We're about to land, but I don't know where in the world I'm going. The landscape spread below me is a tableau of muddy waters and tin-roofed houses poking out from palm groves. As we sink earthwards I see dark-skinned men picking through fallow fields, planting new seeds perhaps, though the soil's bone dry.
Such contrast from a few hours earlier, when I'd taken off from Bangkok: the sun was rising over the Gulf of Thailand, turning the sodden rice paddies stitched along its shoreline to glass. I thought I'd be flying direct to Paro, in Bhutan, but discovered once airborne that this Royal Bhutan Airways flight would be landing first at a place I'd never heard of.
I can't see it spelled anywhere — neither in the airline magazine, nor on my ticket — so I'm relying on the flight attendant's pronunciation for clues. 'Gawati,' she says, and I strain to hear the syllables and decipher this unfamiliar destination.
I conjure the world map in my mind's eye: are we landing in an eastern corner of Bhutan? A city in Myanmar's northwest? Somewhere in northern Bangladesh, perhaps? My geographical aptitude fails me.
We touch down and pull up to a small, flaking terminal with the words 'LGB International Airport, Guwahati' helpfully spelled out for me. A row of IndiGo aircraft lines up alongside us, and a tanker sails past bearing another clue: India Oil Corporation, it reads. And then it comes to me: we're in Assam, that part of India cut adrift from the motherland during partition. Bangladesh lies to the south and, beyond it, the subcontinent. This state's disjointedness mirrors my own.
People disembark, others climb aboard. The plane takes off. We arrive in Paro, via a circuitous and world-enlarging route. On the way back to Bangkok I know exactly where we are when we stop to offload passengers at once-mysterious Guwahati.
Soon I'm on my way to Africa's tiny, ravaged heart, Rwanda. But to get there I must first land in another unfamiliar city, Entebbe. I've requested a window seat so that I can see where I'm going; a house-speckled swatch of greenery rises up to meet me, and then the vast bowl of Lake Victoria, glorious in the late afternoon glow. I've seen this lake once before, from its eastern shore near the border between Kenya and Tanzania. But up here I'm afforded a fresh perspective, one which helps to reorganise the