India, Oct. 11 -- In 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer's Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. After the initial shock and shame, Taseer felt, unexpectedly, relieved. "The burden of trying to fit into India, of... apologizing for my own Westernization, was... lifted from me. The West, in turn, was no longer some dirty secret that I could enjoy only at the detriment of the 'real' India. It was all I had. I was home," he writes in the introduction to his new book, a small collection of travel essays titled A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile. After returning from university in America, he had spent time in India "trying to make up for the cultural and linguistic gaps of a colonial childhood". He "learnt Hindi and Urdu well enough to translate" Manto's short stories, "devoted hours every day to learning Sanskrit," wrote two memoirs and three novels including the excellent The Way Things Were (2014). The insider-outsider perspective is a hallmark of his writing. All his work is focussed on untangling ideas of belonging, unbelonging, identity and class, societies at the cusp of transformation, and the inheritance of history. India has been the source of most of his writing material. It is also where he grew up in a "westernized enclave" in Delhi in the 1980s, raised by his mother, the journalist Tavleen Singh. It is never quite clear why the West was such a dirty secret that Taseer, "a westernized product of a westernized elite could only enjoy it "at the detriment of the 'real' India." But India is not really the point of this book, on his excursions between 2019 and 2024, although it comes up often. Taseer travelled widely from the Mediterranean to the Andes for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He explored, on each of his trips, cities as cultural palimpsests, searching for traces of past empires to make sense of the present. In Istanbul, he reflected on how much his life and Turkey had changed since he first visited in 2005. In Morocco, he looked for the ghosts of the past in the Draa valley. In Spain, he tried to understand how a place where Jews, Muslims and Christians had coexisted for a thousand years had changed. For the most ambitious essay, he embarked upon a journey following old pilgrim routes across histories and continents. Over the course of a year, he set out on three pilgrimages: from the indigenous Catholic festival of the Virgin of Copacabana in the Andes in Bolivia, to the steppes of Mongolia where Buddhism - banned when the country was a Soviet satellite state - has been experiencing a quiet reawakening, and finally to Iraq during Ashura, the Shia ritual of mourning. "Pilgrimage," he found, "gave us the illusion of a forward movement across space, even as it allowed an inner journey toward communion with our past." The essays are a compelling blend of reportage, history and memoir. Taseer's book is meticulously researched, the descriptions are vivid and the writing elegant. Except when it becomes convoluted. He gets carried away, for instance, while describing pollination in the lotus: "Watching Asoka leaning down, measuring the calyx of one flower against the length of his forearm, showing me how to pluck its fibrous rough-napped stalk (never pull; it's a swift back-and-forth motion, like breaking a chicken's neck), I was reminded that this gentle matinal scene had been the site of sexual revelry the night before. The lotus flower, a great seductress who lives but three days, uses her subtle aquatic scent - which grows heavier by the hour through a process known as volatilization - to draw insects into her boudoir. As night falls, the petals close, trapping the hexapods within. 'Encouraged by the warmth,' writes the British horticulturist Mark Griffiths in The Lotus Quest: In Search of the Sacred Flower (2009), 'the hostages feed and frolic on a litter of pollen shed by the golden anthers. The oubliette becomes the scene of an orgy.' In the morning, the petals reopen, releasing the pollen-covered insects into the chill air. The shock of being so suddenly exposed makes them unable to tell morning from evening. So all around me now, drowsy six-legged sexual prisoners, in what Griffiths calls 'a false dusk,' were in search of comfort in newly opened lotus pads, diff- erent from those in which they had spent the night, thereby acting as unsuspecting agents of dissemination." This kind of travel writing may have been acceptable, even expected, until the 2000s, but can make a contemporary reader cringe. Taseer himself occasionally comes across as, well, ungracious. Marrakesh, he writes wistfully, "once attracted the Tuareg, the West African tribe who had plied the caravan route through the Sahara since at least the fifth century BC." It was now, he adds, contemptuously, "awash with the tourist trash of Europe - the EasyJet set." Bukhara, he jokes, "...had been subjected to the only fate worse than Genghis Khan's, that fifth horseman of the apocalypse: tourism." All this while staying at a hotel in Istanbul where he "paid $45 extra per night for a view of the Bosporus, gazing out at the sunlit splendour of the most beautiful body of water in the world." It is the grandness of the self that will gnaw at Indian readers. The country comes up often and it feels sometimes like Taseer responds to the cruelty meted out to him with what seems like spite towards India itself. "If these essays feel like a return to self," he writes, "it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself... They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home."...