I HAVE NEVER MET the Indian author, Vikram Seth, who wrote the long novel “A Suitable Boy”, but today, 30 July 2026, my wife and I met his sister, Aradhana, quite by chance while visiting the beautiful brickwork Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens.
In about 1968, my wife was awarded a scholarship to study for her A-Levels (university entrance examinations) in the UK. That year, she was not the only one to receive such an award, which allowed her to travel from India to study in England. Another awardee that year was Vikram Seth, now a renowned author.
In 1994, a few months before my first ever visit to India, my then fiancé, now my wife, suggested that I read Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” because it might have helped me to ‘acclimatise’ to Indian ways of life before I arrived in the country. The book, first published in 1993, is well over 1400 pages long. Dutifully, I began reading it, but then little of it made much sense to me, and I gave up reading the book by the time I reached page 300. Thereafter, I have not touched the book until this month, July 2026.
Since 1994, I have visited India at least 50 times, often for long sojourns, and have become familiar with many aspects of life in the country. A few days ago, I started reading “A Suitable Boy”, and I am finding it both enjoyable and incredibly engaging. Much of what Seth has written makes much more sense to me than it did in 1994. And despite it being published without a glossary, many of the Hindustani words (transliterations of Devanagari and Urdu scripts) now mean something to me.
Seth has managed to write an epic novel whose pages contain a brilliant portrait of life in certain social circles in India. Although I have only just passed page 230 (in four short episodes of reading), I feel that by the end of the following few weeks, I will have read the whole book.
Meeting Vikram Seth’s sister by chance was only one part of an amazing encounter today. My wife thought she looked vaguely familiar, and that is why we engaged her in conversation. It turned out that Aradhana and my wife had attended the same school, Loreto House, in Kolkata (Calcutta), and although they differ in age, their times at the school overlapped. In addition, Aradhana, was with her friend, Amrit, whose father, we discovered, had worked in the same company as my wife’s father.
Although India’s population is about one and a half billion, I am always amazed how often we ‘bump into’ Indians, with whom my wife can find some not too distant connection.
One of my aunts believed if something is cheap, it cannot be good. I have never shared her opinion, but as I will reveal below, occasionally what my late aunt believed, turns out to be correct.
IN DECEMBER 2024, we made a trip to Rajasthan (India). Of the places we visited (Ajmer, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur, and Bikaner), I enjoyed Bikaner the most because apart from being full of interesting nooks and crannies, it attracted less tourists than the other cities. When planning the trip, I made use of the booking.com website to find accommodation. At Bikaner, we booked an air-conditioned bedroom with an ‘en-suite’ bathroom-cum-toilet in a guest house (homestay) and breakfast included. I will not reveal its name in public. The homestay was extremely well reviewed by numerous previous guests from all over the world, and the price was remarkably reasonable: £28 (Sterling) for five nights. It was much cheaper than any of the other places we stayed in Rajasthan, which charged between £30 and £45 per night.
The accommodation was in the maze of tight thoroughfares in Bikaner’s old walled city. It was difficult to find using Google mapping. Eventually, we fought our way through the dense traffic on the narrow Teliwara Road, one the old city’s main streets, until we got within about 100 yards from the guest house. Our driver looked at the lane which led to our accommodation. It was more like an alleyway than a road. He refused to drive any further. We rang the landlord of the guesthouse, a young man named ‘S’. This cheerful fellow came rushing to meet us, and carried our baggage from the car to his tall, slender building.
S took us up two treacherous staircases with wobbly handrails, and showed us our tiny room. Most of its floor space was occupied by an ageing double bed with a blanket and a single sheet fitted around the mattress. The sheet was, we discovered later, torn in places, and either well-worn or not very clean. There was a small, attached bathroom – actually, a tiny toilet with a shower.
After ‘settling’ in our room, which was devoid of cupboards or anywhere to hang clothes, we were told that dinner was ready, and that we could eat it either in our room or on the roof terrace. As the outside temperature was well below 10 degrees Celsius and we did not want food on our bed, we persuaded S to let us eat on the ground floor, where we had to squat on what must have been one of his family’s beds. To be fair, although he charged us a lot (by local standards) for the dinner, his mother cooked delicious north Indian food.
Throughout most of the night, I heard a roaring sound coming from somewhere above our room, and in the morning, there was no hot water. We informed S, who casually remarked that he had forgotten to turn on the geyser (hot water heater). That morning, we noticed that one side of the bathroom, had no wall. Instead, there was a deep cavity that extended beneath the staircase. This was filled with litter, including discarded cosmetics containers, plastic shampoo bottles, wastepaper, and other dust covered, distasteful rubbish. We did not spot any rodents lurking there. The included breakfast, which we ate in another bedroom, windowless and even more spartan than ours, consisted of a greasy paper napkin containing an omelette wrapped in a piece of soggy toast.
We decided to leave S and his guest house, and find accommodation elsewhere. S, who seemed upset that we had not enjoyed staying in his family home, reluctantly directed us down his lane to a much more comfortable guest house, the Moon Haveli, where for £10 per night we had a large, clean, well-lit room with a satisfactory, spacious bathroom.
The lanes in the part of the town where we were staying were populated with plenty of street dogs, goats, and a few cows. Many goats spent a lot of time lurking around the Moon Haveli, and great care had to be taken not to let any of these creatures, which investigated everything they could reach, enter the building. Some of the goats were wearing grubby, ill-fitting discarded human clothes; others were without these garments. A lady, who lived in a house close to the Moon Haveli and used to stand in the street, feeding the goats every morning, told us that her goats with clothing spent the night outdoors. Her unclothed goats spent the cold nights within her house. She told us her goats’ names, which included: Munnu, Sonu, and Ronu. During the day, the goats climbed all over the place and licked everything (including motorbike handlebars and mirrors) just in case they proved to be something tasty and edible. The goats and the street dogs seemed to ignore each other and the occasional cows that wandered past. We ate our breakfasts at a series of street stalls where jalebis, bhajias, and other tasty delicasies were prepared while we waited. We befriended a tea maker, who was happy to be photographed while at work. As we wandered around the town, we spotted working camels and craftsmen making things in their shops. It was everyday things like this that endeared me to Bikaner.
To this day, I cannot understand why so many people (from all over the world) gave S’s establishment so many glowing recommendations. When we met S’s father, an artist, in the street a day or two later, it was obvious that he was annoyed that we had not liked his family home. But what annoyed me was that I had not been suspicious of the accommodation’s much lower than average price per night. I should have known better.
[This piece of writing is adapted from my book “88 Days in India: A Journey of Memory and Discovery”, which is available from Amazon.]
UNTIL EARLY IN THE 1990s, Albania, the small state on the western side of the Balkan peninsular, was at least as tightly sealed-off from the eyes of the outside world as is North Korea today. It was a maverick socialist state, which, under the leadership of its dictator Enver Hoxha, regarded first the USSR and then later the People’s Republic of China, as being too reactionary to be its allies. Few visited it, the only country in Europe where Stalin was publicly revered long after his death, and even fewer escaped from it. And, not many people shared my long fascination with the country.
Central Tirana in 1984
In 1984, when solo travel was forbidden in the country, I joined a group tour to Albania. 28 years later, I was chatting about my experiences on the trip with a dental patient who had migrated from his native land, Albania, to the UK. After telling him some of the strange things that had occurred during my fortnight in Stalinist Albania, he told me that what I had noticed was indeed the case during Hoxha’s dictatorship. He said to me that if he were to relate the conditions that prevailed, nobody would believe him. However, he said, that if I, an outsider, told what I had seen, I would more likely be believed. This conversation led to me writing and publishing an account of what I could recall of my brief sojourn in Albania. This book is called “Albania on my Mind”. It includes my 1984 travelogue as well as what made me become interested in that then almost impenetrable country from the age of about 15. When I published it in 2012, I thought that I had lost the many photographs I took in Hoxha’s Albania, and I illustrated the book with images from out-of-print literature. A few years later, I found the colour pictures I had taken on the trip. Maybe, one day I will bring out a new edition that incorporates my photographs rather than the other images.
During my 1984 trip, our group was watched carefully by our Albanian guides, the coach driver (a party member), and members of the Sigurimi – Albania’s highly effective secret police. And everything we were shown was carefully stage managed so that we were likely to regard Albania as a perfect Socialist paradise. One day, a group of us decided that we would like to hire a taxi in Tirana (the capital) to visit a local beauty spot, Mount Dajti. This is what I wrote about it in my book:–
After we had eaten lunch at the hotel, a group of us went into the square outside it. We saw a long line of taxis, which were waiting vacantly by a booking booth. We wondered how often these were hired and by whom; there was not a soul in sight taking the slightest interest in them. One of us walked up to the booth and asked the man sitting inside whether we could hire a taxi to take us up to Mount Dajti, some way outside Tirana. Just when it seemed that we had succeeded in hiring a cab, another person inside the booth lifted a telephone receiver, listened for a moment, and then whispered something to the man with whom we had just negotiated. He beckoned to us, and pointed at the hotel. Somehow, he made it clear to us that we needed to book the taxi not from him, but from the hotel reception desk.
We trooped back into the hotel’s lobby and made a beeline for the reception desk. Two suited men, sitting on a sofa nearby, looked at us over the tops of their newspapers. As we reached the desk, I noticed that the doors of one of the hotel’s two lifts were opening. Our (Albanian guide) Eduart hurried through them and towards the receptionist, who was beginning to attend to us.
“What do you need?” Eduart asked us, out of breath.
“We want to hire a taxi.”
“Why?”
“We want to visit Mount Dajti?”
“Why should you do that?”
“We need some fresh country air. We’ve been in the city for too long.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Eduart protested. “You have already spent many days in the countryside.”
“But, that’s what we want, and we believe that the views from Mount Dajti are magnificent.”
“You cannot go.”
“Why ever not?” we asked.
“There is a lot of traffic. The roads are crowded.” We looked at Eduart disbelievingly. Traffic congestion was certainly not a problem in Albania in 1984.
“You know that there’s a big national cycle race on at the moment.”
“That was over long ago,” one of us objected. “We saw the posters announcing it along the roads.”
“You can visit Mother Albania, but no further.”
We had already visited the Mother Albania monument, which was located in the outskirts of the town. However, as we were determined to not to give in to our obstreperous guide, we agreed to his compromise.
“Alright,” we said.
Then, Eduart said menacingly:
“You may take the taxi to Mother Albania, but remember that if anything happens to you, we cannot take any responsibility for your safety. You will not be protected by your group visa.”
“We’ll risk it,” one of us said.
I did not like the threatening sound of Eduart’s voice, but followed the rest of our small group back to the taxi rank. When we arrived there no more that ten minutes after we had left it, we found that all of the taxis had disappeared, and also there was an extremely long line of people waiting in a queue outside the booth.
It seems that while we were arguing with Eduart, a queue had been hastily assembled next to the taxi rank, and it was long enough to put us off the idea of hiring a vehicle.
If you enjoyed this extract and want to read more, “Albania on My Mind” is available from Amazon:
THE MAUGHAN Library in London’s Chancery Lane is now part of King’s College London. It occupies a mainly nineteenth century building that was (until 1997) the Public Records Office. In 2001, the college acquired the building from the Crown Estate and renovated its interior. The garden facing the main façade of the library is on land part of which was once owned by Clifford’s Inn – a former Inn of Chancery. The garden was designed by George Carter. It contains two sculptures, one portrays Confucius, and the other, a semi-abstract, is by Dorothy Brook.
Near these sculptures and attached to the wall of an out-house (a bicycle shed), there are some bas-reliefs depicting the continents. They have the titles: “America”, “Australasia”, “Europe”, “Africa”, “Canada” (not a continent), and “India” (which is not a continent, but a sub-continent). Made in plasterwork, they were removed from the north wall of Dunstan House, a publisher’s office building, in Fetter Lane, which was constructed in 1886, and demolished in 1976.
The rectangular plaques are nineteenth-century plasterworks. They have been attributed to the artist Walter Crane (1845-1915). In the 1870s, Crane:
“… became increasingly involved in the decorative arts, designing textiles, stained glass, tiles, wallpapers and plasterwork. In 1884 he was a founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild and, four years later, founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, of which he served as President for many years. In 1898, he was appointed Principal of the Royal College of Art.” (https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/walter-crane/).
I had not known about these bas-reliefs until 25 July 2026, when I visited an art installation curated by Artangel (https://www.artangel.org.uk/) within the library. This organisation chooses unusual venues for their artistic events, and a darkened room in the library filled with metal shelving was certainly a curious place for a show. Normally, entry to the library and its grounds is restricted to members of Kings College and other people who have been given special permission, but because of the Artangel event, I was able to enter, and discover yet another of London’s many delightful surprises.
DURING THE COVID19 pandemic, meeting indoors was neither allowed nor encouraged in the UK. Eventually, restaurants, cafés, and pubs began providing outdoor seating areas – something that was relatively rare before the pandemic.
The plants surround an outdoor seating area at the Mall Tavern
Long after the worst of the pandemic was over, people continued to drink and eat outdoors, even in bad weather. Many hospitality establishments offer facilities for customers to eat and drink ‘alfresco’.
For example, since the pandemic years, a local pub, The Mall Tavern, in Notting Hill Gate has been occupying a bit of the road and pavement outside it, and has been placing benches and tables there.
They are still in place and very popular with customers.
THERE ARE MANY stepwells in India. For those, who have never seen any of them, a stepwell is, putting it simply, an enclosure built around a deep well. Its walls have sets of staircases, often geometrically arranged with landings at regular intervals. The steps allow people to access the water, whose level varies according to the season. In rainy periods, the water level is high, but in other periods, it is far below ground level, and people use the steps to reach the it.
Whenever I see a stepwell, and I have seen many of them during travels in India, I think of the creations – optical illusions – of the Dutch graphic artist MC Escher (1898-1972). He produced images in two dimensions of subjects that cannot possibly exist in three dimensions. Several of his pictures include interconnecting staircases, which unlike those seen in stepwells, could not be constructed in three dimensional reality.
As far as I can establish, Escher never travelled to India. I always wonder if Escher’s staircase images were influenced by having seen drawings or photographs of stepwells in the Indian Subcontinent. It would be interesting to know if he did see pictures of these interesting water sources.
Here is another extract – a ‘taster’ – from my forthcoming book “ROAD TO HEAVEN – a passage through India”, which has reached the final editing stage. This sample relates to Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India
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Maheshwar is a 58-mile drive south of Indore, a journey that took us about 2 ½ hours. Much of the way was through hilly countryside. In places the road goes through rock faced cuttings. Every now and then we saw distant high peaks, that looked bluish in the heat haze. During our journey, we passed pedestrians carrying bags and bedding rolls on their backs. These people walking in the hot sunshine were pilgrims, about whom I will tell you more soon. Occasionally, we had to slow down when we met flocks of goats and herds of cattle being led along the road – a common sight on country roads, including motorways, in India.
When we arrived in Maheshwar, our driver had difficulty both navigating and negotiating the maze of narrow, winding lanes in the lower, newer districts of the small town. Eventually, we drove up the steep, straight road leading to the main gateway in the walls that surround Maheshwar Fort. Traffic is not generally allowed into the heart of the fort, but as our accommodation, at Laboo’z Café and Lodge, was in the traffic-restricted zone, a barrier was lifted to allow us through. Nestling within a corner of the fort’s walls, Laboo’z is an attractive café with outdoor tables and chairs. An old motorbike is attached high up on the tall stone wall facing the seating area. Below it, there is a sign that reads: “Labooz’s Scooter”. The cafe was established in 2002 by Richard Holkar, a scion of the Holkar family that once ruled the Kingdom of Indore. Richard is the son of Yeshwant Rao Holkar II (reigned 1926-1948), who commissioned, and had built, a Modernist style palace in Indore, which was designed by the German architect Eckhart Muthesius (1904-1989).The palace, Manik Bagh, still exists. Stripped of its Modernist furnishings and sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, it now houses governmental offices. When Richard and his half-sister were children, they used to be ferried around Maheshwar on the bike now adorning the cafe. The driver who took them on the motorbike was tall (‘lambu’ in Hindustani). Over the years, he became known affectionately by the nickname ‘Labboo’. The scooter on the wall commemorates him.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, the Tate Galleries (Britain and Modern), the Wallace Collection, Kenwood House, The Courtauld, the Royal Academy, the Barbican Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Dulwich Art Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum are all well-known places in London where art lovers can view fine pictures and other artworks. However, these are only the tip of the iceberg. London has a huge number of less well-known places where great art can be enjoyed.
By Paulo Nimer Pjota
First, there are the commercial art galleries, many of them, but not all, in Mayfair. Among those which I visit often are Thaddeus Ropac, Annely Juda Fine Art, Pace, David Zwirner, Waddington Custot, White Cube (both in Mayfair and Bermondsey), Beers London (near the Barbican), Lisson Gallery, Gagosian, Richard Greene, Grosvenor, Hause & Wirth, Victoria Miro, and Goodmans. There are others, but those listed are the ones I visit most. At these locations, modern and contemporary art can be viewed and, if you have plenty of spare cash, purchased.
Other interesting places to view art of all types and from all eras are the auction houses. Christies, Sotheby’s, Bonhams, and Phillips, all in Mayfair, hold exhibitions of art works that are going to be auctioned. Many of these pieces have been offered for sale by private collectors or their descendants, and have never been seen by the public. Seeing them prior to the auction is a precious experience because many of them will return to private collectors after the auction, and will once again be hidden from general view.
Another place that deserves visitors is the South London Gallery in Peckham Road, London SE5 8UH. Part of the former Camberwell School of Art, it has an annex nearby in a former fire station. Today, 24 July 2026, we visited an exhibition, “Encantados”, which was a collection of paintings by the Brazilian artist Paulo Nimer Pjota, who was born in 1988.
Pjota’s intricately executed, colourful paintings hang in the gallery’s large rectangular space. The wall space between, above, and below the paintings contain drawings, which were specially executed for the show by the artist. Thus, the whole room, paintings and walls, has been transformed into an artwork. The large paintings are populated with depictions of mythical creatures and fantastic plant forms. Although occasionally weird, the paintings are generally joyous, and uplifting to behold. The exhibition continues until 23 August 2026, and should not be missed.
By confining oneself to the best-known venues listed in the first paragraph, one will certainly see great art, but will miss hidden gems such as the pictures I saw today at the South London Gallery.
LONG QUEUES OF people were waiting to have their bags checked at the main entrance to London’s Tate Modern Museum. Most of them had booked tickets to see the poorly reviewed Frida Kahlo exhibition, which I have been told by a reliable source is very disappointing. This is a pity because elsewhere in the Tate Modern, there is an exhibition that is very well worth viewing.
The exhibition, which is in the Blavatnik Building, is of works by the Argentine artist Julio Le Parc, who was born in Palmira (Argentina) in 1928, and moved to France in 1958. He died in Paris in May 2026. Parc specialised in kinetic and ‘op art’, and the exhibition is filled with his dazzling works. As the Tate’s website explained, Parc believed that the viewer was part of an artwork. He felt that a piece was incomplete until the viewer engages with it, either by stepping into it or, simply, encountering it. And everything at the Tate’s exhibition is visually engaging and highly absorbing. The website (https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/julio-le-parc/julio-le-parc) added:
“From 1959, Le Parc used light as a sculptural medium. He used it systematically, exploring ways of creating reflection, refraction and vibration. In his ‘Continual Light Mobiles’, opaque, reflective or translucent forms sway in response to slight breezes, reflecting light from spotlights or natural light sources to create ever-changing reflections.”
These fascinating works need to be seen rather than be described in words. The website also noted:
“Le Parc wanted to make viewers feel active, with their acts of looking and experiencing bringing each artwork to life; to make more democratic art that everyone can easily enjoy.”
And seeing his works was enjoyable. Although ingeniously conceived, Parc’s works did not seem to have the profundity often associated with other artists’ creations. They had been created to give the viewer pleasure and to lighten his or her life. Instead of being a ‘deeply meaningful’ experience, Parc’s work is both full of fun and visually intriguing.
Without reading other people’s minds, I guess that seeing this exhibition would give most of those queueing for Frida a far better time than trudging around the crowded rooms in which Kahlo and her works are on show.
yamey 