Travelling as a fan: 16 holidays where art inspired the itinerary

We’ve all been so floored by a book or a movie or a song that we’ve wished we could be in the same place. Some of our writers have followed through on this impulse, tracking a work or body of art to its setting. Whether it’s a journey to Costa Brava to soak in some Dali, or to Seoul to relive moments from a favourite K-series, here are 10 holidays where we followed our obsessions to their source.

In Dalí’s playground in Costa Brava

Spain has been home to some of the most influential creative minds, from the paintings of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso to the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. For Salvador Dalí, much of that inspiration came from the rugged coastline of the Costa Brava.

While planning a road trip from Barcelona, a little research and a long-held fascination with Dalí’s art led us north to Figueres, Dalí’s birthplace and home to one of Spain’s most unusual museums: the Dalí Theatre-Museum, built on the ruins of a theatre destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Even from the outside, it’s clear that this is no conventional exhibition space. Dark pink walls are dotted with sculpted loaves of bread and crowned with enormous white eggs (one of Dalí’s favourite motifs, symbolising birth and creativity). Above it rises a glass dome that reflects the Mediterranean light. Inside, the museum feels less like a gallery and more like stepping into Dalí’s imagination. Rooms are filled with paintings, sculptures and playful visual illusions. Dalí himself is buried in the building, beneath the former theatre stage.

We continued eastwards toward the whitewashed fishing village of Cadaqués. Dalí spent childhood summers here. Just beyond the village lies the tiny bay of Port Lligat, where Dalí built his home and studio overlooking the cove. Dalí lived and worked here for decades with his wife and muse, Gala. The Salvador Dalí House Museum preserves the artist’s eccentric world. Large white sculpted eggs appear again—perched on rooftops or tucked into niches, while a wall of Pirelli tyres stands beside the swimming pool.

The windows frame the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Step outside and the influence of the landscape becomes clear. The wind-carved rocks and barren headlands of nearby Cap de Creus resemble the scenery that appears in many of Dalí’s paintings, including the famous The Persistence of Memory. Standing here, it becomes easier to see how Dalí’s imagination took shape—the landscape had already done half the work. — Udita Jhunjhunwala

A magical metro ride to find Prokofiev

My introduction to classical music came through a slightly crackly LP of Peter and the Wolf that appeared often on the family turntable when I was a child.

In our living room orchestra, every instrument had a personality. Peter himself bounded through the music carried by bright strings that sounded like youthful mischief. A fluttering flute became the bird. The oboe waddled along as the duck. The clarinet crept about like a suspicious cat. A bassoon grumbled its way into the role of the stern grandfather. And when three French horns suddenly appeared with dark and menacing chords, the wolf had clearly arrived. For a child it was not merely music. It was a story unfolding through sound.

Many years later that childhood soundtrack quietly followed me all the way to Moscow. The tour schedule was organized with near military discipline, and our guide Theo issued firm advice about not wandering off alone in Moscow. The city, he explained, was far too vast and complicated for such freelance adventures.

Which of course meant I did exactly that.

I slipped away from the group, descended into the Moscow Metro and surrendered myself to one of the grandest underground railway systems on the planet. Stations glittered with chandeliers and marble columns. The platforms looked less like transport hubs and more like imperial ballrooms. Eventually I surfaced near Novodevichy Cemetery.

It is one of those cemeteries where Russian history seems to be quietly assembled in one place. Poets, revolutionaries, musicians and artists lie there among statues and sombre stone markers. And among them is Sergei Prokofiev.

There is a strange irony attached to his death. Prokofiev died on the same day as Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin’s funeral consumed the Soviet Union. Prokofiev’s passing barely registered. Moscow’s florists ran out of flowers because every bouquet in the city had been commandeered for Stalin’s funeral. Standing there decades later, the imbalance felt almost corrected. Stalin ruled through terror. Prokofiev left music that filled childhoods with imagination.

And somewhere in my head, in a small Russian village that exists only in memory, Peter is still sneaking past his grandfather and chasing a wolf through the woods. – Rishad Saam Mehta

Channeling Hallyu on a beach in Gangwon-do

Sometime in 2018, I started watching Korean dramas while researching a story on the Hallyu wave. I wasn’t hooked from the get-go. I remember watching a few shows and wondering what the fuss was all about.

Then I stumbled on shows that clicked, like Inheritors (2013) and Descendants of the Sun (2016). Most of the dramas I enjoyed were written by screenwriter Kim Eun-sook. I looked up the rest of her work and landed on Goblin (2016). It’s available on Netflix under the title Guardian: The Lonely and Great God.

The show stars Gong Yoo—who later became instantly recognisable to non-K-drama audiences after his recruiter slap scene in Squid Game—in the titular role, alongside Kim Go-eun.

In September 2019, I travelled to South Korea and hoped to revisit some favourite drama locations, especially Jumunjin Beach in the Gangwon-do province on the north-east coast, where the lead characters’ first meeting unfolds, in which Gong Yoo’s Kim Shin gives Go-eun’s Ji Eun-tak a buckwheat flower bouquet at the edge of the breakwater.

It was the final item on my six-day trip to Seoul. My friend who was hosting me had already offered to drive, but work derailed those plans and she ended up pulling an all-nighter the day before. The next morning, after barely a power nap, she simply said, “We’re still going. You can’t miss this.” When we finally got there, it felt oddly cosmic, as if the place carried the same fated energy as the scene that had drawn me to it in the first place.

Later, Kim Eun-sook wrote my all-time favourite drama across languages: The Glory (2022-23).

On my next trip there, I might try to meet her, tell her how one show she wrote over a decade ago took me to Jumunjin Beach. On the way, we stopped at a drive-through and I ate what remains the best ramen bowl of my life. On our way back, we spotted a full rainbow arc across the sky. The kind of details, I suspect, based on her writing, she would appreciate. — Shephali Bhatt

Following Feluda in Jaisalmer

“Many years ago a Bengali director came here to make a film. Since then a lot of tourists from Bengal have come here to see the fort,” said our cab driver as we headed out of Jaisalmer airport earlier this month. The last time I was in this corner of Rajasthan, I remember waking up in the sleeper compartment of a train to barren sand dunes stretched out on both sides.

In 1992, soon after Satyajit Ray’s death, Doordarshan aired the legendary filmmaker’s works back to back, enough to keep our family of four engrossed for days. For my brother and me, the detective series Feluda sparked a sense of mystery and adventure, especially the 1974 cult hit Sonar Kella, a film adaptation of the book by the same name, set against the backdrop of Jaisalmer’s Golden Fort.

The following year, during the Durga Puja holidays, my father booked a 10-day trip to Rajasthan, making his notes from Bhromon Shongi, a popular Bengali travel guidebook. As children, we were particularly thrilled about visiting Jaisalmer because we’d finally be able to trace Feluda’s footsteps through the labyrinth of narrow lanes inside Sonar Kella, one of the very few living forts in the world.

Built in 1156 AD by the Bhati Rajput ruler Rawal Jaisal, the Golden Fort draws its name from its yellow limestone walls, which shift from a pale gold at sunrise to a deep amber by sunset. The royal family lived in a palace within the fort. Today, it is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and houses approximately 2,000 families apart from shops, restaurants and ancient Jain temples, a stark contrast to Ray’s film that portrayed it as an abandoned ghost town.

Stepping through the massive gates of Sonar Kella after 33 years, this time with my eight-year-old son, it felt as though life had come full circle. The golden glow of the facade was intact, but the square, bustling with vendors was a reminder we were far removed from Ray’s sepia-toned world. — Rituparna Roy

On the trail of Celine and Jesse

Celine and Jesse meet on the Eurail, hop off at Vienna and spend a magical evening (and night) together. This bare-bones description of Before Sunrise hardly does justice to one of the most loved romantic films, and a personal favourite. Richard Linklater’s 1995 film, starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, takes you on a tour around the Austrian capital, with the protagonists discussing life (and death), relationships, faith and magic.

When my husband and I visited Vienna for the first time in 2013, we were keen to explore the filming locations.

So, we took the trams, rode the Reisenrad (vintage Ferris Wheel dating to 1897) in Prater amusement park, where Celine and Jesse shared their first kiss, and stopped for a coffee at Kleines Café (sadly, no palm reader offered to tell us our fortune). We went to the raised square in front of Albertina Museum to gaze at the Staatsoper opera house (and saw a performance of Romeo and Juliet later).

While the movie couple was too late to visit any of the museums, we spent hours admiring art in the palatial Kunsthistoriches Museum. And finally, we stopped by Café Sperl, a traditional coffeehouse established in 1880, where the famous fake telephone conversation scene was set. We were delighted that its cosy booths, marble-topped tables, bentwood chairs, and even the burgundy upholstery were exactly as seen in the movie. Over multiple trips to Vienna, it has become my go-to cafe—grab a window seat, order a kleiner Schwarzer (espresso) and a slice of the Sperl Torte (almond-chocolate cake), and soak in the quintessential Viennese experience. — Prachi Joshi

In f****** Bruges

Bruges? Where’s that?”

“I didn’t even know where Bruges f****** was.”

“It’s a pity it’s in Belgium, really, but then if it wasn’t in Belgium and somewhere good, there would be too many people to see it.”

These lines from Martin McDonagh’s superbly funny 2008 film In Bruges, which never loses an opportunity to run down the tiny Belgian town, had quite the opposite effect on me. When I saw the film, I had to look up Bruges on a map. What I read ignited a fascination that led to a visit in 2012.

Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are two assassins trying to “disappear” for a bit in Bruges after a botched job. Ray hates Bruges, but Ken is happy to be the tourist and through him we get a sense of this adorable Flemish town, an hour’s train ride from Brussels.

A Unesco world heritage site, this medieval town is still remarkably well preserved with its cobble-stoned streets, canals that wind through the town, and market square where a lot of the film is shot. Inspired by Ken, I went to the Basilica of Holy Blood, named for a relic that’s believed to contain a cloth with the blood of Christ, and unique in its mix of Gothic and Renaissance styles. The characters drink frequently in pretty pubs, which I wanted to do. Bruges has one surviving brewery, Brugse Zot De Halve Maan, which has been bottling beer since the 1850s and had an entertaining English-language tour. I followed it up with visits to Brugs Beertje with a selection of over 300 Belgian beers, and Cambrinus.

It took two leisurely days to discover the rest of Bruges, including a boat ride on the canal past the famous Labrador, Fidèle, who makes a fleeting appearance in the film. As it turned out, Fidèle was not a prop. He was very much by the canal-side window when our boat passed, watching the world go by though his drooping eyes. — Arun Janardhan

Prague’s metamorphosis

In hindsight, 18 is probably not the age to read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I stumbled upon the book by accident, raced through its 80-odd pages and was shell-shocked for a few days. For someone who’d grown up on a strict but voracious diet of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Erle Stanley Gardner, I did not comprehend much of it, but the dark helplessness of a man suddenly finding himself turned into an insect on waking up one morning wasn’t lost.

When I finally got a chance to visit Prague 20 years later, I found Kafka everywhere, as statues, sculptures and souvenirs. Ironically, in his work, Prague lives only by allusion, never overtly. It is a theme that is explored in considerable detail at the Franz Kafka Museum in Mala Strana, which is dimly lit by design to reflect the author’s penchant for gloom. Yet, the city itself is full of life and joy.

The brooding Prague Castle, labyrinthine streets, towering spires and stone facades of ancient buildings are interpreted as claustrophobic and threatening in his work. It is in buildings and on these various streets that he wrote his works. It is only later that he frequented talks, theatres and cafes, including the Café Louvre. It was the last stop on a day of gazing at Kafka hot spots in the city. Its buzzing atmosphere felt anything but Kafkaesque. All around me, lively conversations, some intellectual, were flowing. Kafka, I felt, would approve.
— Anita Rao Kashi

Seeking Sylvia at the Trevi Fountain

People remember their first crush or kiss as landmark moments in their lives. For me, it was watching Italian director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in my early 20s on a sweltering summer evening in Kolkata that turned into a formative event. From the magnificent opening scene of a statue of Jesus Christ hanging off a helicopter, as it makes its way to Vatican City to the concluding party, where the fraying moral fabric of the film completely unspools, every minute of the nearly-3-hour-long movie made me fall deeply in love with Italy, and especially with Rome.

It took 20 years of day jobs, careful saving, and much planning for me to finally land up in the city. On the first day, as I stood before the iconic Trevi fountain, guarded by the carabenieri to prevent any overenthusiastic tourist from wading into the waters, I was surrounded by a babel of tongues and people taking photos and selfies. And yet, in my mind’s eye I could only see Sylvia, played by the ethereally glamorous Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s movie, standing knee-deep in water, beckoning to the dashingly handsome journalist Marcello Rubini (played by Marcello Mastroianni). As Marcello, who is besotted with Sylvia, joins her, everything around him merges with her perfect beauty—his job, his search for the higher life of a writer. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, the scene cuts from midnight to dawn. The gurgling waters come to a rest as stillness rings through the frame. I don’t think I can ever forget the frisson of that moment, where, briefly but truly, life imitated art, and memory turned into magic. —Somak Ghoshal

Searching Mexico City for an Orozco

Travelling for the first time to Mexico City in 2023, my friend and I arrived with a side quest each. Mine was straightforward: I’d loved the 2018 heist film Museo, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, and wanted to look up the setting (also the site of the actual robbery): the formidably impressive National Museum of Anthropology. My friend’s target was more elusive. Years ago, she’d been gifted a diary with a vivid fresco on its cover, which ended up becoming her screensaver. She knew it was by the pioneering Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco, but not what it was called or where it would be found. Undeterred, we embarked on a haphazard hunt, scouring the city’s galleries and museums.

Our Orozco hunt ended up becoming an inadvertent crash course in the work of the great Mexican muralist trio of Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros (my pick would be the 117 murals by Rivera at Secretaria de Educacion Publica). Finally, we found the Orozco at Palacio de Bellas Artes. It is a rude, teeming, seething fresco called Katharsis, which depicts mankind caught in the grip of war and industrialization. It’s from 1935, but could not be more apt for today’s ravaged geopolitical landscape. — Uday Bhatia

Misty mountain hop

When I was a child, I longed to visit the wonderful, fantasy lands that I would read about in books—places like Oz that seemed to lie behind a thin veil of reality. While Oz remained out of reach, in 2011, I did manage to pierce the veil and visit a magical land—the Nanda Devi sanctuary, deep in the Garhwal Himalaya. This hike was also the result of a book—Eric Shipton’s Nanda Devi (1936), a masterful blend of high alpine adventure, poetic nature musings, and everyday comedy. It charted the incredible 1934 feat of finding a way into the previously impregnable mountain fastness of the inner Nanda Devi basin, which Shipton accomplished alongside his fellow British climber Bill Tilman and the Sherpas Ang Tharkey, Pasang and Kusang.

The Nanda Devi sanctuary of the book is a prelapsarian paradise of glittering high peaks that form an awesome circular fortress, holding inside it miles of glaciers, alpine pastures and herds of bharal. These days, one isn’t allowed to enter the innermost realm, but I tried to get as close as I could, with the help of local Bhotia guides from the village of Lata. Travelling during late monsoon, I was privileged to witness the annual Nanda Devi festival, before making my way up to the high alpine meadow of Lata Kharak, and then into the hanging valley of Dharansi. Throughout those 10 days, Nanda Devi played truant, drawing impenetrable mists and cloud banners across the landscape. But the price of a successful pilgrimage is perseverance, and so it happened that one morning in Dharansi dawned, revealing an otherworldly vista of high peaks and deep gorges, framing the perfect granite triangle of the Devi. Herds of wild bharal grazed all around me, while musk deer played hide and seek among the juniper thickets. It was emotional, it was magical, and it was perfect. — Bibek Bhattacharya

The heart of computer science

My interest in Alan Turing began long before the excellent film The Imitation Game brought his story to a wider audience. As a World War II enthusiast, years earlier, I had travelled to Bletchley Park, the quiet Buckinghamshire estate near Milton Keynes where one of the most important intellectual battles of World War II was fought. The enemy was not a man or an army. It was a machine.

The German military relied on a cipher device called the Enigma. Every day its rotors shifted into new positions, creating millions upon millions of possible combinations. Messages that passed through it became unreadable strings of letters. To decipher them without knowing the daily settings would have taken human minds longer than the war itself. Alan Turing realised that the only way to defeat a machine was with another machine. So he built one.

The electromechanical device he designed was called the Bombe. It could race through possibilities at a speed no human team could match, testing combinations until the hidden message revealed itself. With it the codebreakers at Bletchley Park began to read German communications, locating U-boat wolf packs in the Atlantic and understanding enemy plans before they unfolded. Historians believe this shortened the war by several years and saved millions of lives.

When I visited Bletchley Park, the place still carried a curious hush, as though the war had ended only yesterday and the codebreakers had simply stepped outside for a quick cup of tea. Churchill had ordered that the Bombes destroyed after the war to preserve secrecy, and for decades almost nothing remained. But during my visit engineers were painstakingly reconstructing one from original designs. I remember standing beside the machine as it clattered into motion. Metal drums turned, relays clicked and cables trembled with electrical life. It felt less like watching a historical exhibit and more like witnessing the first heartbeat of the digital age.

Turing’s life, however, did not end with the gratitude that such service deserved. In Britain of the early 1950s, homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and in 1952 Turing was prosecuted for being gay. The court gave him a brutal choice between prison and chemical castration. Bound by wartime secrecy, he could not even reveal the extraordinary work he had done to save his country. Two years later he died by suicide after biting into an apple laced with cyanide. When I learned the full story, I felt a quiet and persistent sadness that refused to leave me. Not long afterwards I found myself boarding a train to Manchester.

In Sackville Park, a small green space in the city, there is a statue of Alan Turing seated on an ordinary park bench. He holds an apple in his hand. It is a small object, but carries a remarkable weight of meaning. The apple is often described as a triple symbol. It recalls the forbidden fruit that society associated with his sexuality. It echoes the apple that fell for Isaac Newton and helped inspire the science that shaped the modern world. And it represents the poisoned fruit that ended Turing’s life.

The memorial itself has been placed with quiet thoughtfulness. On one side lies the University of Manchester, where Turing worked on early computing machines that would help shape the digital future. On the other side lies Canal Street, the heart of Manchester’s Gay Village. The bench beneath him carries an Enigma coded inscription: IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ.

When decoded, it reads simply: Founder of Computer Science.

Many people like to believe that the Apple logo is a tribute to Turing. It is a beautiful story though apparently untrue. Stephen Fry once asked Steve Jobs about it directly and was told there was no connection. Which is rather a pity. Because if anyone deserves a quiet acknowledgement from the modern digital world, it is the man who first gave it a heartbeat. — Rishad Saam Mehta

A Sherlock-style quest

While most of the Indian families on the train with me that morning from Zurich were headed to Interlaken, quite possibly as a homage to Yash Chopra films, my destination was prompted by a different cultural totem: Sherlock Holmes. I was on my way to Meiringen, a tiny, picturesque town in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland, famous as the town closest to the Reichenbach Falls. Sherlock fans know, of course, that the falls are the site of one of the most iconic scenes in fiction: Holmes and Moriarty grapple on the edge and then drop into the falls, seemingly to their deaths. In real life, the falls are a little less impressive. "This is it?" I remember thinking when I finally reached the viewing point after going up the steep hill in a funicular, the most fun part of the journey. The falls themselves are singularly underwhelming, or at least they were in the month of September, and I can honestly say I have seen more spectacular unnamed waterfalls during the monsoon in the Western Ghats. There is a cute Sherlock Holmes museum in Meiringen town, where a bunch of Japanese tourists and I took turns taking photos with the Sherlock statue outside, and that was it—a personal pilgrimage that was more fun in conception than in the actual experience. — Shrabonti Bagchi

Do-re-mi in Salzburg

Few films have inspired as many pilgrimages as The Sound of Music. The 1965 film starring Julie Andrews turned the story of the von Trapp family into one of cinema’s most beloved musicals, and made a star of the Austrian city of Salzburg.

During a visit to Munich, the chance to cross the border in under 2 hours along a German autobahn and reach Salzburg, home to many of the iconic locations from director Robert Wise’s Academy Award-winning film, seemed irresistible. Surprisingly, our German host had never heard of the movie, yet he happily indulged our fascination.

The city sits between baroque church spires and the forested hills of the northern Alps. Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, has long been synonymous with classical music. But since the release of The Sound of Music, the city has gained a second, more cinematic soundtrack. Throughout the film, it appears almost as an extra character. As Maria makes her way across the city to the von Trapp family home, singing the song I Have Confidence, she moves through several real Salzburg locations, including the central square of Residenzplatz. The narrow lanes of Salzburg’s Old Town, with their pastel facades and wrought-iron shop signs, provide the backdrop for several scenes. One of the film’s most recognisable sequences unfolds in the gardens of Mirabell Palace, where Maria and the von Trapp children leap along stone steps, dance around fountains and sing Do-Re-Mi.

And then there are the hills. The rolling green slopes surrounding Salzburg stand in for all kinds of imagined Alpine settings in the film. It’s hard to resist humming a few bars of The Hills Are Alive or Edelweiss while wandering across a meadow, even if it means singing a little too enthusiastically in public. —Udita Jhunjhunwala

In step with Chopin

On a chilly, nippy autumn morning about a decade ago, Warsaw’s Royal Krakowskie Przedmieście, the Royal Route in the Old Town, was deserted. The sun’s weak rays reflected off the yellow and stone facades, giving everything a golden hue. In that perfect silence, a tiny bit from one of Frederic Chopin’s Nocturnes filled the air. It was lilting, cheerful and poignant. The tune began playing from a bench where I had pressed a button. A little further down was one more, and then one more, and so on up and down the road, 15 in all. I didn’t think I was the type to cry, but the silence and the beautiful music playing for an audience of one made my eyes fill up for some reason.

The benches on the Route were strategically located in front of monuments and buildings associated with his life and time. Such as the Czapski Palace, where Chopin’s family began living in 1827, the Baroque and Rococo Vistants’ Church where Chopin played as a pupil and the Radzwill Palace where Chopin gave his first public performance. But the most poignant was the Holy Cross Church, inside which a pillar topped by Chopin’s bust contains his heart. The music was haunting and soul-stirring. I felt oddly joyous and wrung out at the same time.
— Anita Rao Kashi

Ireland’s Ranji link

Few writers have handled the English language with quite the authority as W.B. Yeats. His poetry has a rhythm that feels distinctly Irish. Lines pause and hover. They invite you to stop halfway through a stanza and think about what has just been said. For years I had wanted to visit his grave at Drumcliffe Church in County Sligo, where Benbulben rises dramatically behind the churchyard like a stage backdrop. The plan seemed simple enough. Drive from Galway to Sligo. Pause at the grave. Continue onward to Dublin. Ireland, however, tends to interfere with tidy plans.

I was staying with friends, who live near Galway in the village of Cloonboo. During dinner one evening, they mentioned another figure whose story had taken root in the same landscape. A cricketer who had once dominated the sport of cricket in India and whose name now graces one of its most famous tournaments.

K. S. Ranjitsinhji. Ranji.

Eighty kilometres from Cloonboo stood Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara. In July 1924, Ranji, the Maharaja of Nawanagar and one of the most elegant batsmen the sport of cricket has ever produced, arrived in Ireland. He had come in search of trout fishing and promptly fell in love with Ballynahinch. Before long he bought the castle and began spending his summers there.

His generosity made him popular with the local community. Each summer he brought motor cars with him and when he left he presented one to the Catholic priest and another to the Protestant minister. In rural Connemara of the 1920s that was not a small gesture. Even today the older residents speak of him with a faint sparkle of admiration.

Ballynahinch Castle now operates as a hotel beside the River Owenmore, whose waters still hold large trout that rise eagerly to a fly. Standing beside the river, listening to water move steadily over stones, it was obvious why Ranji had been enchanted by the place. — Rishad Saam Mehta

Beauty and menace in the Sundarbans

Though Amitav Ghosh had already written a few books by then, I first heard of him in 2004 when a colleague at the newspaper I was working in was reviewing The Hungry Tide. “It’s really good,” she said, passing it to me to read. I was hooked from the first few pages. Till then, Sundarbans, the dense mangroves straddling India and Bangladesh which together are the world’s largest mangrove system, was a hazy idea, the stuff of lore and legends. As I read the book, my image of them crystallised and I could almost feel the humidity and smell the briny water jump out of the pages. The mangroves were a character in itself and just as impactful as any other.

Exactly 20 years later, I finally visited the Unesco designated biosphere reserve. It was every just as I imagined. The hazy mist rising from the dark waters at daybreak set the tone from the book. The labyrinthine waterways, the overarching mangrove trees and shrubs with their intricately latticed roots and pneumatophores formed a canopy that was dark and mysterious, hiding any number of creatures. The tiger, its most famous inhabitant, is elusive, but round a bend, we come face to face with a saltwater crocodile, sunning itself in the warm winter sun. About 15-20ft long, its skin a dull white, it is a dramatic specimen and evokes scenes from the book when the protagonist falls into the crocodile-infested waters. I felt the same unease, the same constant sense of danger and surprise round every bend that I’d experienced while reading the book as I cruised the maze-like canals. After a day-long cruise, stepping ashore is a relief laced with a bit of loss, akin to finishing the book. —Anita Rao Kashi