Writers We Love: Pico Iyer

In this way, Iyer's essays proceed as a kind of conversation with himself. He travels, experiences, analyzes and concludes; each (temporary) conclusion furthers the dialogue and deepens his understanding of the place.

He again invokes Bali's inviolability: "Innocence, I thought, could be its own protection." But then, four paragraphs later, he writes: "So I had decided in 1984. But when I returned to Bali just eighteen months later, my faith was shaken, and my seesawing convictions about whether paradise could survive took what seemed to be their final turn, downward."

Kuta, he says, had become almost unrecognizable for all its flashy cafes and sleek boutiques. Even Ubud had become more crowded and commercial, with hostels sprouting like mushrooms.

But then -- and again the essay twists, the exploration deepens -- "The fates were kind to me: a shadow crossed my path, and I fell ill. I was struck down, indeed, by a mysterious ailment that laid me low with a sledgehammer force I had never known before."

Iyer is bed-bound for three days and nights.

Cast out from the sunlit paradise that seemed so compliant, I was borne back, so it seemed, into the night world of Bali, island of shadow plays and cockfights, sacred daggers and full moon rites ...

I had strange dreams each night. And gradually, through my fever, I began to catch the steady, keening undertone of this island of spirits (the aural equivalent, perhaps, to the undertow that carries several surfers to their death each year). I heard the jangled syncopation of the clangorous gamelan, weird, unearthly, psychic, resolving itself into no pattern that a Western ear could follow, but hammering away, with a dissonant and insistent tinkle, all through the narrow lanes of Kuta in the dark.

He plunges further, and wider.

As I lay alone in the dark, I began to think about the secrecy of this whole mysterious land, a secrecy so deep that it seemed like sorcery. Indonesia is the fifth largest country in the world, exceeded in population only by the three superpowers and India, home to more people than South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Nepal combined. But how often was it heard from? And what did we know of it? ... Indonesia was far and away the largest Islamic nation in the world, with twice as many Muslims as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia combined. Yet even in Muslim Java there seemed to be few mosques, the mythology was Hindu and its most famous monument (Borobudur) was Buddhist.

After these wide-sweeping thoughts, he returns to Bali, to end with a final emblematic scene:

And in a village courtyard, a huge moon hanging in the branches of the tree beyond, I watched as an old man patiently lit candles in the silence. A gang of bare-chested men burst out, in a trance, chak-a-chakking rhythmically, waving their arms about, sitting down in concentric circles and raising their hands to the heavens and shaking their heads wildly in the dust and all the time chuck-a-chucking furiously. As the chant mounted, the village mongrels let out a low growl, and backed away slowly. Limber, light-footed spirits in monkeys' masks jumped out from the darkness and leaped this way and that. Then two little girls, perhaps eight years old, slithered out of the darkness in a trance, dressed all in white, bodies swaying, eyes shut tight, twitching their tiny wrists together in a witchery of motion, fluttering their hands like snakes. And as the fairies rocked back and forth in a spellbound dance of exorcism, the gamelan continued its relentless ungodly wailing, the voices of its caged dark spirits clanging and jangling through the night.

This final iconic image resolves Iyer's own journey of exploration, his quest to come to terms with Bali's elusive essence.

"I was delighted," he concludes. "Caliban was back, and the spirits were active, and both had survived even their shipwrecked visitors from abroad."

The old magic embraces -- and outlives -- all.

So Iyer creates a complex, multilayered portrait of Bali. This portrait is rooted in his highly individual experience of the island -- his journeys and perceptions, his encounters, his illness -- but transcends that experience to evoke more general truths.

Iyer's art in this enterprise epitomizes the best travel writing, for it is really the record of two journeys -- one outer and one inner. The outer journey -- the encounters and incidents of the trip -- is the vehicle, but the inner journey -- the understanding of the place and of the author's experience in that place -- is the trail the essays trace.

This trail leads to mysteries that can never be fully understood, and revelations that will always seem mysterious. One of its lasting lessons, for me, is that polar opposites are an illusion -- silence and cacophony, good and evil, purity and corruption, tourist and local, all partake of each other. There is a heart of silence in the loudest cacophony, and a kernel of purity in the most corrupt heart. Nothing is as it seems; everything disguises -- and reveals -- some deeper and more complicated truth.

The breeze has taken on a warm edge now; the wind chimes tinkle, the orange and purple blossoms dance and the pages in my ink-splotched journal turn. I close Iyer's book and turn my eyes to the horizon. The waitress brings more hot water for my tea. Spicy scents waft from the kitchen. More travelers amble cheerily onto the terrace.

Now the sun is out, and the clouds are beginning to disperse. And in the distance the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge emerge, gleaming like an Asian pagoda, high above the mists.

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