Somewhat unexpectedly – as none of the other authors has done it – Dalrymple reads to us. In a delightfully expressive voice, he treats us to an extract from In Xanadu, written when he was just 23, describing a comic outing to the cinema in Kashgar, and a charmingly moving account from the City of Djinns in which two old muhajirs, reminiscing on old Delhi before Partition, 'swam together through great oceans of nostalgia before finally coming ashore on a strand of melancholy'.
For Dalrymple, of course, India 'changed just about everything'. Until the age of 18, life revolved around the family home in the east of Scotland, family holidays in the west of Scotland ('even greyer, drearier and drizzlier' than home), and school in Yorkshire. 'I didn't have a particular interest in India, and probably even had a mild aversion to it,' confesses Dalrymple, although that would all change when, by a series of happy accidents, he ended up visiting a friend there and found the impact 'explosive'.
Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, is his first travel book for more than a decade. Likened to a Canterbury Tales of the sub-continent, it records his encounters with various adherents of India's 'dying religions', amongst whom are a Jain nun whose every meal must carefully be sifted to ensure no ant or other living creature has fallen into her food, rendering it impure; a devadasi or temple prostitute dying of AIDS; and a gathering of tantric musicians at the Makra Sakranti (who 'make the Kumbh Mela look like a Rotary lunch'). A timely chronicle of traditions and practices pushed to the fringe by the country's rapid modernisation, and a general move towards the 'hyper-masculine gods' of the Hindu pantheon.
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