Authors: Pico Iyer
He’d never know, years later, what moved him at that moment to look at the translation in that strange way, almost as if the words themselves were less important than the patterns they made on the page; almost as if they were glyphs or markings only, not carriers of meaning. But as he ran his eye quickly down the beginnings of the lines, he remembered something she’d told him once about the games she liked to play in school.
M y hand
Y our hand
J oined
O ver
H is hand.
N o division in
O ur hearts.
He looked at her—closer than ever, perhaps, to a young man who had come from Tehran to Los Angeles, hope alight, and closer, even, perhaps, to a young woman who had come from Denmark to the New World, with some hopes of her own,t and then he turned again to the last poem in the book but one.
Asleep, and being comforted by a cool breeze,
Suddenly, I saw a grey dove
Soar above the trees and sob with longing;
In her anguish, I heard my own.
The boy was right, he thought, putting the pages back in his pocket. Poems are what we make of them.
A Note of Thanks
As one who’s never studied Islam or been close to Iran—and is of Hindu origin to boot—I was especially grateful, in pursuing this project, for whatever wisdom I could glean from others. To learn a little about Sufism and Rumi, I turned above all to the great Annemarie Schimmel and to Franklin Lewis; for a more general understanding of Islam and its place in the modern world, I was helped most by the writings of Akbar Ahmed, Malise Ruthven, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr; and for renderings of Sufi poetry, like many I was much inspired by Coleman Barks.
Among the many, many books on Iran that I consulted, I was most grateful for the fair-minded, open-eyed travel accounts of Christiane Bird, Robin Wright, V. S. Naipaul, Paul William Roberts, and the author of the heroic 1992 Lonely Planet guide to the country, David St. Vincent; for a more intimate sense of Iranian culture, I was especially helped by the novels of Shusha Guppy and Gina Nahai. One day in London, I picked up a new novel set in Isfahan, and found it to be written by an old schoolmate of mine, James Buchan; clearly, more than one student was dreaming of romantic Persia in our fifteenth-century Berkshire classroom. Most of all, I learned about the human side of Iran through the wise counsel of my new friend, Jasmin Saidi, my old friends Manou and Fariba Eskandari, Professor Abbas Amanat, and Sharon Rawlinson.
In bringing this book into print, I was buoyed beyond measure, as always, by the inspired wisdom and kindness of Lynn Nesbit— who, presented out of the blue with a manuscript about Sufism, was able to advise me on mysticism, tell me about her own trip to Rumi’s tomb in Konya, and introduce me to an Iranian friend with whom she’d gone shopping for manuscripts in Damascus; and helped, too, by the legendary readers at Knopf, especially Sonny Mehta, Marty Asher, Robin Desser, and in particular my editor, Dan Frank, who threw himself into this book as passionately as if it were his own. Terry Zaroff-Evans copyedited the manuscript seamlessly, and Ayako Harvie and Rahel Lerner tended to my every need with grace. Nicholas Latimer, Pam Henstell, and Dave Hyde, among others, took wonderful care of me on the rare occasions when I emerged from my seclusion.
On a more private level, Peter MacLeod dug up fascinating background material in Toronto, and Mark Salzman and Steve Carlson read an early draft with responsive sympathy. Poor Michael Hofmann, my unpaid reader-in-chief, brought to every sentence his elegant, wise sense of when to speak and when to stay silent.
In certain invisible but essential ways this book is the product of the weeks and months I have spent at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in California for more than a dozen years now, and I owe the brothers and fathers of that Benedictine order more than I can ever say. Inspiration at home came from my mother, Nandini Iyer, a lifelong student and teacher of mysticism, and from my friend Patrick O’Donnell, who emptied his shelves to assist me. And in my tiny apartment in the middle of a Japanese nowhere, I was deeply grateful for such inspiration as came from far away, whether publicly, in the work of James Nachtwey, Peter Brook, U2, and Leonard Cohen, among others, or privately, in the warm and supportive messages of Tony Cohan, Mark Muro, and Susanna Kaysen. It seems only right to me that a book about love should be written in the company of my talisman, Hiroko Takeuchi, and of her equally radiant and thoughtful children Sachi and Takashi.
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Coleman Barks:
Excerpts adapted from
The Essential
Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks. Copyright © by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Continuum Publishing Company:
Excerpts adapted from
My Soul Is a Woman
by Annemarie Schimmel. English translation copyright © 1997 by The Continuum Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the Continuum Publishing Company.
University of Wisconsin Press:
Excerpts adapted from
Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity
and Tradition
by Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Pico Iyer
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found following “A Note of Thanks.”
All the events and characters in this book are made up. The author—to pick examples at random—has never been to Iran, never attended a Sufi conference or seminar, never even met a Sufi. All lectures, articles, and newspaper clip-pings—and most poems—included in the text are peculiar to this book. It is, in short, a work of complete and utter fiction.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Iyer, Pico.
Abandon / Pico Iyer – 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. British—California—Fiction. 2. California—Fiction.
3. Actresses—Fiction. 4. Sufism—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3559.Y47 A64 2003
813’.54—dc21 2002070059
eISBN : 978-0-307-42459-4
www. vintagebooks. com
v1.0