This time last year, it seemed that life couldn’t get much better for me: I had a new book out to appreciative reviews, had just returned from a literary festival in Mumbai and was en route to a few more, in Galle, Jaipur and Lahore.
The Galle festival is small and cosy — a little paradise of sun and sea and authors and books — and I loved my first event, with the lively Sri Lankan writer Ashok Ferrey. Afterwards, signing books, I had a bad headache but I took a paracetamol and tried to ignore it. That night, there was a big dinner organised by Geoffrey Dobbs, the man who started the festival (and who owns several of Sri Lanka’s nicest hotels). Everyone was chatting around the long table and I said something to Christina Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times. But as the sentence left my lips I was aware that it was a meaningless string of words and made absolutely no sense.
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