I’m irritable, impatient, out of love with India. Walking immerses me so deep that at times I feel I am drowning in it all, in the India described so well by Naipaul, “the broken roads and footpaths, the brown gasoline-and-kerosene haze adding an extra sting to the fierce sunlight, mixing with the street dust and coating the skin with grit and grime; the day-long cicada-like screech, rising and falling, of the horns of the world’s shabbiest buses and motorcars.”