back from ladakh

The expected reviews in The Pioneer and the Biblio this month haven't appeared, yet. Hopefully next month (or next issue, in case of the latter publication). In the meantime here's a review of Patrick French's Naipaul biography i did for a Pakistani paper, The News on Sunday (scroll down the link to read the whole review). I've been described as "an Indian novelist", something that made me feel, well, international!

The first royalty cheque from my publishers arrived a few days ago. I hadn't kept track of the many "debit-to-royalty" copies i'd procured from them, so after that was deducted my modest royalties shrunk further. Anyway, all one can do is keep on writing.

I got back to Delhi a fortnight ago from a 10 day trip to Himachal and Ladakh. The stark beauty of that frontier region is something otherworldly. We did the "cannonball run" from Manali to Leh squeezed into a Scorpio taxi for 20 hours. We crossed the (supposed) highest motorable pass in the world by motorcycle and reached the village of Hunder in the Nubra valley, where you can see two humped Bactrian camels, a remnant of the old caravan routes that passed through the area. There wasn't enough time in the end for Pangong Tso and Lamayuru and Tso Moriri: they'll have to wait for another time. There was thick cloud cover as we flew into Delhi airport; the plane that had seen better days rattled and shook, and then we landed in a heavy drizzle. It seemed the monsoon had just arrived (though there seems to be no sign of that now!).