In spite of 9/11, or may be because of it, the bestselling poet in America today is Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, all love and ecstasy-paperback therapy at the nearest bookstall. In the age of Saddamism-bombed out and dying-and other evils in the back alleys of civilisation, who doesn't want some take-away poetic bliss? Some wisdom from the antique verses of the East, whose soul technology has become the perfect antidote to the information-and intimidation-technology of the neurotic West? Ask Madonna, or Demi Moore, or buy Rumi on a CD for yourself, but please don't ask John Macmillan, the protagonist of Abandon, an Englishman in California doing research on the Sufis, especially Rumi, and for whom "the cry of the Sufi is, quite simply, the cry of abandoned love. The drive of the Sufi is to find the hidden self, the secret soul, that has the capacity to take us back. They do not care whether you call the destination God or Truth or Reality or Emptiness. For the Sufi, man is not fallen, just fallen asleep; we are not lost, just temporarily obscured. Like stars that can't be seen in mid-afternoon".

ABANDON: A ROMANCE By Pico Iyer Knope/Viking Price: Rs 450 Pages: 354

That is the lure of the mystic in the postmodern fog of California, and Pico Iyer, one of the most refined culture junkies on the move, is here trying to see the lost stars in the elusive texts of the Sufi. Iyer, when he is not in an airport lounge-"an anthology of generic spaces"-or in some distant Xanadu, spends his time between suburban Japan and California. He is the Global Soul, the nowhere man, the unaffiliated citizen for whom the state of home is defined by the 12th century Saxon monk, Hugo of St Victor: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." Iyer is the perfect seeker, and it is the movement of his meditation that gives his second novel a rare rustle-of wisdom, of submission, the beauty of being "abandoned", which means the lightness of transportation from the certainties of the Californian idyll.

In Macmillan, caught between knowledge and epiphany, he has created a kind of alternative citizen whose republic is always elsewhere-and to reach there is to inquire, to ask questions, to pass through secret doors. His Holy Grail, the source of his parallel journeys-one poetical, the other geographical-is the secret Sufi manuscript, one of the many treasures that reportedly escaped the Great Islamic Revolution of Iran. The quest takes him to faraway centres of culture riddles-Damascus, Jaipur, Isfahan-and every journey ends in a new enigma, propelling him towards new allusions.

PILGRIM'S PASSAGE: Iyer sings Rumi to the West

Iyer, the stylish essayist and traveller, is predictably enchanting whenever he is an outsider in a foreign milieu, in unaided communion with unknown spirits. It is much more than culture tourism; it is an unravelling of paradoxes, like this erotic poem by Khomeini, translated into English by an Iranian boy: "I'm made by the beauty spot above your lips, my love,/ I see your eye and fall sick./ Open the cellar door to me, every day, every night,/ I do not like the mosque or the seminary." In Abandon, they are accidental revelations, and what is never revealed, certainly not with that much clarity, is the manuscript.

It is not meant to be. It is to be lived. Macmillan has been living it with little awareness ever since he came across the mystery girl called Camilla. Their togetherness, or the intimate absence of it, is a personal explanation of his academic passion. She comes from nowhere, her past is grey and what she has in common with Macmillan is the quest. They are two seekers-she of love and he of wisdom- brought together by the ecstasy of the long dead poets. It is as if the script of their romance-all tension and suspense to begin with-is a symbolic elaboration of what Macmillan is seeking. Macmillan, a character in the familiar Californian tragedy-"Once you see a spark in someone, or think you've found a Golden Age, you can't settle to anything less. You become a wanderer for life"-has all along been chasing an idea that cannot be contained by scholarship. If submission is the original Sufi destination, he has to reach there with the least self-resistance. He has to give in fully to the mystery itself. It takes many places and many passages and one enigmatic lover for Macmillan to achieve that. Maybe the poems have been making use of him, throughout.

In Abandon, only the text is ancient, the context is intimately contemporary. It repudiates the stereotypes that generate the cultural frisson in the narrative of Jihad Vs McWorld. In the manuscripts born out of Iyer's cultural pilgrimage, you never feel abandoned. You get exalted by the passions and evasions of the seeker.