Travel writing is traditionally the domain of the European writer: it is the English, the French or the German writer who discovers the marsh Arabs in Iraq, the monks in Tibet, a violent tribe in South America. Amitav Ghosh is approaching travel writing in the spirit of a Third World writer writing about the Third World. His book begins with the time he spent in a small Egyptian village and the piece he wrote about the time there that appeared in Granta magazine, a story of the Imam of the village, of Khamees, of the teacher at the village and of all the squabbles and prejudices of the village.