Here's the short story. My father was a village boy who studied by an oil lamp while his mother brought him warm milk at night, and became a doctor, the sixty-fourth and last student admitted to his medical college. He came to England with three pounds in his pocket, all the rules would let you take out of India then, and brought us with him when I was a baby.
And then, on a doctor's wage, with four children, he went and saw the world. Japan. Moscow. The pyramids. He never stopped wanting to look at things. You'll find him in the photographs further down.
I grew up one of the only brown boys at my school, and they did a fine job of making me a British kind of Indian. At fifteen I went back on my own, to deep, darkest Rajasthan, and stayed three years at university in Jaipur. That's where I got my Hindi back, and a good deal else besides. To this day I can be talking to you in one language and to a man selling corn in another, and I don't notice I've done it.
My father wrote me one letter in his whole life. It said: "I think you have become a Foreigner now." He meant I'd stopped being Indian. I have been arguing with him about it ever since, and he isn't here to argue back, which is very like him.
So now, whenever I go back, and I go back often, I film it. My phone in one hand, my mum not far behind. Delhi, the roadside food, the village, the mango trees, all of it. No crew, no script, just me telling you what I see. More later.
