Looking around, it seemed that every car on the road bore the scars of the chaos.

‘Only five minutes,’ was the other phrase he’d been repeating since picking me up from Kathmandu airport one hour ago. It seemed an unlikely promise as a stray cow loomed up in the evening smog, bringing all traffic to an abrupt halt as it plodded, surreal and languid, past a neon-lit stall of cell phones.

During my retreat, I’d had plenty of time to contemplate how everything that appears to our senses is more illusion-like than real. Nevertheless, it still seemed especially illusion-like to be on my way to visit a person whose name I had only ever heard mentioned in connection with the biggest ever art heist in Bhutan.

Back in the mid-2000s the proprietor of Dalberg Antiquities had been a frequent and prominent visitor to Bhutan, friendly with the Royal Family, Government ministers, and lamas at numerous monasteries. It had been through his relationship with the King of Bhutan, that the right doors had been opened for a Boston-based photographer he described as ‘a long-standing associate,’ who’d spent several painstaking months photographing and cataloguing the artistic treasures of the country’s many temples.

Shortly afterwards, a spate of steal-to-order thefts in those very same temples had rocked the small kingdom, which found itself stripped of over a dozen of its most valuable statues and wall hangings. The surgical precision with which the rarest treasures had been selected and the inside knowledge of temple security arrangements, immediately focused attention on Dalberg. He had denied the charges vehemently, but suspicion poisoned his relations from the Royal Family down. When his photographer associate died in mysterious circumstances weeks later, suspicions only deepened. Then reports surfaced that one of the stolen items had turned up, briefly, in an exhibition in Geneva. Despite his protestations of innocence, Dalberg had found himself banned from Bhutan for life.

Behind the wheel of the battered, blue Fiat, Dipesh finally turned off the congested main road of Thamel, into a narrow side-street, rutted with missing flagstones and lit only by a single, stark strip light in a kiosk selling everything from cigarettes to hair dryers. Sitting more noticeably upright in his seat, he brought the car to a halt in front of an anonymous, high wall in which was set a wrought iron security gate.

‘We are arriving.’

A short while later he was keying a code into a security panel to the right of the gleaming black curls of the gate. An electric buzz was followed by a click, and we stepped inside.

Behind the walls of Dalberg’s residence lay a tree-lined courtyard of dense, boxed hedges surrounding a formal sandstone square. At its center, an exquisitely sculpted, four-foot-high statue of Prajnaparamita, the female Buddha of Transcendent Wisdom, poised white and ethereal above a floodlit fountain. A short distance away, the front door of the house was ajar and from inside beckoned the chords of a piece of music I instantly recognized.