essence of the Japan he loved, Lawson speaks for a new fluorescent, posthuman — even anti-Japanese — future. And yet, in the 12 years I’ve lived on and off in my mock-California suburb, the one person who has come to embody for me all the care for detail and solicitude I love in Japan is, in fact, the lady at the cash register in Lawson. Small, short-haired and perpetually harried, Hirata-san races to the back of the store to fetch coupons for me that will give me 10 cents off my ”Moisture Dessert.” She bows to the local gangster who leaves his Bentley running and comes in the store with his high-heeled moll to claim some litchi-flavored strangeness. When occasionally I don’t show up for six or seven hours, she sends, through my housemates, a bag of French fries to revive me.

The Japanese are so good at keeping up appearances that few signs are ever evident of the series of recent recessions. But over the years, I have seen poor Mrs. Hirata’s husband (the store’s manager) open his doors around the clock and take the graveyard shift himself. The place started to stock tequila-sunrise cocktails in a can, and little bottles of wine. Soon even the Hiratas’ two high-school-age sons were being pressed into service (unpaid, I’m sure).

It’s no easier to understand Japan in Western terms than it is to eat noodles with a knife and fork. Yet it has been evident to me for some time that the crush of the anonymous world lies out in the temple-filled streets; the heart of the familiarity, the communal sense of neighborhood, the simple kindness that brought me to Japan, lies in the convenience store.

Early last year, writing an article on paradise, I surmised that my modest neighborhood could be improved only by the addition of a cinema, but given the laws of human longing and limitation, such an arrival would probably mean the end of my favorite convenience store. Be careful of what you write. Days before my article came out, a sign appeared on my local Lawson, announcing it was going out of business. Almost everyone in the neighborhood was shaken, but no one knew what to do. (How to express your gratitude to a convenience store?) We’d watched the owners’ sons grow up while their parents served up bags of chicken nuggets in three spicy flavors.

I went home, found a set of elegant bowls I’d bought in case of a sudden need for a wedding present and returned to the store. They were being transferred to a far-off shop in the countryside, Mrs. Hirata said; she feared for her kids. She was even afraid of going out there herself. Then I handed over the box, and she realized why I had come. She began to waver for a moment, then turned away from me and put a calzone in the microwave. A true Japanese to the end, she wanted to protect me from her tears.

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La Paz, Bolivia

You touch down two and a half miles above the sea, in the world’s highest international airport, and the city below is a bowl of shining light cradled between snowcaps. The cholas, or Indian women, are tromping along in their multicoloured ponchos and bowler hats as if no one had told them that this was the 21st century. The signs on the buses say, “Oh, beautiful La Paz,” while the graffiti on the walls assures you that God is on his way. You drive down into the high, exalted capital, shockingly clear under Tibetan blue skies, and, bumping over pebbled, barely paved backstreets, notice the “Video Club Shrek,” the Jerusalem Pharmacy, a shop named after Ringo Starr. And then you get out along the flower-filled Prado that runs through the center of the city, a green promenade, and wonder which century exactly you’ve landed in.

A central restaurant nearby is called “Dumbo.” The taxis are chugging along at an almost human pace, with “Droopy” written on their tops. At the central San Francisco church, a shaman is placing a golden bowl, upside down, on an Indian woman’s head, while at the creche nearby the Three Wise Men are converted into Aymara Indians wearing llama-wool earflaps and ponchos. There are shacks along the main drag selling old Barry Manilow CDs, Sony micro-TVs and copies of the Bhagavad-Gita, but they are manned by more of those Indian women in bowler hats. It’s easy to feel as if Bolivia has staged a reconquesta of its own, upending the Spanish Empire–upending even the very thought of forward motion–and plodding serenely and steadily back into the past.

All of us travel in space in order to travel in mind; to go to places we’d never see amidst the clutter and familiarity of our daily lives. But many of the best trips for me involve what is really a journey in time; we move across centuries when moving across borders and end up in a place where the issues of the day are turned on their heads. Bolivia is to my mind the sweetest, most unspoiled and engaging country in South America, the continent’s hidden jewel; but what that is really a way of saying is that Bolivia is the country that is most itself, inhabiting a different universe–a parallel century–to our own.

If you consult your local newspaper, or World Bank website, you will read that Bolivia is the poorest country in the Americas, outside of Haiti, and that it sits in the Guinness Book of World Records enjoying the unhappy distinction of having had more changes of government than any country in history (188 in 157 years). The red-brick houses spreading across the hills around the airport have made the shanty-town of El Alto the fastest-growing city in South America. And yet little of this seems to touch the daily life of a capital that is slower and more human than any metropolis I know. Even the Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia notes that walking along the Prado on a Sunday afternoon, when the main street is closed off to traffic, is like recalling a “bit of lost childhood.”

Peru, to the north, is one of the many Latin countries that seems to have one foot in the 16th century, and one gingerly extended towards the 21st, forced to attempt a kind of splits that few countries can pull off. Argentina to the east longs to be a part of Europe with its fashions and its psychotherapists, though its up-and-down economy and politics confirm that it is a part of Latin America. Bolivia sometimes seems to be the most quintessentially Latin American country on the continent precisely because it aspires to being nothing other than Bolivia. You will find no English-language newspapers or magazines on its streets. In many parts of the countryside (including a village clinic where I ended up this year), not even Spanish is spoken. Even the chic areas in the affluent suburbs of La Paz called the Zona Sur still rejoice in such Indian names as Calacoto, Cotacota and Achumani.

I went to Bolivia to see in the New Year this year, as I had done three years ago, in part because Bolivia throws the very notion of a new year into question. The first time I came here, in 1975, the magical ruins of Tihuanaco, 44 miles from La Paz–a few engimatic statues and walls in the midst of the vast emptiness of the Altiplano, nothing visible but the huge shadows the sun is throwing across the mountains and a few stick figures in the distance–I was amazed that so little had been excavated of a complex and mysterious civilization that had flourished here for 18 centuries or more (from 600 B.C.E. till the 13th century after Christ). Returning thirty years later, I found it no different than before. Cervantes, the father of Quixote, tried in vain to become mayor of La Paz once; Queen Victoria at one point opined that Bolivia did not even exist.

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Fairy-Tales for Adults

There is a square in Mexico, just across the border, where a foreigner is sitting, looking at the bright lights, the big hotels across the bridge. Like everyone in town, he’s also been watching another foreigner–a reflection of himself, we somehow feel–who is, as it happens, a celebrated con man, in flight from his creditors, now in the habit of taking a walk around the square every day with his dog. The observer feels a kind of kinship with the observed–he, too, we sense, is in flight from something–and seems to relish the fact that, this being Mexico, everyone in town knows the other man is a criminal, except the two foreign detectives sent to find him. When at last they do catch up with their prey, they quickly befriend him, and the crook’s safety looks to be guaranteed.

Then, however, his dog runs away, the foreigner goes across the bridge in pursuit–and is hit by a car driven by one of the detectives. The dog bays pitiably beside his master.

“It was comic and it was pitable,” the narrator says, “but it wasn’t less comic because the man was dead.” Nor, one might add, less pitiable. “It all seemed to me a little too touching to be true,” he confesses, “as the old crook lay there with his arm around the dog’s neck, dead with his million between the money-changers’ huts, but it’s as well to be humble in the face of human nature.” Art, he might be saying, is seldom so neat (or cynical) as one might wish.

To some, perhaps, such a scene might sound almost like a parody of Graham Greene: when an English magazine once ran a competition, asking its readers to send in a parody of Greene, by some accounts, the author himself sent in an entry, and came second. Yet all that is strong and touching about Greene is caught in the short vignette, written before any of the major novels came out: the love of paradox, the surrender to a sense of human frailty that makes all paradox redundant, the position on the wrong side of the border, among the fallen, and the sense of companionship being often no more than a fellowship of thieves, but no less real for that. “The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden,” writes Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, “lives in mystery and fear.” So, too, Greene might suggest, does the man who knows that the secrets of the world are forever known.

Greene’s ability to weave wistfulness and comedy together, his skill at constructing emotional and political spider webs so intricate that the lightest touch leaves them shaking, has often meant that his short fiction has been overlooked. The classic masters of short stories (Chekhov, say, or Greene’s friend and contemporary V.S. Pritchett) are masters of a single mood, or character, or air of ironic humanity; Greene’s characteristic domain, by comparison, was doubleness. Divided loyalties were his thing, conflicted feelings. To play out the full logic of a man reaching out for a man he distrusts, or a swindler doing good things for bad reasons, he seemed to need the measured space of a tightly plotted novel.

Yet the stories collected at four points in his career, written over a course of sixty years, catch their elusive maker in silhouette, in a way, and sometimes, less distracted by protagonist and plot, show us more of him than do any of the novels. With perhaps typical perverseness, Greene structured his first collection of stories backwards, beginning with the last and ending with the earliest (as if to chronicle a passage towards innocence); but even the smallest of them, like that story on the frontier, have titles (“Across the Bridge”) that suggest they were aiming at something more. Sometimes amusements, sometimes parables, sometimes ways for him to try out a mood or idea, sometimes just “escapes,” Greene’s stories show us the writer in his off hours, less guarded.

You can draw certain conclusions about his development when you read them in one place: noting, perhaps, that he made a more attractive older man than a young one, because his sense of human folly and confinement was mixed with a sense of fun and youth–seen from a distance–or realizing how the youthful stories are often preoccupied with disenchantment, where the later ones rejoice in their freedom from illusion. The earliest pieces here, frank in their restlessness and anger, end often in murder, where the final ones are haunted by death, the damage no longer done to others but oneself. Yet what haunts one most of all, reading them all at once, is how much his concerns were steady from the beginning, even as they took in more tolerance and irony. Nearly all the stories, it seems to me, are about innocence, and turn upon the fact that the innocent, those still inside the Garden, long for adventure, danger, flight; while those on the far side of the fence wish that they could go back again.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Greene was least able to take on this theme, or to approach it, when he was youngest. His earliest exercises are largely set in England, which is to say the familiar and the gray; when wartime comes, with its austerities and precautionary rites, its long bureaucratic corridors and paper shuffling, it seems only to intensify a sense of privation that was there from the beginning. In the first set of short fiction Greene published, initially entitled 19 Stories, and then 21 Stories, the mood is sullen, often violent. The stories with the most everyday titles–“A Drive in the Country” or “A Little Place off the Edgware Road”–are taken up with darkness, a sense of oppression. The mere recitation of English place names–“Maidenhead” is a recurring favorite–carries a kind of salacious charge, and the overall mood can best be caught by the sound of “Fetter Lane” and “Leadenhall Street.”

Indeed, those who know that a Catholic writer is behind the pieces may be surprised at how little solace there is in them–or will have to adjust, at least, to a provisional believer’s sense that redemption is a never-ending if. Greene was as singular a Catholic as he was everything else, and the faith he took on at the age of 23 seems never to have left him with a sense of happy endings. His interest, in fact, is almost never in what is above us, and almost always in what lies beneath, often quite literally. Everything that lies below the conscious mind, or the bland surface of our formal lives: the Underground and the basement. When writing of a king’s jubilee, Greene concentrates, quite typically, on a gigolo (dressed like a “retired Governor from the Colonies”) and a madam, each taking the other for something else, but bound together in a kind of companionship. As the two of them carry on their conversation in a hotel lounge, the most commonplace phrases–“trips to the London underworld,” “I cleaned up the streets”–acquire a happily shaded second meaning. Greene was always interested in the parts of us (sometimes better) we don’t acknowledge.

The archetypal early story, in that regard, may well be “When Greek Meets Greek,” in which all four of the characters, as in classic Greene, are con men, who are somehow innocent enough to believe that their deceits are cunning–and, more than that, innocent enough to fall for another con man’s devices. As a fraudulent schemer pretending to be the head of an Oxford college hands over a diploma to a would-be lord, in some borrowed rooms in London (while the young accomplices of each go off, linked together, just as the older men hoped), one comes upon the perfect Greenian tableau in which lack of virtue is rewarded and errant trust becomes a kind of faith. From here it is not a very long step to the whisky priests of his first great novel, The Power and the Glory, who, for all their shabbiness and impiety, can perform a mass, or administer simple human compassion, as well as any cardinal.

Insofar as Greene was drawn to the shabby or the secret–a charge he always denied–it was because he was always unable to turn away from the human, or to give up on the prospects of even the most motheaten. Many of these early stories are inchoate, or mere scenes almost, but in the richest of them you can see the smiling skeptic of Our Man in Havana or Travels with my Aunt. Greene never had an entirely innocent reading of the world–he seems to have been something of an ironist at birth–and yet he never lost a due respect for childhood and for all the things we do when we don’t know better. And it is the stubborn, recidivist innocence of even the con men in his stories that makes them so endearing; we laugh at them from a distance, and then realize that we’re somehow within them, and on their side.

There is a story in that first collection actually called “The Innocent” and in it Greene reveals another factor that complicated his abiding sense of loss. A character not dissimilar to his maker goes back to his drab boyhood hometown–Bishop’s Hendron–to rummage through the past. On his arm, though, is a woman he’s just picked up, one Lola, who, of course, contradicts with her every movement the search for innocence he’s undertaking. One part of Greene, one feels, was always eager to poke away at what he’d left behind, the root of him, while another was hungry for the worldly and the new. In his finest stories the language of both moods comes together in the sound of a well-bred diffidence trying to tamp down something stronger. “She wasn’t anything in particular,” says the narrator of “Across the Bridge,” of another Lola, “but she looked beautiful at a distance.”

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Impersonal Identity

This is the place where all selves and words burn up, I say defiantly, triumphantly, as I settle into the silent Catholic hermitage where I spend much of my life. Names fall away, and with them all the divisions that names enforce. I look out on an ocean become a blue plate extending below me, the sky a great bowl of blue above, Steller’s jays landing on my terrace, rabbits disappearing into the undergrowth–and realize that it doesn’t matter who or where you are: this is who you are when the who (and the “are”) fall away.

So much of our time–my time, at least–is spent in drawing fine analytical distinctions: this and that and East and West. Male and female, old and young. Sometimes I can even convince myself that they all have something to do with what is true: breathing in and breathing out, taking in and giving back. I lull myself with the ebb and flow of movement, and hear in it the rhythm of growth and loss. I attach labels to myself–this is where I was born, this the color of my skin, this is where I work–and at certain moments, for an instant, I can almost believe that they have something to do with who I am. But “identity,” if it means anything, means communion, coming together, that self in us that belongs to something far larger than us, found in perhaps every other seeming self. And  from where I sit today, in a patch of light, the ocean 1300 feet below, spread out like a mat that reaches all the way to Asia, it isn’t the small self that impresses me, it’s the larger one that lies around it.

No terms in this place, no sign of anything man made. Receding hills to the south, mist wreathing in and out of the dry brown valleys. The ocean below. Brush that has been cleared to protect the place from fire. Up above, if I look towards the blue, blue sky, cloudless in early spring, a cross, as it happens, though it could be something else.

The problems of finding a true self in the midst of the many selves that we house, the voice beneath our voice, inevitably make up the center of many of our waking thoughts. We wish to balance our going forth with our coming hither, our thoughts with our deeds, the dictates of the spirit with those of the world. We hunger for direction and the truth behind appearances. We tell ourselves we’re not ourselves and that a fixed self doesn’t exist. But then we ask ourselves what self it is that’s saying we believe only in fluidity–and go round and round in circles. We only find our true self, of course, when we stop looking for it (and it finds us).

I tell myself–and feel it, at some level deeper than all words–that Buddhism, living in Japan, has taught me about the smallness of the individual, the virtue of defining oneself in terms of a community, a company, even a country, how much one finds one’s voice by losing it in a choir. Each year the autumn, so blazingly blue even as the first chill and dark of winter draw closer, teaches me about impermanence and the larger scheme of things, to which each individual plan and voice must bend. It ushers me into the darkness, the back-stage emptiness behind the world’s play of lights.

I tell myself that being in this psalm-filled space, for eighteen years, has taught me about the light that hides within that darkness, and made me less wary of words like “harmony” and “grace.” I come here in the spring, and when I look out on Creation–the word that I would otherwise never use for simple ocean, radiant sky–the soul feels like singing. The two perspectives turn around one another as the illuminated frame for chaos and the darker frame for beauty. They teach respectively the lessons of autumn and spring.

And yet autumn and spring are part of the same single round, and it is a round that takes them in and makes the terms quite meaningless. One does not think to call oneself a Buddhist or a Catholic when one is in love, forgotten; one does not think to call oneself anything. What remains when the last category or division is cut away is this: blue sky, blue ocean, the wheeling sun. And this, too: the moon above the hills, translucent, the planes and their beeping lights among the stars.

I come to a Catholic monastery to cut through whatever notions I have of Catholicism, one book as holy, this doctrine or its opposite. I come here to cut through whatever I might associate with Buddhism, too, its schools and fine distinctions. I come to step into whatever stands behind the person who is saying all that and the one who imagines himself a being in the world.

Does it help me with the definitions I offer to those who ask? Does it give me a clearer sense of what remains when illusions are burned away? Does it help me sort out the self I believe in today from the one I can feel when all longing is abandoned? It does, but only in the way a slant of light does, and questions themselves fall away. It could be snowing, it could be bright tomorrow; the sea, the sky, the deer emerging from the tall grass in the dusk, will still be here. The only thing I am is the moment and the sunlight pouring through this fleeting, empty vessel.

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Summing Him Up

“The critic I am waiting for,” wrote Somerset Maugham in a letter near the end of his life, “is the one who will explain why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people.” The edge of defensiveness was unusual in a man who generally accepted that he had more readers than friends or admirers, but the perceptiveness was characteristic. A century after Maugham’s literary career began, the other best-selling writers of his day, even those who won the Nobel Prize, such as Pearl Buck and John Galsworthy, are largely forgotten; the “serious writers” by whom he was often eclipsed, whether Hardy or Joyce, are mostly consigned to the classroom. Yet even the most discerning readers continue to push Maugham’s sales beyond the 40 million mark, while the slightest of his novels, Up at the Villa, was recently made into a 21st century film. On himself, as on most things, the old man exercised a precise clairvoyance.

Maugham’s biographers have been no help at all in explaining the mystery of his success. “I wasn’t even likeable as a boy,” Maugham once wrote, and, eager to take him at his word, especially when that word is negative, later writers have built up a portrait of an almost marmoreal figure, clenched and captious and unkind. His nephew Robin, whom Maugham took under his wing, repaid the debt by writing “three increasingly unreliable and malicious memoirs,” in Jeffrey Meyers’s words, asserting that Uncle Willie was “a sadistic queer.” Frederic Raphael pounced on the same material to pronounce that Maugham’s homosexuality was not just a flaw, but a fault “in the geographic sense,” and that he was “too clear to be great.” Anthony Burgess reimagined the life in a 607-page tome, Earthly Powers, that begins with the 80 year-old Maugham figure in bed with a catamite.

The sense that Maugham was a workmanlike journeyman has somehow inspired biographers to approach him in just that spirit. Ted Morgan wrote a full, but not revelatory, biography in 1980, after persuading Maugham’s literary executor, Curtis Brown, to part with papers that the novelist had wanted suppressed. Now Jeffrey Meyers, biographer of Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield and Edmund Wilson (to name but a few) turns his fast-moving pen on what he calls an “engaging Gila monster.” Maugham’s work, he assures us in his preface, “can be explained by the struggle between sexual repression and artistic expression.”

As ever, Maugham himself was much more agile than any of those who have tried to follow him. The whole point of the writer, he says repeatedly in his autobiography, The Summing Up, is that he is “not one man, but many.” Men are mysteries even to themselves, he always told us, and in The Moon and Sixpence, he says again, “In social intercourse [a man] gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept…But in his book or picture the real man delivers himself defenceless.” To use the life to understand the work, he might be saying, is to try to explain the larger self by the smaller; to use the work to shed light on the life is to begin to understand how a figure who looked buttoned-up and unfeeling at the dinner table could write books that hold readers with their openness and warmth.

For to turn from the biographies to the novels themselves is to move from a darkened chamber into the fresh air, and to be confronted by what you didn’t expect (the explosion of expectation is, of course, the books’ steady theme). The stories’ most sympathetic characters are nearly always renegades–seekers, drop-outs, innocents who throw everything away for love–and their villains are mostly those who think they know it all or uphold the status quo (society hostesses, in short, or clergymen). For all their feline air of undeludedness, the books feature characters of almost startling innocence and even goodness. Their life springs from a ravenous curiosity that seems ready to follow any trail as far as it will go.

The Maugham we meet on the page, in short, could not be further from the unsmiling, bespoke figure we see in all the pictures (handkerchief protruding from the double-breasted suit). The riddle he presents us with is how a stammering, conventional-seeming Edwardian, writing in civil service prose, could somehow become the spokesman of hippies, black magicians and stockbrokers throwing it all over for Tahiti. His books are measured explorations of extravagance.

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The Mystery of Transparency

How to say goodbye to the world with peace ? How accept everything around us, including the fact that “us” itself is something of an illusion, and certainly about to be no longer ? How take leave of things with light ? Those questions have been circling around the later songs of Leonard Cohen, as the man who has undertaken Zen practice for more than thirty years now, and even been ordained as a monk, moves towards his seventies and ever further from a sense of being the center of the world. Everything is passing, and he’s heading out the door, and yet the impulse, over and over, is to acclaim the world that remains, complete in itself, and a form of what others might call “Creation.” The only suitable gesture is a raised Zen hand of salute.

When Cohen brought out his last record, just before September 11, 2001, “Ten New Songs,” listeners were carried off to the Mount Baldy Zen Center where he has been studying with Joshu Sasaki-roshi for decades. There was a grave, contained intensity to all the songs, as if they issued from the meditation-hall itself; they flowed in one single dark current that seemed always to be coming from the same place, or no place at all. Their subject was farewell; but what one heard in the deep, chant-like mumblings was a man in the dark, alone, bearing witness to his position on a mountaintop where impermanence is the only truth.

The new record, titled, much more intimately, “Dear Heather,” and released on September 28, one week after the ageless singer turns seventy, gives us the other side of the coin, in a sense, not the solitary soul contemplating last things, but the beauty of all the things he’s leaving. Light is its theme and setting, not the dark; the singer skims from one musical form to another like a bee buzzing among the flowers. The first time I heard the record, appropriately enough, I was in a small cottage in central Los Angeles, looking out on a sunlit garden, flowers, a constant tinkle from a small, stone fountain; the record could have been a transcription of the scene.

An offering for a Sunday morning at home in the sun.

Those who have been listening to Leonard Cohen for many years will remember that his first record explicitly tending to the Zen experience, “Various Positions,” contained a song called “Night Comes On,” about that pull that every sometime hermit feels. The poet longed to court Our Lady of Solitude; he wanted to go out into the dark, into silence and emptiness, and find all the dissolutions that wait for us there. But the world–his children, his duties, the need to serve and report–kept pulling him back, refusing him the easy solace of contemplation. In the new record, which finds him fully back in the world, among the morning glories, it is as if the movement is reversed. Light comes in, and night recedes. The singer has left the monastery behind and now his saying goodbye to the world takes the form of celebrating its graces..

A large part of this involves taking leave of self. It’s as if one can see and feel, more and more, Cohen setting himself aside, packing himself up, as one might a suitcase that is no longer of use. Some listeners may remember how, on the last record, in “Alexandra Leaving,” he took an exquisite poem of Cavafy’s, about watching one’s home pass away, and wove it into his own reflections; on this one, the song that sounds most like vintage Cohen, with its talk of “bitter searching of the heart,” actually uses words written by a law professor of the singer’s from McGill many years ago. With most singers, one would call these “cover” versions; with Cohen, it is as if they are uncovered versions: the songs that unveil the hidden, unchanging truths not particular to him. The brochure for the C.D. is full of the names of loved ones and teachers who have passed on; the bright melodies that tinkle through are memorials of a sort to who they were.

One of the other curious features Cohen has always brought to the popular song is a readiness to put his own name into his lyrics, as if to make of “Leonard Cohen” a makeshift illusion. Like Nagasena telling King Menander that his name is “a mere sound,” a “practical description,” Cohen.ends songs, “Sincerely, L.Cohen” or entitles them “Field Commander Cohen.” In the new record, the very second song, right after Lord Byron’s “Go no more a roving,” finds naked women crying out “Look at me Leonard,” as he passes through old age. It’s as if he’s playing with the Cohen we imagine, taking leave of the man in our heads, as of everything else. “Leonard, Leonard, Leonard,” the name recurs in the song, and then, for the rest of the record, it departs.

And all the while, his voice, which began to recede in “Ten New Songs” (where Sharon Robinson, conspirator and co-producer, led on many tracks) fades further and further away from us, as Robinson and Anjani Thomas replace Cohen’s somber darkness with their more light-filled decorations. You can almost see him slipping out the door.

The first time I listened to “Dear Heather,” as modest and everyday on the surface as a recipe hung on a refrigerator door, I wondered what listeners would make of it. Many of us look to Cohen for deep poems of questing, for complex parables or harrowed stories of the search; these songs are so transparent they dissolve almost at the touch. Every time you expect him to go deeper into a song, he steps back, and gives us the same verse again; every time you imagine he will surprise us with an unexpected word, as he’s always done before, he surprises us instead by giving us just the words we expect. The title song lasts all of five lines; and very soon, it stops bearing meaning, and just becomes prayer or ritual incantation. “And your legs all white from the winter.” Repeated and repeated, till the legs, the white and the winter disappear altogether.

It’s almost as if the singer is deliberately stepping away from complication or momentousness, and giving us nothing but jottings, moments, portraits of things that point to nothing but themselves. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure–details are precise and reflected on Cohen albums–that in the C.D. brochure, there are sketches on almost every page, and on many pages the drawings swallow up the words.

The mystery of transparency, I’m tempted to say; the central conundrum of the world being just that it is there, outside us, indifferent to us, beautifully rounded in itself. When we describe things, famously, we muddy them with our thoughts or projections, our notions of them, our confusions and chatter. Just to give us the thing as it is may be the hardest task of all, which is one reason we admire a Cezanne still-life, or a William Carlos Williams poem about a small red wheelbarrow.

The words here are deliberately straight, for the most part. There’s no spin on them, no gloss. The man who has traditionally been one of our great voices of striving, of conflict and the search, now becomes something almost harder to accept, a voice of contentment. Again, it’s hard not to see a complete withdrawing of the self, as if to say, “This is what the world is, worthy of celebration. It has no need of me.”

There’s no explicit mention of Zen but, as on the previous record, one cannot help but think of Japan, and the grasp of the now, at every turn (“No words this time ? No words,” one song begins). The central Buddhist poets of Japan, Basho and Issa and Ikkyu, give us their worship or attention simply by giving us the world. The sight of a white plover in the autumn sky. The sound of a temple bell along the eastern hills at dusk. That morning-glory in the sun. Observation of the world for them becomes something very close to what might be observation of a religion, or at least a ritual, for us. The poems, like the moon they point to, become elusive precisely because they stand in full view before us, illuminated.

No need to look for depth or explanations or the wisdom of the mind, they say, no need to search and fret and cavil. It’s all right here, in front of our eyes.

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Frederick Prokosch

“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark alleys, black-lidded girls with roses in their hair bringing us ices.” A page later, the young narrator is being shown up to a room in Peshawar, along the Afghan border, noting the “great brownish stains on the wall,” getting bombarded by mosquitoes. Down in the coppersmiths’ area of the marketplace below, old men in green turbans sit near young men with “collyrium-painted eyes” and from every side comes the “chah, khach, kukha” of opium eaters. Everyone, the wanderer tells us, “looked hungry; not for food, but for something else.”

When Frederic Prokosch wrote those words, evoking in particular detail the look and smell of Peshawar–and, in later pages, of Rangoon and Saigon and Ladakh–he had been to not a one of them. He was, in fact, a 29 year-old Research Fellow at Yale who had just completed a doctoral thesis on (of all things) “The Chaucerian Apocrypha.” As a boy, the young painter and poet from Wisconsin had spent a year in Austria and Germany–returning to Texas in 1915 with better German than English; and his father, a professor of Germanic philology who would later become Sterling Professor at Yale and President of the Modern Languages Association, would keep the house filled with cosmopolitan flavors. Yet as he sat in his room on Elm Street in New Haven, poring through atlases and travel diaries, and writing only from imagination, suddenly (as he recalled, almost fifty years later, in his 1983 memoir, Voices), the young Prokosch was walking through the rain along the road past Ba’albek.

“Day by day,” he remembered, “this vision of a continent grew more vivid in my mind. It kept growing in the darkness, it seeped into my dreams. I’d wake up in the night with a sudden glimpse of a tropical city, a shabby old hotel, a picnic by the Brahmaputra, and I’d turn on the light and jot it down quickly.” The vision was so intense–so lived in, one might say, so possessed–that to go to any of the places Prokosch describes today is to find that he caught them better, sight unseen, than most of us could manage on the spot. The single most implausible word in his book was that startling disclaimer on the title page, “A Novel.”

As soon as The Asiatics was published, in 1935, it was, not surprisingly, a runaway success, ultimately translated into seventeen languages and turning its young author, as his friend and champion Gore Vidal recalled, into a figure of almost Byronic panache. Thomas Mann, a friend of Prokosch’s father, pronounced the book “astonishing” and Andre Gide called it “unique among novels and an authentic masterpiece.” Camus noted, perceptively, that it “invented what might be called the geographical novel.” Even those with no knowledge of the well-connected author were stirred (and one of the first congratulatory telegrams Prokosch received, from a publishing house in London, was signed by T.S. Eliot). Wise beyond his years, and clearly unabashed in his imaginings, the hitherto unpublished writer seemed set for life.

By that time, Prokosch was already at King’s College,Cambridge, pursuing a life of letters and semi-permanent exile. He wished “to avoid the vulgarization of money and publicity,” as he put it–and in that aim, he may have succeeded more than he would have liked. He quickly became a talismanic figure for wanderers and professional expatriates–Vidal remembers him as a cult figure in the U.S. Army in the Forties, and the great American chronicler of Japan, Donald Richie, has said that he was moved to travel, as a boy growing up in Lima, Ohio, by Prokosch’s evocation of the world. Yet to most Americans, his exquisite, almost perfumed world seemed remote. World War II put an end to the exotic romances of the Thirties (Pearl Buck’s Good Earth had come out in 1931, Lost Horizon in 1933), and even as Prokosch made it at last, in person, to Damascus and Isfahan and Agra, he fell increasingly out of public view.

He followed up his initial surge with a similar work of fiction, The Seven Who Fled, in 1937, about seven Europeans propelled out of Kashgar by local unrest, and then, in 1939, with The Night of the Poor, about a midwestern boy hitch-hiking around America. “Landscape is a state of the spirit,” he wrote in The Seven Who Fled, more or less voicing his personal creed, “it is a constant longing for what is to come, it is a reflection incomparably detailed and ingenious of what is everlasting in us, and everlastingly changing.” That book was translated into French by Marguerite Yourcenar, and Prokosch’s first book of poems, The Assassins, in 1936 was acclaimed by W.B. Yeats as “astonishing…the talent of a real visionary, and often magical.” Yet even as Prokosch was living out the adventures he had once only imagined–spending stints in Portugal and Stockholm, in Italy and Hong Kong (in later life he settled in Grasse, in southern France, where he collected butterflies and put out hand-made editions of poems he loved), he was known, when known at all, until his death in 1989 as the author of a best-seller many years before. The sense of discovery his book commemorated–the discovery by an author of his theme, his world, the discovery by the world of a new infectious voice–would never be repeated.

To pick up The Asiatics today is to encounter a work that seems to be about youth as much as about Asia; its theme, really, is the very sensations it describes, of possibility and movement and not knowing what will come next–a “sort of poetry and surprise,” as the narrator puts it–and its only larger purpose seems to be to exult in the excitement of going nowhere in particular. The rhythm of the book, you will quickly see, is not that of a train, with its destination marked on the front, but of a fast-moving river that picks up a passenger here, and drops off a wayfarer there, catching the light across the mountains, the sound from the huts along the shore. Scenes follow one upon the other as abruptly as chambers in a dream.

This freedom from agenda or from direction is a large part of the book’s contagious charm. Most books of travel are, at however unacknowleged a level, about seeking out the source of the Nile or the meaning of life; they pay lip service to a sense of purpose even when ignoring it. And novels, inevitably, aim to infuse every moment with a larger sense of meaning and resonance. Prokosch, however, seems more than happy to take every moment as it is–no more–and it is a striking feature of his narrator’s travels that, for all their near-constant danger and closeness to incarceration, there’s never a very great sense of tension. The protagonist, like most his age, revels in a freedom from the past; and like almost everyone he meets on the road, he goes out of his way to live free of a sense of future (when put on the spot, he says he’s going to Japan, though Japan is the only exotic eastern place he never visits or describes). We are in a perpetual present here, akin to the swaying of a hammock under the casuarina trees.

Part of the shrewd understanding of the writer, one senses, is that he was catching a world that was only just coming into being, in all its aspects, and one feature of that new world (post-Jamesian, you could call it) is that people from the New World were going off in search of the wisdom and antiquity of the Old, and finding, often, that the Old World was hungering for the freshness of the New (“The mere presence of youth makes my heart beat more quickly,” says a dying countess in Tehran, on meeting Prokosch’s narrator). The logic of the book is that most of the people the young traveler meets are eager, because he is young, to pass on their wisdom to him; and he, because he is young, is eager to take it in. The result is that reading the book feels a little like being young oneself again.

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What Would Graham Do?

We stumble toward another election that can look, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of grey and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies around the world telling us that non-violent humanity is the one weapon politics defers to.

As the world wavers, more than ever, between irreconcilables–”Human nature is not black and white,” a distinguished English novelist said, “but black and gray”–it becomes tempting to ask not what Jesus would do, in all his wisdom, but what a mortal, conflicted, and deeply human soul, like that distinguished novelist, would do, faced in the modern moment. Today marks the hundredth  anniversary of the birth of Graham Greene, who made of doubt his eternal creed  and tried always to find the human, ambiguous truth that lay beyond all slogans or ideologies. And Greene’s characteristic blend of realism and conscience–his determination to see the world in all its fallenness and detail, and yet never to give up on it entirely–seems closer to what many are hungering for these days than the bromides of politician or pundit.

Greene’s contention, always, was that a human complication must take precedence over all the noble solace of talk about God and country. Certainty is the luxury of the unthinking; it’s the things that don’t make sense we live with. Thus his novels end, often, with a winner half-wishing he’d lost the struggle, or a kindly man who swears he’s honest turning out to be a Judas. It is the very contrairiness of things that leads to possibility: there’s always the hope that even a whisky priest who’s done everything wrong in his life may suddenly, almost in spite of himself, do right.

Were he to watch Fahrenheit 9/11, therefore, Greene might note that Michael Moore, as a spokesman for the dispossessed, with a grasp on the human cost of war–the grieving mother left behind, the bewildered kids at sea in the desert–is offering us an essential, and forgotten truth; but he would also surely remark that, as an idelogue himself, Moore squanders all the trust he’s won with ad-hominem attacks and a distrust of every nuance. Were he to survey the situation in Iraq, Greene might cite the precedent of Quixote, who, declaring that his “occupation and profession” is “to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injustices,” blithely breaks a young man’s leg. All talk of left and right glosses over the fact that right and wrong are often inseparable.

One reason Greene’s novels have lasted into a second century is that he saw that to report on the present was, if you did it right, to document the future. If you look deeply enough at any society, you see not just its systems and circumstances, but a character that is enduring. Thus visitors to Haiti today are best advised to consult Greene’s Comedians, from 38 years ago. His portrait of Batista’s Cuba, all nonchalance, corruption and sudden brutality, is startlingly close to the Cuba of his friend Fidel Castro. I thought I saw his Vietnamese heroine Phuong as I was sitting in an Internet cafe last month in Saigon, and then the young woman at the terminal next to me clicked onto her e-mail and I read, “Dear Phuong…” and a long letter from a foreign admirer.

Greene’s hope, ultimately, was that our predicament could be our redemption: the very fact that we are confused or suffering or scared is what allows us to feel for someone else, even an apparent enemy, and so act better than we should. Our opponent, too, has children at home, and hopes for them. One can imagine him smiling in approval at the documentary movie Control Room, where Arab journalists chronicling American attacks say frankly that they dream of sending their children to America for school,. while the U.S. military spokesman whose job is to rebut them acknowledges, winningly, that they may have a point.

For some, Greene is too much a product of his old-school imperial background to be of value today, too far from post-modern confusions on the one hand, and too ready to defend the English traitor Kim Philby on the other. The cult of political correctiness has little time for his kind of trans-political incorrectness. But as we look at religions claiming political ground, and politicians speaking on behalf of religion, and as we see people everywhere wishing that both America and its enemies were not so sure of their God-given rightness, some of us find solace in the wisdom of the hero of watchful agnosticism. A hundred years after his birth, he’s still telling us that if God exists, and gives us anything, it’s a sense that we are all as wrong, and fallible, as the people we curse at..

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Saigon: City of Night

From the air, as one descends, Saigon looks to be a vast and scattered web of white and yellow lights, coming up from shacks and tiny houses, notably impoverished, not flashy, the graceful curve of the Saigon River breaking up the grid and reminding you of the paucity of clustered lights and high-rises. But as soon as you move into the crowded streets, passing the immigration officials whose long, glossy hair falls down from Army caps, moving past the Saigon By Night club attached to a glittery new hotel, joining the massed energy of the 3 million motorcycles that seem to be permanently gunning through the city of 9 million, you can feel a pent-up electricity like nothing else in Asia.

The little lanes are bustling long after 10 p.m., lit up with signs for Nokia and large screens projecting English Premier Division matches, and every hundred yards or so a sudden blaze of color marks a new cafe or Vegas-worthy beer garden. Down near the Saigon River large illuminated boats dream along the water, offering dinner, dancing and even massages for sybarites, while young women in cocktail dresses slink in and out of the N.Y-Saigon bar, hearty expats devour smoked salmon quesadillas at the Club Latin and lazy-eyed cyclo-drivers keep up a constant, whispered incitation of “Girl, bar, anything you want.”

Saigon is a place for savoring the night, more than any other place I know, and though it is now officially known as “Ho Chi Minh City,” the airline tags still identify it as “SGN”; it stands, after all, for the very anything-goes looseness and promiscuous internationalism that Ho Chi Minh abhorred. Hanoi to the north is a proud, musty city of poets and philosophers and official pronouncements under cool grey skies; Saigon is home to the wheel and the deal. Having not visited the tropical carnival for years, I’d decided to return to see how its Wild East atmosphere had changed as the West began to come flooding in. Besides, flying in from California, I knew that I’d be twelve hours out of sync, sure to be up all night. If there’s one place where it pays to wake up at 7 p.m. and go to bed sometime after dawn, it’s Saigon.

One’s first view of the city of shadows, especially around the tourist stops on Dong Khoi Street (Rue Catinat in the days of Graham Greene and the French, Tu Do Street during the “American War,” and now a patriotic thoroughfare whose name means “Simultaneous Uprising”), is of an almost generic slice of modern, mongrel Asia. Tiny dark girls in very short skirts pull large white businessmen into their darkened boites, while a Led Zeppelin cover rises up from the Underground bar and a legless man with a broad smile wheels himself up to you, hand extended. One night in Bangkok may be more profuse and varied than in Saigon, but Saigon stands, more even than does the Thai capital or Shanghai or Hong Kong, for the face of modern Asia: sleek Western surfaces driven by a uniquely Eastern sense of energy and determination. Hanoi is the good girl who lives with her parents, gets high marks in school and carries herself with a proud sense of rectitude; Saigon by comparison is the rebellious younger sister who runs away from home and decides to live off her wits and her charm, donning a skin-tight denim outfit in the dark.

Put more explicitly, Hanoi, for all its teeming shops and motorbikes, is home to official, public Vietnam, the site of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and other places for school-tour pilgrims, reminding the people of their common origins and aims; Saigon is a riot of privacies, individual energies cut loose with nothing to join them other than the state commandments they’re ignoring. The best way to feel the city, I remembered as I stepped out of my hotel, is on the back of a scooter, joining the democratic crush of vehicles that inscribe circles around the Notre Dame Cathedral, the park opposite where scores of couples amidst the trees sit or stand above their bikes like breathing replicas of Rodin’s “The Kiss,” the Municipal Theatre in front of which (this being National Day–September 2nd) and a chanteuse delivering sugary local melodies set to dance moves from the age of Cher. Whole families were riding along on single bikes, a dandy was drifting past in white suit and shoes, laborers were carrying huge panes of glass on their scooters and women were sporting masks to protect themselves from the fumy air. So intense is the flow that people strike up conversations with ao-daied strangers on the neighboring bike.

The rough edges of the city had been smoothed away a bit since my last visit, or buffed to an international sheen. On my first visit, in 1991, shopkeepers sold pieces of endangered species downtown and tourists flocked into Maxim’s for its retro-kitschy floor show. Now there was a new Prada outlet across from the new Burberry emporium, and on the mezzanine level of the five-star Sheraton Saigon I found an elegant Palazzo Club (which turned out to be a casino). Red flyers for “Saigon Yoga” decorated the walls, a “Rain Forest” disco offered “Security-Hospitality-Attractive-Peacefulness and International Friendship” and as I walked down the night streets, perhaps in deference to that last great goal, many a woman on her Honda Dream (or man remaking himself as woman) darted in front of me and stared frankly into my eyes, peddling a piece of Saigon’s distinctive cocktail-dress-and-oil-lamp chic.

Yet the zany resourcefulness I remembered from before seemed just as lively as it had been then. I passed a tiny, dark cafe that called itself, impenitently, the Hard Rock, undeterred by the fact that a real Hard Rock Cafe sat only a few blocks away, in a fancy hotel. One little restaurant had a sign up in front, “No Delicious No Pay.” The Bimbo patisserie was almost within sight of the T and A silk shop. Where Hanoi sells a kind of faded romance, Saigon is not shy about dealing in straight sex.

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The Global City

Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta’s stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two millon of the city’s residents lack access to latrines, and the air has ten times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, as 5 million or more living on the streets do every second, is equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day). An unusually large number of criminals are either shot in “encounters” or tortured to death in detention in Bombay; that is in part because 40% of the police themselves live in slums, with no time for niceties, and four years ago, only 4% of criminal offenses saw convictions. The courts of India had, at the turn of the century, a backlog of 25 million cases. At the present rate, it would take 350 years to clear it.

This all has resonance because Bombay, Mehta says, will be the largest city in the world eleven years from now; what happens there is just a more dramatic instance of what happens in Jakarta and Bangkok and La Paz. And the only people maintaining standards and facilities in this Jacobean society are, almost inevitably, members of the criminal underworld, who run things more efficiently than do their government counterparts. Even judges turn to mobsters for help. “Our motto,” a criminal overlord tells Mehta, “is insaaniyat, humanity.”

An underling agrees: “He is a very communal gangster, a well-wisher of the community.” When an ordinary, law-abiding citizen comes to Bombay from elsewhere, Mehta shows, he soon learns that just to buy a movie ticket or get the plumbing fixed involves short-cuts and contacts. Before long, he too survives only by breaking the law.

When some of us read of such an upside-down society, we sit back in the comfort of our apartments and think, “There but for the grace of God (or India’s millions of gods, or luck) go I! At least I live in safety, and have more than the one room that is all 73% of Bombay families can enjoy.” Yet the thrust of Mehta’s book, and studies like it, is that every city in the world is being reclaimed by the countryside, and with it by a more tribal, atavistic form of law and order. Bombay happens to be the place where millions of rural Indians flock; but if they do well enough in “the Golden Songbird,” they set their sights on London, New York, Los Angeles. The whole world is being colonized by the have-nots.

In our brochures and commercials, in the cosier corners of our imagination, we tell ourselves of a “global village” and relax in the image of a settled place, governed by tribal elders, steadied by ancient traditions, with a village green around which everyone can gather. A village, in the popular imagination, has a quaint and settled air; it moves on the human scale. There may be village idiots, killing superstitions and taboos, but the village observes the changeless rhythms of Nature and religion.

Yet what our newly linked world more precisely resembles is a global city, Bombay–or Los Angeles–writ large. Thousands of tribes assemble in a single space, but there is no common ground for them, and they have no common values. Nor is there any kind of organizing intelligence to make sense or order of the masses. The pace of the village is that of a bullock-cart, or a folk-song; the rhythm of the city is that of an MTV video, broken-up, super-accelerated, post-human. If it takes a village to raise a child, as Hillary Clinton has said, it takes a city to corrupt her.

And yet the city is where the hope is, and the links to a global economy (the village is only linked spiritually to a universal simplicity). Who would not want to be amidst the bright lights of a hub ? “There’s no money on the farm,” a young man from Danang province  told me last month, explaining why he was riding me around Saigon on the back of his motorbike to support the family he never saw. The girls in the local bars, like their counterparts in Manila or Shanghai, might have said the same thing: they would give up security, community and family if it led to a chance for cash.

I read Mehta’s book, by chance, a few weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro, where 700 favelas, or officially designated slums spread across the hillsides, and seem ready to mudslide down and swallow up the Sheraton hotel and the condo-blocks all around. According to one Brazilian friend, 400,000 people arrive at the city’s bus station every year, seeking a new life, only to find that all the jobs and houses–and lives–have been taken up by others like themselves.

They can survive only by joining the underworld, and a child is seen as irresponsible if he goes to school when he could be supporting his parents by running drugs. As the population of Bombay doubles every ten years, it will eclipse that of Italy by the year 2015, says Mehta. We may tell ourselves of the beauties of a “global village,” but in fact more and more of us are stranded in a planetary metropolis.

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