About

As a child I loved opening a heavy three volume encyclopaedia my father's family had brought from the foothills of the Himalayas to Southern England. On each tissue-thin page the world would open its secrets to me, at times with words, and at others with illustrations and stories. I had no means to verify whether what I read was true, so I decided to take on board what I found as one way of understanding the world. The stories my father told of his childhood and youth was another way, as was his struggle to live in a place that treated his difference in appearance and voice with scorn.

As I grew older I realised that the truth I read as a child in the encyclopedia often changed. The boundaries of countries moved frequently, as much as the boundaries of language and of those truths that seemed to be written with such assured conviction. I came to also understand that the stories I often heard as a child contained more consistency and truth than those 'facts' I had read...