This autumn, I set off to teach at a college in Massachusetts for a month. These days travelling anywhere, but particularly to the US, requires careful preparation, and I don't mean measuring the size of my carry-on luggage. I have dark skin and a beard and, although I was born a Hindu, many people mistake me for a Muslim. My Indian passport is festooned with visas to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan (when it was ruled by the Taliban). My wife says I lose my sense of humour in airports. If true, this is because I am concentrating too hard on controlling my nerves.
After spending too many hours in dingy rooms with immigration officers and police, I do not leave for the airport without at least trying to adjust my appearance so as not to alarm officials and fellow passengers. Western-style suits make me look like a third world arms dealer; I prefer a Nehru jacket. I recently acquired a suitcase of the finest Indian leather, and a pair of glasses with expensive frames.
I dread US Immigration's "secondary inspection room", where I have spent many idle hours in the company of other apparently suspicious-looking individuals, as we wait to be interrogated. I usually carry one of my own books and use the author photograph to prove I am who I say I am. My new book, which covers my travels in Pakistan and Afghanistan, doesn't quite fit the purpose, so I usually fall back on an older work, An End to Suffering, a book on Buddhism, which immigration officials seem to find more reassuring. Perhaps the author of a book on a religion devoted to non-violence seems less likely to blow up a plane in midair.
I am amused to recall that a bearded Indian friend was recently detained in Dallas for three hours before the interrogating officer realised that his middle name was "Krishna".
Just before leaving for the airport, I take a final look in the mirror: do I still look like a terrorist, or do I look so much like one that officials will think I am too obvious and send me on my way? My frequent flyer miles entitle me to check in at the business-class counters, which has fewer security checks. It seems the more air miles you have, the less dangerous you look.
As I stand at the counter, I furtively survey my fellow passengers: is the young woman with the Daily Mail half-stuffed into her Miu Miu handbag the kind of person who would refuse to travel with me on the grounds that I have a beard? After all my worrying I encounter no trouble; and at the first sight of the New England landscape - the leaves on the trees waiting to turn, wearing the last glow of summer - I feel an old affection for America revive.
Ordinary outrage
Wellesley College seems as becalmed as when Vladimir Nabokov taught here in the 1940s; the mood, as in the rest of the country, is deeply conservative. A professor, who was among the protesters against the Vietnam war at Columbia in 1968, tells me the anti-war movement is dead. "We have the Congress in DC meeting to legitimate torture and to consign habeas corpus to the dustbin and there is no sign of an uproar or even ordinary outrage among the students."
It is older people who seem to have the most anguished sense of how badly things are going. I head to New York and the public library near Bryant Park, where a crowd of liberals, most of them in their sixties and seventies, break into strident applause as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich reads from his new book, a denunciation of the Bush administration and its dupes in the media. Guests at a dinner hosted by Rea Hederman, publisher of the New York Review of Books, deplore the craven attitude of the Democrats, and the absence of a credible candidate for the 2008 presidential election.
Strange valediction
Back on campus, I stare bemusedly at online reports of another apparently terrific performance by Tony Blair at the Labour conference. The attempts at a stylish valediction for him seem wrong. Whatever his intentions, Blair has helped create the climate of fear and hatred that is poisoning relations between races today.
Pankaj Mishra's "Temptations of the West: how to be modern in India, Pakistan and beyond" is published by Picador (£16.99)
