LUNCH WITH BS: William Dalrymple

The Past Master

Murali Menon gets impromptu history and geography lessons from William Dalrymple

The sun is just a rumour, the grey sky looks suicidal and little raindrops are invading Mumbai. I'm walking with William Dalrymple in search of a Chinese restaurant he'd been to years back with film maker Ismail Merchant and 20 of his friends.

Ideally, I would have loved to take Dalrymple, acclaimed travel writer and social historian, to Bade Miya or Khau Galli, into the depth of the city's labyrinthine streets. I fancied he would have been more at home there than in the Botox serenity of any of Mumbai's fancy restaurants. But time is at a premium, the public relations people are worried and then Dalrymple remembers the Chinese restaurant, which, he's sure, is just around the corner.

Hong Kong is one of those fairly anonymous places with obscure music, but the staff is unassuming and the surroundings are cheery and clean, if a bit cramped.

"What's Laura doing these days?" I ask Dalrymple. Laura was this seemingly invincible woman who along with William set out to retrace Marco Polo's famous journey across Central Asia to Xanadu in Mongolia. Both were Cambridge history undergraduates then, and In Xanadu, the account of their experiences in strife-torn West Asia and along 1,500 miles of the Silk Route, won Dalrymple