Murali Menon gets impromptu history and geography lessons from William Dalrymple

The sun is just a rumour, the grey sky looks suicidal and little raindrops are invading Mumbai. I'm walking with William Dalrymple in search of a Chinese restaurant he'd been to years back with film maker Ismail Merchant and 20 of his friends.

Ideally, I would have loved to take Dalrymple, acclaimed travel writer and social historian, to Bade Miya or Khau Galli, into the depth of the city's labyrinthine streets. I fancied he would have been more at home there than in the Botox serenity of any of Mumbai's fancy restaurants. But time is at a premium, the public relations people are worried and then Dalrymple remembers the Chinese restaurant, which, he's sure, is just around the corner.

Hong Kong is one of those fairly anonymous places with obscure music, but the staff is unassuming and the surroundings are cheery and clean, if a bit cramped.

"What's Laura doing these days?" I ask Dalrymple. Laura was this seemingly invincible woman who along with William set out to retrace Marco Polo's famous journey across Central Asia to Xanadu in Mongolia. Both were Cambridge history undergraduates then, and In Xanadu, the account of their experiences in strife-torn West Asia and along 1,500 miles of the Silk Route, won Dalrymple — then just 22 — the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award.

"Oh, Laura, she became the youngest-ever director of Tesco's, UK's largest retail marketing firm and right now handles their, I guess, entire corporate affairs. Earns more in a year than I do in a decade," he says as we place our order — chicken Won Ton soup, spring rolls and beer.

Dalrymple isn't doing all that badly either. After his debut with In Xanadu, more books – City of Djinns(on Delhi), From the Holy Mountain, and Age of Kali – and awards have followed. Dalrymple is back in India (he's here three months a year on an average) for the launch of a three-part BBC series on Indian pilgrimages — the first to the source of the Ganges, the second on Delhi, and the concluding part is on the link between St Thomas and Christianity in Kerala.

I tell him that the third part — on St Thomas — would make a cracking book and he agrees, saying that most educated people slot that particular episode in history as legend just like Krishna lifting the universe on his little finger. "But actually, if you look at a map, it was far easier for a priest from Palestine to land in India than for him to go to Rome just after the death of Christ. There were regular fleets that left Egypt for Kerala in the first century AD; it was the Grand Trunk Road of its day and you can't really prove that it didn't happen. However, most of what we have on St Thomas and his life is a hagiography, and there are a lot of ifs, buts, and coulds, which could get a little irritating in a 300-page book."

The soup and the spring rolls arrive as Dalrymple shows me an unedited, yet- to-be-proofed version of his latest book, The White Moghuls. A social history, the book deals with acculturation of the British in India, in a manner similar to that of the Moghuls. "I got the idea for this book while on a visit to Hyderabad and started work on it in 1997. It deals with the times before the Raj when the East India Company was just kicking in."

The White Moghuls is the tale of a passionate love affair between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, an imperialistic upper-class Englishman who, after falling in love with Khair-un-Nisa, a Hyderabadi princess, is circumcised, and while remaining a British citizen, becomes a secret agent working for the Nizam against the British.

"There were a lot of Englishmen who intermarried and fathered children here. There was a book on etiquette for the British, like a Lonely Planet of the early 17th century, which provided tips on dealing with tawaifs, bazaar prostitutes and the like. The Victorians and their stuffy morality changed all that and chapters in books dealing with the subject were steadily deleted. In fact, my grandmother three times over was a Hindu lady from Chandernagore in West Bengal, which makes me one-eighth Bengali. Maybe that is why I talk so much!" says Dalrymple, bursting into laughter.

I debit Rs 500 from my mental ATM at that very instant; the book seems to be a must-buy, but why does William Dalrymple always have to write about the past? Paul Theroux writes brilliantly on the present, so does Colin Thubron, and Bruce Chatwin was all wacky zest in his search for nomads and ideas. More importantly, why does he have to hang around India and West Asia? I want him to go to Africa, Polynesia and the CIS.

"Every writer has his USP. Theroux writes wonderful stuff on train journeys, Kapuscinski specialised in revolutions and coups, and as far as I'm concerned, my training is as a historian. I also find the mediocrity of the present very uninspiring, except in India. Look at Great Britain, it has an interesting past, but right now, it's going nowhere in particular. India, on the other hand, could go anywhere. On the one hand, there's Gujarat and then, there's the software revolution in Bangalore. The sheer uncertainty of the present here is an alluring draw so much so that you'll find me here and in West Asia for, I guess, the next six to eight years."

We move from the fluidity of the clear soup and the beer to the soft crunchiness of the spring rolls and the conversation now turns to travel writers. I know Dalrymple rates Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana as the best travel book of the century, but what about living writers? Dalrymple feels Colin Thubron is spectacular. What about Theroux, I ask him.

"Paul Theroux, I feel, doesn't like travel writing any more. His recent books all seem like rushed jobs. The tragic thing is that he writes superb fiction, but while they don't sell well, his travel writing sells in millions, especially in the United States and Great Britain. I guess something similar is happening to Bill Bryson."

Travel writers have to keep on changing, says Dalrymple, or they could get geographically or thematically stuck. Which, I think, still hasn't happened with him, touch wood, and even if one perceives him as a coloniser writing about the colonised, he's mostly inoffensive and doubly careful.

Sarah, the head of public relations at BBC Worldwide, is getting edgy and out of the corner of my eye, I can see her taking a peek at her watch every now and then. But both our beer mugs are half full, and that makes me optimistic about another 15 minutes with Dalrymple.

I ask Dalrymple about an article written by him in the aftermath of 9/11 that has been floating around the Net for quite sometime now. The Christmas Palm Tree deals with a subject close to Dalrymple's heart and forms the basis of his From the Holy Mountain — about how Christianity, with all its western trappings, is actually an eastern religion and has striking similarities with Islam.

But does he ever see amity between the two religions? "I wrote that article for a low-budget Catholic magazine run by a friend and never thought it would get this far. But yes, the future does look very grim. Most people in the West, including my mother, think that each and every Muslim grows a beard and bombs buildings. That is terrible. And what compounds perception problems are articles like these..."

He shows me the front page of a national daily. That has Naipaul, all puffy face and double chin, exhorting people to embrace the RSS and just stopping short of maligning Muslims. "The beauty of his writing seduces you, but it gets suffocating when he starts to talk about Islam. It's saying the wrong thing but very beautifully at that."

Sarah is now dropping stern hints with a gentle face, something only public relation people can do, and but I act dumb and ask Dalrymple about what he'll be writing ten years down the line.

He asks me whether I've read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and then goes on to tell me more about John Berendt's non-fiction work that reads like an engrossing novel, where the writer takes the lid off a beguiling southern city called Savannah in Georgia.

"I might look at a sequel to The White Moghuls, but writing something like Berendt should be very interesting. I don't know, maybe, I'll set my mystery novel in Bombay," he says as we leave Hong Kong.