I made a book for this trip before I left home. With a steel ruler I drew lines and made a calendar. The days were numbered with a small-tipped pen. I pasted in some portraits of the tribal communities of Kachchh taken by Rohit Chawla that I found inspirational. And then I left it on the plane.

So I worked through the trip with this book instead. It had a perforated card cover that soon disintegrated. The elastic band, designed to hold the book closed, went limp and just sort of flopped about. The book did not age gracefully the way almost all books do. I wanted to abandon it, but there was too much in it already. I found myself in a dubious moral territory wanting to turn my back on it. I considered amputation or worse.  In the end, I rebuilt the covers with gaffer tape and thick card from an exotic hotel magazine featuring the Mughal emperor Jahangir. I keep books to record time. To have a trace. In the end the trace was more important that the beauty of the book.