One of the unanticipated benefits of British rule in India is the body of distinguished writing in the English language coming from the Indian diaspora — Naipaul, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Mishra and Pico Iyer. Iyer, however, is atypical in that he was born in Oxford, lived in California, and was educated at Eton and Oxford. Thus he is less an Indian than a global author.He is coy about having been to Eton, which he does not name: it is the ‘high school near London’, ‘somewhere between the grey towns of Slough and Windsor’, which was founded by a king, has the oldest classroom in the world, and has provided Britain with 19 prime ministers. He also makes clear that, contrary, perhaps, to his parents’ expectations, he has not reached the pinnacles of the establishment on either side of the Atlantic but is now, in his mid-fifties, ‘a scruffy mongrel living in Japan’ with his Japanese wife in ‘a rented two-room cell in an anonymous Japanese suburb’, earning his living as a novelist, journalist and travel writer — always off to some far-flung corner of the world: ‘so long as I was loose in the world, uncompanioned, I was never bored or at a loss’.
