The morning found me aching from scalp to soles, and I nearly asked the chuprassi who brought the tea tray to fetch me strong drink, or a nice dose of morphia. But then I noticed the thick white envelope tucked under the saucer, which proved to be a note written by the same elegant hand that produced the daily schedule:

His Highness will see you at nine o’clock for a tour of Khanpur zoo. Please meet him in the toy room.

Under those circumstances, intoxication did not seem a good idea, so I waved the servant away and tottered into the bath-room to switch on the geyser. At least with a gentle walking tour of the maharaja’s zoo, I might avoid too much sitting on my black-and-blue posterior.

The bath loosened me enough to dress and take a gentle turn through the gardens, where the combination of motion and crisp, fresh air had me moving almost normally as I turned for the dining room. Half a dozen of my fellow guests were there, distributed among three tables. I waved to Faith and Lyn but chose a seat near the novelist Trevor Wilson, whose presence in Khanpur interested me. I eased myself onto the chair, murmured a greeting, and opened his discarded copy of the previous day’s Pioneer. When he’d had a few minutes to become accustomed to my presence, I pushed the paper away as if weary of the world’s problems.

“Mr Wilson, pardon me, but you’ve been here for quite a while, I believe you said? It’s just that I was thinking of taking a walk into the city this afternoon, and wondered if there was anything you could suggest that I see there?”

“I’m not much of one for sight-seeing,” he answered, then proceeded to list for me a dozen sights that should not be missed, encompassing as he did so a fairly comprehensive history of Khanpur. I kept my gaze on him as he spoke, nodding and exclaiming occasionally to keep him going. We spoke of Moghul ruins and inheritance rights for a while as I slowly worked the conversation around to what I was really interested in.

“So, how long have you actually been here?”

“Eighteen months, more or less.”

“I imagine you’ll have enough material for half a dozen books, by the time you leave.”

He couldn’t hide a wince, although whether at the idea of leaving or of writing, I couldn’t be certain. “Oh, exotic adventure stories aren’t exactly my bailiwick.” The book of his that I had read comprised two hundred pages of hallucination, internal monologue, and sexual reminiscences on the part of a young man who lay in hospital after having been sent down from Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, and been knocked unconscious by a police baton during a violent march in Trafalgar Square.