Pic by Jagan Negi

It was Alice Albinia’s worst moment. She was alone with a tipsy guide on an arduous 10-day trek through the mountains from Mount Kailas to the source of the Indus. The guide had bought brandy with the money she had given him for a tent — and to top it all, a snowstorm was brewing. Looking back, she recalls her moments of despair: “This is it, I thought. This is the end of me.”

Happily for Albinia, she lived to tell the tale — and turn out two books in quick succession based on her experiences in India, Pakistan and distant Tibet. Soon after her dark moments of desperation, Albinia and her guide stumbled on a group of nomads with whom they spent the night and shared plenty of tsampa, the Tibetan staple dish that the writer learnt to love during her time in Tibet.

Albinia’s journeys took her to Bamiyan (top) in Afghanistan, where huge Buddha statues stood before the Taliban destroyed them, and Chitral in the Himalayas where she photographed the Kalash tribe (above)

Alice Albinia’s sub-continental saga had begun a few years earlier in 1999 when she was offered a Commonwealth scholarship that, in the end, never came through.

An Indian High Commission official in London gave her a two-year visa anyway and suggested that she should go to the Delhi office of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), which was administering the scholarship. Says Albinia: “I came to Delhi and went to the ICCR in an autorikshaw and they got really angry with me and said: ‘you’ve broken all our rules. You must go home now and don’t ever come back’.”

However, she stayed on in New Delhi, with a tiny flat in Nizamuddin, a job with a magazine that didn’t pay very much and an observant eye that soaked in everything she saw around her.

The result has been two books written almost side-by-side. The first, Empires of the Indus published in 2008, is an account of an Albinia’s journey up the Indus starting in Karachi and ending in the mountains of Tibet. The second, Leela’s Book, which has just been released by Random House India, is a novel set in contemporary New Delhi — mostly around Nizamuddin where she lived — that revolves around the legend of Ganesh being the scribe who wrote down the Mahabharata and a battle between him and Ved Vyasa, the author of the epic.

“I had the idea for both the books simultaneously when I was living in Nizamuddin. They are both joined at the hip,” says Albinia, who as the eldest of five children grew up in London and also in sleepy Somerset in south-west England.

Leela’s Book paints a vivid picture of Delhi, with its upper middle-class cast of academics, journalists and businessmen and even a right-wing Hindu ideologue. During the time she lived in Delhi, between 1999 and 2001, the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power and Hindu revivalism was in the air. The book’s Hindu ideologue, Shiva Prasad Sharma, starts out as a caricature but ends up as one of the villains of the tale. Says Albinia: “He started as a comic figure. Then I thought I can’t just have a comedy. That’s not what it was about.”

So, is she first and foremost, an intrepid travel writer happiest in the remote corners of the globe or a novelist who can spin a yarn from a slender thread? “I see myself as both a travel writer and a novelist. I wrote both books at the same time and it was very fruitful doing that,” says Albinia.

What’s amazing is that after barely two years in Delhi, she managed to build up a huge understanding of modern Indian lives and attitudes. During that time Albinia worked at places like the Centre for Science and Environment, Biblio a small literary publication and Outlook Traveller magazine. “I began to see things very much from an Indian point of view. Also I read omnivorously,” she says.

To bolster her everyday experiences, she began reading different versions of the Mahabharata, photocopying reams of material at the Sahitya Akademi and also buying the Chicago trans- lation of the epic. In Calcutta she bought P Lal’s transcreations of the Mahabharata and also attended one of his readings.

She followed up the experience of living in Delhi by returning to London and enrolling at SOAS (the School of African and Oriental Studies) for an MA in South Asian studies. A large part of the course focused on the history of the Indus valley and she also wrote a paper on the Mahabharata. “Yes, I was able to tailor the course to my interests,” she says laughing.

During her studies she made the first of many trips to Pakistan. Starting out in the smarter part of Karachi by the sea, she journeys to its distant inland suburbs where the city’s sweepers (who are all Hindus) live. She delves into history to recount how, as the garbage began to accumulate, many of the bitterly poor Hindu sweepers were deemed essential workers and stopped from leaving for India by Jinnah’s newly formed government.

But Karachi is the relatively easy part. She also walked for almost three weeks trying to retrace Alexander the Great’s conquering route through the region. “I may have no other qualifications but I’m a good walker who can walk for 30km a day,” she says cheerfully. Her nonchalant tone gives no indication of what one reviewer of Empires of the Indus remarked was “an alarming” disregard for danger — she got lost in blinding snowstorms and crossed a frothing river in a crate suspended on a wire hung between a cliff and a tree.

Her journey ended in Tibet — which she describes as a profoundly depressing country — at the source of the Indus and very near Mount Kailas where Ganesh is supposed to have transcribed the Mahabharata.

What will her next book be about? She says it will probably focus on Britain. Albinia reckons that she has, perhaps, had her fill of the sub- continent for the time being. She says: “I was in Tibet and the most shocking thought I had was I’ve got to go home and bake a cake. Which I hardly ever do anyway. So I thought maybe it’s time to go home now. I really feel I know some parts of Pakistan better than England. I know the Mahabharata better than Paradise Lost.”