The question of identity has been a complicated issue for me, long before I accidentally stumbled into writing fiction. I have always been wary of any rigid, stereotyped characteristics that may be attributed to the word identity in a way that may compromise my notions of individualism. Undoubtedly my attitude has much to do with cultural fragmentation, and, in that sense, I am a post-modernist.

There are times when I recall an interesting experience during the early 1980s, after I became an Australian citizen. It was the singular incident that set me thinking about the multiple dimensions of identity, especially when you freely transcend boundaries and leap across cultures. On a tram in Melbourne, an elderly lady, whose grandfather had a stint in India as a British administrator, asked me politely if I was an Indian.

'No,' I replied, 'although India is my ancestral home. My grandparents and my mother were born there, and I have relatives in Kolkata where I spent most of my school holidays.'

Was I a Pakistani?

'No,' I responded. 'I was born in Pakistan, but my Australian passport doesn't say so.'

'Ah, an Australian!' The enlightened exclamation sounded very definitive in its conclusion. 'So, you were born in Pakistan but you are an Australian citizen. A Pakistani-born Australian!'

Her triumph was short-lived.

I must confess that I wanted to add to the confusion I was creating. 'Not quite,' I said, watching her frown. 'I was born in Pakistan, but officially I can no longer claim that privilege.'

There was perplexed silence. By this time I was rather pleased with the web of mystery I had spun around my national identity. The riddle had rapidly reached a complexity worthy of the Sphinx. It was time for revelation.

'I was born in East Pakistan,' I explained. 'It is now Bangladesh.'

She smiled and nodded, but I sensed that the bewilderment was still there. I had, however, stated the truth. It really summed me up. I was born in Pakistan, with familial connections in India, had a rebirth in Bangladesh without ever believing in reincarnation, and now I was an Australian in possession of a certificate of citizenship and an associated document of sixty-four pages, valid for ten years, to prove who I was.

If one considers Hamlet's situation as a parallel, then his dilemma was relatively simple. He was merely crawling between earth and heaven an uncharted distance, I shall grant him that. But one may well ask, what should such fellows as I do with the claims of four different countries tugging at me for some declaration of who I am?

At any point in our lives, we can think of ourselves as relating to a number of identities - in terms of gender, age, family status, religion and ethnicity, to name only a few. The conceptual and emotional difficulties that a migrant experiences in coming to a singular understanding of the term identity is akin to standing in the middle of a chamber of mirrors that are in constant and slow rotation. One catches glimpses of transient reflections without ever settling on a fixed image. Those of us who have reluctantly experienced displacement, or willingly shifted our cultural base, find our own private ways of locating and perceiving ourselves beyond the obvious coordinates of a street, a suburb, a town or a passport. I am no exception in this quiet but persistent search, and my vehicle of travel is writing fiction.

But undeniably, as a social being, I am part of a larger scene, and I have to say that looking at the bigger picture makes me uneasy about contemporary attitudes regarding identity. The cultural fragmentation with which I must cope merely complicates the issue, but it also alerts me to the pitfalls of excessive and sometimes blind prejudicial loyalty that is evident in the polarisation between the West and the Islamic world.

The alarming acceleration in the evolution of technology and its impact on social and cultural changes have significantly influenced the ways in which communities are insisting on defining themselves. It would appear that there is a desperate need to find historical and contemporary markers to construct a framework within which people can feel secure about their perceived values and lifestyles. Across nations there appears to be a shift in the way people characterise identity. The identity of an individual is now sometimes subservient to a community's ideology of what a person should be if he or she is to have a meaningful place in mainstream society.

Discourse on gender, ethnic and class identity appears to have subsided for the moment and we are caught in a mesh of aggressive religiosity and nationalism that encourage a somewhat naïve and illusory view of identity. Guilt and alienation are frequently evoked to lash individual into acceptance of an advanced tribal mentality, and these are often achieved by clearly defined characteristics of unacceptable non-conformity. In all likelihood this is a communal reaction to fear, and fear is the most potent weapon of politicians.

I do not believe that it is possible for me to wear the tag of a cultural stereotype. An unqualified identification with a single, mainstream tradition would be a denial of the composite that I am. It would be futile and, indeed, undesirable to purge the cultural diversity that has shaped me. My splintered life is not entirely the result of migration. It is also a natural consequence of an upbringing that was strongly influenced by history. In the 1950s and '60s, the postcolonial subcontinent was still strongly affected by the cultural and institutional legacy we had inherited from the British. For my parents it was imperative for me to attend a school where English was the language of instruction. I was sent to Holy Cross and then to St Joseph's.

The fragmentation took place early in my life.

There were glimpses of the Gospel at school. We had to study an absurdly titled subject called Moral Science. The Old Testament was taboo. Some friends and I deduced that since anything forbidden had to do with girls and sex, the Old Testament had to be compulsory reading. So I read Genesis and Exodus and learned about creation and Moses, played cricket in the afternoon and returned home to face a Spartan mullah waiting to hear my reading of the Koran and teach me about the only faith he wanted me to know. In retrospect, the exposure to the historical richness of the three desert religions saved me from some of the prejudices of ignorance and set me on the path to cultural dualism. It was no longer possible to think of myself exclusively in terms of a single tradition.

At university I studied Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton. They did not negate the influences of The Ramayana, Mahabharata, the Moghul poets, Tagore, Iqbal, Nazrul Islam and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The two traditions met, not in cultural combat, but in a synthesis of ideas out of which I emerged considerably enriched in ideas and feelings but without any clearly defined sense of belonging to a mono-cultural society. I would not have it any other way. Even at the risk of sounding excessively egotistical, the awareness of my multiplicity makes me curious about myself. What I was, what I am and what I will be can only be determined by experiences and their storage in memory. I am not a great admirer of Tennyson's poetry, but I sometimes recall that wonderful line from 'Ulysses': 'I'm a part of all that I have met.'

My writing life has merely intensified a curiosity about identity. Writing fiction was purely accidental during a period of soul searching to know why I was so restless when I turned forty. There was a growing dissatisfaction with my teaching life and boredom with the predictability of my middle-class existence in a Victorian country town. I had reached a point of lethargic blandness where any desire for intellectual fulfilment was being blunted by an increasing indifference to the wider world. Underneath all of this was a kind of insurgency, a revolt from within that insisted I pay attention to myself. I made an effort to meet the real me by recording my reflections in fragmented bits of writing.

A novel emerged as a residue of this attempt at self-analysis, and with it came the realisation that I was destined to occupy a kind of no-man's-land, wedged between polarised cultures. My identity is simultaneously plural and mutable. There is no definitive measurement of who I am. My occupancy of a territory between the East and the West does not offer much stability. Here the earth shakes quite violently to discourage me from developing any sense of permanence or belonging.

However uncomfortable this position may be, it is by no means an arid ground for the mind to discover a multiplicity of voices and what they have to say. The voice of diaspora tells me how it is to feel like a stranger and yet be at home, to live both inside and outside of one's immediate situation, to be permanently on the move, to think of return journeys but to realise at the same time the impossibility of doing so, since the past is not only a different country but also another dimension of time. It tells me about long-distance travels and relocations, of losses, changes, conflicts, powerlessness and visions of what might have been had I never left Bangladesh. And with it comes infinite sadness that severely tests my emotional resolve.

But there is another voice that refuses to be silenced. It is different in tone and articulates perspectives of another landscape. It speaks about new frontiers, of ideas that extend my intellectual and emotional horizons and recharges the desire to explore unknown territories. It encourages me to celebrate the richness of cultural diversity. In a sense, writing has become a residence, a place I can call home.

So the question arises, in this house of writing which room do I occupy and can I be vaguely characterised by the way I live?

That was perhaps a possibility until very recently. I guess I shall move from room to room in my metaphorical residence. My last novel, Homecoming, was set in Australia and it was not about migrants but about a Caucasian Vietnam veteran, troubled by guilt and concerned about his lack of moral responsibility during the war, seeking atonement through art and a commitment to a relationship with a partly paralysed woman. Now, I am back in Bangladesh for my new novel due to be published early next year. Spiral Road explores the themes of dispersal, family secrets and terrorism in my native land in a family saga that is set in Dhaka and rural Bangladesh. And how did I respond to this cultural shift in the writing landscape? Well, I am still in the same house, merely changing rooms. That sense of familiarity has not deserted me. If there were imaginative barriers, then I did not have a problem with pulling them down and roaming freely between Australia and Bangladesh.

That is one of the supreme advantages of not being weighed down by a single identity.

Adib Khan is a Bangladeshi-born Australian writer.