What was I to make of this man who told us that airports were now our homes? I had recently left my home. I knew where it was, and I missed it badly.

The yellow crumbling house, in which my parents lived, with its familiar dankness preserved perhaps from the time in which it was built for the British colonial officials, was fourteen thousand miles away. It was near a loud railway line. Only a few miles away flowed the slow-moving river, Ganges.

During the monsoon months, the river could keep pace with a steam train, but now in my imagination, the river flowed gently in the slow distance. In my memory, far away from this world of freeways and faxes, the world I had left behind remained fixed in golden nostalgia. I would turn in my bed and, facing the barren wall, see clearly that far world as tranquil and still.

In his writing, this writer whom I had never met, Pico Iyer, unremittingly challenged my world and its certitudes. Even as I wrapped myself in the question of what it meant to be Indian -- I hadn't given much thought to this issue while I lived in India -- here was someone who told me that the question was increasingly obsolete in a post-national world in which "as borders crumble and cultures mingle, more and more of us are becoming hyphenated."

Last year, while teaching a course entitled "Bombay-London-New York" to Yale undergraduates, I used Iyer's writings on the new generation of "transit loungers." Many of my students were the carriers of the kind of cosmopolitan histories that Iyer chronicles. They did not share my deep nostalgia, or my urgent need to battle those in the diaspora who turn that emotion, out of guilt or longing, into the dogma of fundamentalism. But each of my students was moved by -- and perhaps identified with -- Iyer's lament that the perpetual travelers, whom he calls "the privileged homeless," feel "neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder." These are those lost souls who "go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed."

Earlier this year, Iyer's latest book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, was published. I read that he was now living most of the year in rural Japan. The man who had traveled everywhere had now made his home in a place where he was utterly alien and hence, perhaps, wholly at home.

Then, last week, while waiting for the elevator in my office building in a small town in northern Florida, I read a notice that Iyer was coming to our town to talk about his new book. I made arrangements to have lunch with him just before his public appearance. At the restaurant, Iyer immediately started quizzing me about the travels that had overtaken my origins. When we ordered our food, the waitress asked us, "Where are you guys from?" Both Iyer and I started laughing. He smiled at the waitress and said, "Well, that's the question of the day."

"Where are you from?" It is a question that is increasingly difficult to answer. But, I think there is also another question that Iyer is asking in his new book. And that is: "Where are you going?"

This is nowhere clearer than when he writes of a friend who had flown so many miles that he had won "the ultimate frequent flier award -- thirty days of unlimited flying around the globe." This friend, Iyer writes, told him of a dream "he'd had under jet lag which was not a 'Where am I?' dream, which you'd expect, but a 'Who am I?' dream. I couldn't remember who I was."

Iyer too, as he admits in his new book, has been asking this question. He wants to know whether he is only "a thing" made up of "jet lag, shell shock, paradigm shift." When I saw him, he had just spent two weeks in a Benedictine monastery in California. The world we live in, he told me during lunch, "quickens the hunger for stillness, and silence." As a result, Iyer now spends seven months in a year in Nara, Japan, where he is "rooted and sedentary." He doesn't even own a bicycle.

Just a few days before I met Iyer, the newspapers had carried reports of the protests in Washington D.C. Crowds on the streets of the nation's capital were marching against the globalization carried out under the aegis of the World Bank and the IMF. Iyer's is a different kind of protest against the fragmentation of identity under globalization. His is a more private attempt to narrate the dream-life of the global village.

In such attempts, I see the resilience of our pasts. Perhaps one might better explain this as the need to find a stable link between our days or, at least, the selves that we manufacture anew for ourselves, almost on a daily basis.

Sometimes, almost without our noticing it, the past speaks stubbornly through us. At the end of our lunch, for instance, the waitress stopped by to ask Iyer and me if we needed anything else. Both of us requested a cup of tea. Iyer laughed and said. "We just answered the question." We had revealed, in a sense, where we were coming from: a colonial past with a taste for tea. Later in the afternoon, when I went to hear Iyer read from his book, I ran into someone whom I had known in high school. We had both come to a boarding school in New Delhi from the same backward province in eastern India. We had not seen each other in 20 years, but here we were, greeting ourselves as professors at a university in the United States. What was the destiny that we had followed?

The first two years of my stay in this country turned into the five needed for a doctoral degree; then, the excitement of a job offer and the interest in the work I was doing meant that more years passed. I have had a driver's license now for eight years. I do not eat the same food everyday any more, though I still remain an unskilled cook. More important, the word "home" invokes no longer the image or memory of a single place. Without knowing it, I have become one of those global souls who populate Iyer's writing. Our prophets are the likes of Salman Rushdie, whom Iyer calls "an archetypal 'None of the Above.'" Iyer speaks highly of the fusions that Rushdie embodies; he notes that Rushdie "speaks for many of the 'translated men' in the new International Empire (as he calls them) because he soars beyond all traditions and religions and lives in the spaces between cultures."

This also raises a question. How come some of the most seasoned translated men and women are writers of Indian origin in the West? Iyer's answer, when I asked him about it, was quick and unequivocal: "This moment cries out for what Indians have to give. Indian writers have one foot in five different cultures. Multiculturalism is their birthright."

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