taught the joys of fucking when he was sixteen at a boarding house in Cornwall - but he was a good man and a romantic, and there was something about Susan that always brought him back to her. She was utterly innocent of the world, fresh.

‘Until then - write to me occasionally?’ he said. ‘You’ll be very busy I know...’ he said.

‘I’ll try, I really will. And thank you for the stone. I’ll keep it close.’

On the other side of the garden, her Father tapped a glass and called for silence to make a short toast. ‘Well we wish you Susan best of travellers’ luck. Bring back some Indian sunshine with you on your passage to India; some plain tales from the hills; and do let us know how the leopard really got his spots!’

She had said goodbye to her friends, finished packing and put the mystical stone in her case and she forgot all about it.

The journey out should have been a metaphor but wasn’t. Susan wasn’t expecting a rite of passage. This wasn’t a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a holiday either; it was an old-fashioned Grand Tour of the Orient, as if India was a great museum and an extension of eighteenth century England.

And so, the journey passed in water-coloured perfection, although several hundred years too late. After days of flying and hopping, Susan landed at the quaint sounding Dum Dum airport, on the edge of Calcutta - but barely smelt the great city itself, for she transferred to the only small plane that left for Assam that week, carrying post and provisions for the planters and farmers out there. She felt special and excited. This was an adventure way beyond what she had hoped. Having flown across the green and blue foothills of the Himalayas, the plane landed on a tiny strip in Assam, a tea garden on the borders of Kaziranga. Her father’s old school friend Trevor, was sweet, old-fashioned, quiet and slightly eccentric - but thorough with the servants, she had never seen so many, - he must have had about eleven for the bungalow alone. His wife was old but charming. The grounds smelled of tea and teak and she was shown everywhere - the tea garden, the bush, the jungle.

‘What’s he doing sending his daughter out here?’ he had whispered to his wife before Susan had come down for supper on that first magical evening, but approaching the verandah she had overheard him: