The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  And now we were in this vast open space—736 Coyote Road—where the future was much more visible than the past, and I was waiting with a yellow Yogi Bear lunch box in my hand for a school bus to take me on an hour-long circuit every morning, around the sycamore canyons and eucalyptus-lined hills, to a school in the pastoral expanse of Hope Ranch. In Oxford my friends and I had all enrolled at the Dragon School, where, like generations of boys before us, we began Latin in the first grade, Greek in the second; here I was in a world I hardly recognized, except from sitcoms on TV, where the boys had crew cuts and braces on their teeth and girls rode their horses in the lazy afternoons through leafy streets called Via Tranquila or Via Esperanza. On Sadie Hawkins Day we were driven to the beach, where “California Girls” was playing on a radio, and as the teachers got to know me, they didn’t know which grade to place me in, I seemed so small in some ways and so well drilled in others. In Oxford we’d been told that the word for love was amo.

  I’d always taken for granted that I was English; I sounded and lived just like the Campbells and Kirkwoods down the road. At SS Philip and James’ Church of England Aided Primary School, I’d taken on the part of Joseph in the Christmas pageant and every summer I’d eagerly headed off to the medieval fair in St. Giles’, in the shadow of the memorial to the three sixteenth-century Protestants who had been burned in the street for heresy against “the Church of Rome.” It was a very bounded, safe world, Oxford in 1963, where someone might say that she’d just run into Mrs. Greene, the novelist’s wife, who lived across from the Ashmolean, and the family friend who’d take over the Dickensian job of being my “guardian” had been to the same college as the novelist.

  Sometimes, I’d walk proudly along the street with my father to his office on Canterbury Road, three minutes from our home. He’d let me sort out all the magazines that had assembled over the past few months—the New Statesman, Encounter, The Listener—and I’d organize them according to date and title and make great piles along the floor. It seemed like one of those puzzles that appeared at the back of my comic books; it was only much later—perhaps too late—that I saw how much the names on the covers of those magazines (George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene) might mean to a young man from the suburbs of Bombay who’d always dreamed of living among the ancient cloisters and tolling bells he’d read about with such constancy from afar.

  In the pictures, when I look at them now, I see a full-lipped man, with bright, compelling eyes, dandling on his lap a baby with huge head and careless smile. His delight in his son is obvious as he looks back at the lens with a natural, unintimidated sense of command. My father told me rich, many-chambered stories before I went to bed each night—Sita and Ravana from The Ramayana mixed with all that he’d got from Tennyson and Shakespeare—and he taught me to read the newspaper almost as soon as I began to talk. By the time I was five, I was filling my green exercise books with long stories about witches, wizards and dragons, though making sure (I was my father’s son) that the goodies always voted Labour, and the baddies were given away by their support of the Conservatives.

  As I grew older, though, and began to read the essays he’d written as a very young man—startlingly confident and fluent pieces on utilitarianism and the end of the British Empire, on Rousseau and Condorcet—I realized that I had no sense at all of where my father came from. He was a mystery I could never solve. He’d grown up in the unglamorous outskirts of Bombay, son of a worker at the Ford Motor Company and a girl who had borne him when she was fifteen. None of his six siblings seemed to share his interests or temperament, and when first I saw the single room they’d slept in—I was visiting my parents’ homeland at seventeen—I could not imagine how anyone could study in so cramped a space.

  My grandmother sat on a long sofa in the small flat, doors thrown open so that everyone could come in and enjoy her gregarious protection, and chattered away in a fluent Tamil that my father, her firstborn, could barely speak (English was the realm he inhabited). She’d never had enough time for taking classes—bearing children through her teens—and my own mother had grown up in a separate universe, amidst the cosmopolitan comforts of South Bombay, with parents who knew all about Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London from having studied there.

  But my father had become a teacher at the celebrated University of Bombay by the time he was eighteen (my mother, a year younger, one of his first students), and by then he was already famous around town for the essays he wrote on The Tempest and his ability to stand before any audience and talk without notes, hypnotic, on almost any topic from Tolstoy to Plotinus. He won India’s only Rhodes Scholarship in 1950, and at Oxford he became president of the Oxford Union, arguing for Shaw’s claim that “progress depends on the unreasonable man,” while surrounded by busts of the many other Union presidents who had gone on to become presidents in some larger sphere. In his final exams he did so well, he won a research fellowship to deepen his studies into Gandhi and the philosophical roots of nonviolence.

  Later, when I was growing up, he would tell me how he’d been taken, as a boy himself, to see Ramana Maharshi, the famous mystic—also an Iyer, as it happened, part of our priestly clan—who’d lived in a cave for seventeen years, practicing “self-enquiry” and communicating mostly through silence (I’d meet him later in the guru based on him in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and the essay, fascinated though open-ended, Maugham wrote about their encounter, “The Saint”). But such unworldly influences my father had balanced and made more rigorous by reading Hobbes and Hume and Locke, as well as the English poets. It was as if his life was to be consecrated to the joining of the spiritual and the political domains; and by linking them together, he could perhaps join East and West as well, separated, for the time being, as he’d written in his first book, by a “glass curtain.”

  I suppose a main character in a Graham Greene novel might have pretended to mock my father for having more belief than a traditional Englishman admits to; he was an idealist and a vegetarian, like the reformist Smiths whom Greene’s alter ego Brown keeps laughing at in The Comedians. He’d been taught, as my mother and so many in their generation and before had been, that the natural culmination of any good Indian student in British India was Britain, but when he got there, he’d found that the place he’d been taught to admire was trapped in a long tradition of skepticism and “on the other hand”s, the stuff out of which Greene had formed his negative creed. The ambition that had brought him there was exactly what wasn’t always welcome, and someone who could rattle off passages from Milton and the King James Bible—and then link them to a text in Tibetan Buddhism—could seem too emphatic and eager to make a point (or an impression).

  So here we were now on the farthest edge of the New World, where my father had been invited to join a think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, at which philosophers from around the globe would gather to discuss, quite literally, how to make a new kind of city on a hill, and put together a fresh version of the Encyclopædia Britannica. We were driven, on a visit, between a stately pair of gates and through what seemed a tropical Eden to a Mediterranean villa, commanding fifty-six acres of eucalyptus trees above the ocean, the sky so blue it hurt my eyes, and told that we had arrived in “the Athens of the West.” It wasn’t impossible to believe.

  One year after we arrived in Santa Barbara, we bought a new house on a hill, alone on a ridge halfway up what were called “the mountains” and looking out over the white-walled, red-tiled town below to Santa Cruz Island in the distance. It had been a hippie house—kids had dropped acid here and then driven their VWs off the slope, into the cushioning beds of ice plant—and even when we bought it, it sat outside the city limits, far from anyone’s jurisdiction. Our water came up to us from a well, reached by a jolting, forty-five-minute drive into the valley tucked below, along another unpaved road, and in the evenings the wind often howled around us at eighty miles an hour, rattling our windows and almost blowing us over
as we struggled in from the car.

  One night the winds ripped the whole terrace off the side of the house overlooking the city and propelled it across the roof till it lay, grotesquely twisted, on the mountainside. My mother, waking up, and about to step out to feed the cat, almost walked into thin air.

  The house had been built by a fundamentalist who had taken very seriously the biblical injunction to build his house “upon a rock”; he had found a large boulder up amidst the brush, and without benefit of foundations—or architectural experience—laid down a two-story structure. Its rising roof gave it the look of a ship that was about to sail off across the billowing clouds that so often separated us from the town; it seemed as if we had left all moorings behind, to enter some realm of unfettered speculation.

  I felt, at some level that I could not articulate then, as if we had stepped out of a cozy drawing-room comedy, written by Greene in a holiday mood, and into some Old Testament text about the end—or the beginning—of the world. But for my father, I later realized, he could not have arrived in a better place at a better time. His deepest commitment had always been to possibility, the mystic’s belief that there’s a better life hidden within the one we see; the maxim he most loved to cite to students was from Greene’s favorite, Unamuno, about how, to achieve the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. He had even named his only child after the Buddha and the fifteenth-century Italian Neo-Platonist who had written an “Oration on the Dignity of Man.”

  And now he was in a state that seemed given over to unlimited potential, discussing The Symposium with some of the world’s most interesting thinkers in the mornings and at night walking in candlelit rallies for peace with Joan Baez and other young champions of hope. He was invited to teach at the local university, along with my philosopher mother, and soon they were both finding that students in California in the ’60s, unlike the students they’d taught at Oxford, weren’t embarrassed about professing an interest in their studies, didn’t believe they had all the answers, were sometimes almost touchingly open to transformation. Three hundred, four hundred kids started crowding into the lecture halls where my father was talking on Bakunin and Thomas Paine (and, perhaps, the Perry Mason show he’d watched on TV the previous night), binding them all together into a soaring synthesis; he began holding his office hours in an all-night coffee shop, so that students could bring him their questions, their hopes or their plans for as long as they wished. Sometimes, he would still be talking, on Coleridge and Pythagoras, as the sun began to show above the far-off ridge at 6:00 a.m.

  It was those from the Old World who had the keenest sense, I thought, of how much could be done in this hopeful and accommodating society and how, in fact, the very principles of classical philosophy could be given new wings and life in this place so unconcerned with history. Christopher Isherwood, Greene’s distant cousin, came to our local Hindu temple to talk about how he’d decided to devote his literary energies to the Indian swami he’d met here; he’d seen through the decadence of Europe, the worn-out skepticisms of England, and this life seemed more exciting to him. Felix Greene, the first cousin with whom Graham had grown up in England, helped to found a mystical community in the desert east of Los Angeles where Aldous Huxley, Greene’s contemporary and longtime fascination, could deepen his research into the perennial philosophy. Somerset Maugham, Greene’s most obvious precedent, had told Isherwood, down the road, that his great wish as he approached seventy was to go to India to study Shankara.

  When my parents took me down to the campus in the warm, subtropical evenings, I could hear wild guitar riffs and Oedipal screams—the Doors—floating out of the basketball gym and across to where the Pacific lapped against the shore just in front of the university lagoon; a little later, the students would burn down our local Bank of America and more or less announce that they were fashioning a new world from scratch, whether in preparation for the future or just celebration of the powers of eternal youth, nobody much troubled to say.

  But for a little boy it was all a bit unsettling, and perhaps more so in the presence of a father with vivid and esoteric views, and no siblings to cushion the effect. I didn’t know what to make of the two pictures of Western occultists my father kept on his bookshelves, next to Gandhi, and I couldn’t follow his frequent references to demons and magicians, a mysterious psychic sphere that filled the invisible spaces around us. And the California I knew seemed so far from time and even reality that it felt more a vision of a place—a cluster of visions, only sometimes overlapping—than anywhere one could learn one’s ABCs.

  Yet strong fathers are also often the ones with the strongest readiness to give their children a solid education, if only so as to fortify the family against the world (or maybe it’s just a way of having a second chance?). And as I sat in our lonely house on the ridge, playing with my favorite toys (numbers), I noticed that the dollar was so strong against the pound—America had clearly taken over as the dominant power—that I could fly back to Oxford, resume my studies at the Dragon (which, conveniently, took in boarders as well as day students) and fly home to see my parents three times a year for less than it cost to carry my lunchbox with the crustless cucumber sandwiches to Hope Ranch every morning, and the school named after a white lake.

  I didn’t stop to think about how hard it might be for parents to give up their only child to rival authorities across the world; I didn’t bother to reflect that the smaller party can abandon the larger, as much as the other way round. I raised the idea with my parents and they assented, because they had seen how much I might forget if I stayed in this fresh and unformed society. They had been at least as concerned as I when I described, aged nine, what my twelve-year-old California classmates were planning to do next summer on the beach with Diane.

  A curious decision, perhaps, for a boy of nine, but empty spaces can be difficult for a little boy alone and maybe I sensed that my parents, raised on Britain in India, were at times as perplexed as I by this unanchored new world we’d entered, and undefended against the different forms innocence and worldliness took over here. A world that knew itself seemed safer than one in a perpetual state of becoming—at least until I hit fifteen—and even algebra teachers flinging hard blackboard erasers at us and pulling us by the hair could seem more knowable than the vast open spaces of this world without boundaries.

  So we got into our small blue Plymouth Valiant and drove down the intercontinental freeway to Los Angeles International Airport. A woman in a stylish uniform took me over from there and put my passport and other papers into a plastic bag. Then I was waving and waving at my mother and father, and turning around to follow the woman into the front of a plane. My parents were left to drive the hundred miles home by themselves, while I headed back to the strange, cloistered world of Victorian England.

  At the other end, a wispy-haired man in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows was waiting to lead me into an estate car (the previous day I’d have called it a “station wagon”), along with other boys coming from Buenos Aires, Nairobi, all the imperial postings, and to deposit us in our new red-brick houses around Bardwell Road. The room where I would soon sleep was called Pterodactyl, named, like all the rooms in School House, after a creature long extinct, and in those early days all I could think of was California. I buried myself under my blankets after “Lights Out” and under threat of getting thwacked on the backside with a tennis shoe, fiddled with my tiny transistor radio to try to catch a college football game on the Armed Forces Radio Service, broadcasting from Germany. My only piece of home was an NFL handbook that soon I had read so often I could recite Raymond Berry’s touchdown statistics as fluently as if it were Kipling’s “If—”

  Yet children are often much readier to adapt than their parents are, and before long I was putting on my blue corduroy shorts, my grey Aertex shirt and my blue corduroy jacket—all with “S. P. R. Iyer” in green Cash’s name tapes sewed into them by my mother—and was happily flinging conjugations of the Greek irregular verb
at my classmates instead of curses. The Dragon was the rare school that allowed boys to bring teddy bears with them to their beds. But, wise to the dangers of life in the trenches, I took along only a stunt bear, so that the creature I really cared for could remain safe at home, out of view.

  School House was, of course, the name of the building where Graham Greene lived, too, both as a student at Berkhamsted and, in holidays, as son of the headmaster; the name itself might have stood for the universe of his fiction, where even in their forties, Old Boys are putting on the ties of schools not quite their own, reminiscing about faraway teachers, even urging other alumni, met at the club in West Africa, to send reports or love poems back to the old school magazine. In Greene’s day, the names of students newly fallen in war were recited every day in chapel (the two hundredth to be killed, by a horrible irony, was called “Dear,” the five hundredth “Good”). In our day, the war was long behind us—Empire had been seriously wounded in the First War and then killed off in the Second—but tall memorials stood above our playing fields, with the names of the dead all around them, and everywhere we turned were plaques and poppies.

  On Sunday afternoons hundreds of seats were laid out in School Hall, so we could watch Zulu and The Bridge on the River Kwai and learn about what loyalty to king and country meant, and how to suffer silently; on Saturday afternoons, a teacher read to us from Esprit de Corps and Stiff Upper Lip, Lawrence Durrell’s stories of life in the Foreign Office, to prepare us for our own detachment abroad. We had to run through a long line of freezing cold showers every morning at dawn, though, by some topsy-turvy logic, the number of warm baths we could take was limited to two a week and had to be overseen by young female Matrons.