In Bhutan, Pico Iyer on stillness and Leonard Cohen

It's four in the morning. I am finding it hard to sleep on my first night in Bhutan. I expected it to be colder. Outside, the dogs are barking. They don't relent till the break of dawn.

Two days later, I'm at the Royal University of Bhutan, Thimpu, for the Mountain Echoes Literature Festival. It's still fairly early. Young Bhutanese men in their traditional knee-length robe, gho, with their hair slicked with gel, and women in their beautiful ankle-length dresses, kira, are ambling into the auditorium, chattering excitedly. I spot Pico Iyer sitting comfortably in the first row. He's waiting for his session, The Art of Stillness, to begin.

"It's going to rain," someone sitting next to me whispers. I feel a cool breeze emanate from the door next to the stage. I decide to walk up to Pico Iyer and introduce myself, unsure if he would remember me. The acclaimed writer of travel books, novels, and essays looks calm, meditative and absorbed. He's wearing a navy blue coat and a light blue shirt. I remind Pico Iyer that I had met him four years ago, at the literature festival in Jaipur. I confess I had followed him around and later filed a story about following him around.

That year, too, he had refused to give interviews to journalists. He doesn't remember me. But he meets me like an old friend. It's prophetic to hear Pico Iyer talk about stillness, all the more in Bhutan. How he decided to move from New York, where he was working as a journalist with Time magazine when he was 29, to a tiny flat in Kyoto, Japan, where he lives without a mobile phone, television, and car or bicycle.

Despite the bustle, Kyoto is a contemplative town, he says at the session, where a day can be stretched to a 1,000 hours. "I learnt Japanese are much better at 'being' than speaking. There's no great virtue in racing around for them - that your life, like a painting in a museum, can truly be appreciated once you step back and take it in. You need to step back to come into being."

It reminds me of this line from an article he wrote in 2009, "Joy of Less" for The New York Times: "At some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did."

Pico Iyer's last book, The Art of Stillness, came out in 2014 (part of the TED books series). It opens with him driving up to meet and stay with Leonard Cohen, who is lodged in a monastery in the mountains outside of Los Angeles. Here, the celebrated singer-songwriter is known by the Buddhist monks as Jikan, referred to as the silence between two thoughts.

"I wondered why a man who has tasted all the pleasures of life was doing in a monastery," he says. "One would have thought to be a monk, to have a monastery sort of living, meant stepping away from the world. Cohen tells me it's actually a way to step within - to be a better person, to see life with eyes open."

This idea of going nowhere struck Pico Iyer some years ago when his house burned down. It took almost everything he owned, including three future books.

"I, with nothing, stayed on a friend's floor for a month, and then moved to a monastery in England," he says. "The silence near the ocean pulsated with such power, I realised, how silence clarified everything. It made me see everything, ever more clearly, that I usually tend to ignore as it's drowned out by noise."

Pico Iyer, when I bump into him next, is more curious about my work in online journalism, which I had mentioned to him in passing. In fact, I notice that from remembering faces, brief conversations with the audiences during his sessions, to knowing that a journalist has been desperately trying to get her books signed (and then writing a lovely note), nothing really escapes him. His mind is sharp; his voice is soft.

On my last evening in Thimpu, as I am ambling towards the hotel, dusk is falling on the city where clouds take shape of billowing dragons. I decide to enter a warmly-lit bookstore that's tucked on a bend of a lane. I notice the owner of the bookstore, an attractive young woman, is reading a book at the counter, while an elderly woman is sitting still on a low stool, full of poise and at peace. The bookstore owner looks up and smiles. We talk. I ask her if this really is Pico Iyer's favourite bookstore in Bhutan.

"He's been here thrice already."

(This post first appeared in the October issue of Harper's Bazaar India.)