Insomnia is so addictive. You want to believe that the next minute you will stumble upon a great thought , an equivalent to the daring z stroke of Zorro. I see a busy crossroads, on the other side of the street is a big neon lit cinema. It is in a big city in the US in the thirties, men wearing hats, boys selling newspapers. the cinema - or is it a music hall- beckons. It's just a sort of vision, more like a feeling of urgent life moving in all directions, the men picking up the newspapers, rushing home to listen to the match on the radio, the sleek black cars passing by. Gosh how i love the thirties, maybe because people still had this naive thrill for modernity, or because the way modernity presented itself in those days still had a rustic feel to it. Any boy with some simple notion of science could open up and repair a car, a radio, a telephone. I would have liked to be that kind of boy. Actually the only time I've ever repaired something was my car and that was a VW Beetle - so it is 1930's technology.

But more than that I love to imagine how people travelled in those days - still mostly by boat. Suppose you're crossing the Suez canal, and you know- you can feel - you've left the West behind you. Then there's the stop at Aden. Then there's Bombay. Then after a long time it's Singapore and people are now yellow. Then the arrival in Hong Kong.

Man's that's what I call travelling, this slow unfurling of port after port, each with the suggestion of its mysterious hinterland, and yourself sitting on the deck, rereading the same newspaper which you bought when you embarked in Southampton, the growing obsolence of the news like a ray of light crossing space from a long dead star.

And in those days, harbours and cities in general did not feel that deplorable urge as nowadays , to adorn themselves with modernish giant cubes of glass and steel , however dirt poor the country may be. Nowadays when you arrive in a city somewhere, it means you step out of the plane into some gigantic concrete toad in which the duty free boutiques are selling exactly the same whiskeys and handbags as the one where you boarded the plane.

But oh for those days ! when Alexandra David Neel could alight with a light step from her steamer in Bombay, after a most horrible storm which left both crew and passengers crawling and retching, except for this woman of steel, who went on Benares to resume her Sanskrit studies, and from thence to three years of meditation and initiations in a cave in Sikkhim ( " I must say that swallowing a burning candle, as part of the ritual at this stage, left me with a most unpleasant feeling"), and from thence to seven years of roaming in Tibet, disguised as a mendicant old lady, in what still a forbidden country.

A forbidden country ! A white spot on the map, the source of the Brahmaputra still uncertain, and what did Lhassa look like - one could only guess from the tales of merchants. At one point , in further travels in North China, she is fleeing from the sacred mountain of Wutaishan, for the Japanese army is advancing, and arrives at the train station in Taiyuan, amidst a panicking crowd trying to get aboard the last train. she falls down, is stampeded by the crowd and left half dead in a ditch ( but eventually recovers and spends the next nine years basically crossing China and Tibet by foot, Himalayas included, to appear in front of a bemused English official somewhere near Jammu in 1946). I have stayed in Wutaishan too, muttering praise to Amitabh, the buddha of infinite light, and my wife was born somewhere near Taiyuan. I have walked in the forests at the foot of Wutaishan, like her, though I did not see the strange rays of light which sometimes emanate from its summit.

These thin details of similarity, to me, only throw in starker relief the almost cosmic immensity of the gulf which separates her life from mine, a bit like a cloud passing in front of the moon makes you think of how far, in fact, the moon is from the wisps which seem to veil her.