SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
Nothing prepared Murray Laurence for India when he first travelled through the country in the 1970s. His first impressions were of its ‘surpassing weirdness' but it soon cast a spell on him, and for the next forty years he kept returning to India over and over again. His early journeys in the crowded third-class compartments of slow trains or in rickety buses to obscure towns and villages in the great Indian hinterland often led to strange encounters and travel disasters. Honey-tongued tricksters assailed him, bizarre locals and foreigners tried to explain the country to him, pompous officials waylaid him with impenetrable assertions and mystifying rules, and a myriad other picaresque entanglements with outrageous characters ensured that every trip he made was memorable.