North London Reading Group

My cousin, who lives in Australia, had just asked me to help her find a home for an album given to her years earlier by her father, my late uncle. When he’d been stationed with the army in North India in the mid-1940s, my uncle had managed to get a one of the few authorised passes to visit Ladakh.

On his return to England, he’d compiled the photos and notes that he’d made into an album, which he’d later given to his daughter. The green ink was fading and she was keen to see the album in a place where it would be preserved.

I reached for an atlas and found that Ladakh was a mountain plateau, north of the Himalayas and west of Tibet.

I found a home for the album in the Indian Room of the British Library. It was brought to England by friends of my cousin, and I collected it from their hotel, and in the two weeks before handing it over to the British Library, read it from cover to cover. As I did so, I fell in love with Ladakh and knew that I had to set a story there.

From that moment on, I began to research the province in depth.

From the very start, I knew that my heroine, Patricia, was born in the 1950s and was brought up in Belsize Park, a part of London I know well. I could see her clearly, a lonely child living with parents who’d been torn apart by grief over a tragedy that had befallen the family in the past.

All I knew of Kalden, though, was that he’d been born and brought up in a Ladakhi village in the Buddhist part of the province.

As I waited patiently to find Kalden’s story, I continued with the research that was teaching me more and more about life in Ladakh, until one day, I read a very interesting fact about the traditions occasioned by living in a virtually rain-free environment. It was a Eureka moment! I felt a huge leap of excitement as I knew that I had discovered my story. What I’d found out was …

Oh, dear, I seem to have gone on for long enough. I’d better say stop now. I look forward to seeing you at Bookstock on Saturday evening, May 18th.

Bookstock is on 18 May. Tickets are just £6 and you can order in advance here

Picture courtesy of Go Elsewhere on Flickr