This was how I came to write my first book, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River. Those three words led to journeys through Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Tibet, and archival investigations into the history of the Indus valley, once the celebrated territory of the Rig-Veda, now the backbone of Pakistan. In my notebook, I wrote down ‘Indus’, ‘Aryans’ and ‘Alexander’. The river idea slipped into my mind while I was reading a translation of India’s most ancient and sacred Sanskrit text, the Rig-Veda. The first was about a chubby Hindu god the second, about a cool mountain river. Both of them were shaped by the heat of a Delhi summer. Ten years ago, when I was living in Delhi, I had the idea to write two books. She writes about what inspired her to write this unexpected story… Alice Albinia, the acclaimed author of Empires of the Indus, is back – this time with a playful novel about the battle between Ved Vyasa and Ganesha in modern-day Delhi.
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