Dear Reader,

When I return home to Mumbai, my second favourite thing is being reunited with my books. I wander through the different rooms, and through the morning my desk piles up with a mixed collection - there’s Money, Myths and Mantras which has arrived in my absence, there’s Eliot’s book of Bookish Lists that I bought a few months ago and is just pure fun to dip into and From Volga to Ganga, which is now on my reading list along with books on rivers from all around the world.

My favourite thing is meeting my book club friends. These readers, people I first met because of our shared love of the written word, these strangers have now turned into my best friends. On Sunday, they troop in for breakfast carrying podi idlis, kachoris and dhokla—and as the day unwinds, our drinks shift from tea to coffee to orange juice, then wine. We argue about whether we should read Empire of AI (please, not another tech book!) or re-read The Day of the Jackal to commemorate Fredrick Forsyth who recently passed away .

On Tuesday I meet others. We first connected online and continued to hang out once every month on Zoom.........

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