My eighteenth year was when the world was suddenly flung open to me. Until then, I’d been mostly incarcerated within medieval boarding-school cloisters, where I regarded Keats and D.H. Lawrence as the greatest adventures imaginable. But my eighteenth year was when I took my first summer-long trip around my parents’ India, and got to savour my first taste of Bombay and Dharamshala; my eighteenth year was when I took on my first job, fecklessly impersonating a Spanish-speaking sub-waiter at Pancho Villa Inn, a Mexican restaurant in Santa Barbara, California; my eighteenth year was when I went on my first official- seeming date, to see, too fittingly, a new movie of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, starring Max Van Sydow and Dominique Sanda.