It is 1964 and my father is up a ladder in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This is how we’d spend our Saturdays, hunting for old stuff: philosophy, psychology, fiction and politics. My father, an Indian, was also looking for something in Buddhist and Taoist texts that would give him, as he put it, “direction in life”, which his parents had failed to engender in him.
Years later, without knowing it, I found myself following him. I too would scour bookshops, searching for works of literature, or for books on psychology, where I might find the key to some kind of liberation.
