Asya and Manu take me back to my youth, when we were just the two of us. We lived, like the anthropologists, “in an apartment for rent, small and a little dark on an unremarkable street” and like the anthropologists, we loved it all the same. “Something about this city reflected the cadences and proportions we wanted from life,” they say, echoing our own memories of that time.

From montages of city life and neighbours to future selves and psychotherapy, this little book is thoughtful and articulate and applies to my life in ways that astound me.

When we landed in Goa, I read all the way to the hotel. Then my daughter and I leave our bags in the lobby and join my parents for breakfast. Looking at my father, a little unsteady and stiff as he rises to greet us, I find myself questioning my choices. Have I, like Asya, adapted too quickly to the idea that autonomy should come above all else? Has my life of teaching, writing, and travelling taken precedence over family time? Like Asya, have I joined my generation in thinking of autonomy “as a moral value, an unquestionably desirable state, and this is the type of thing that has made me strange in the eyes of my family, if not a stranger”

Later in the day, we sit outdoors overlooking the Arabian Sea. We talk of the things we want to do in 2025 – a family gathering, pilgrimage, dive master’s certification. Small fishing boats dot the horizon, and a speedboat whizzes past leaving a trail of foam. On the lawn beside us, a man flies a drone. It feels idyllic; the sea, the sky and the red ruins of a four-hundred-year-old fort.

Yet these ruins hold darker tales: once a prison for Portuguese criminals and Indian freedom fighters, they remind me of another book I've been reading. The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer has been my other travel companion, with essays on Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and Jerusalem on the beauty and violence simmering beneath many earthly paradises. The chapters are uneven, some luminous, others underwhelming. But the search for paradise pulls me in, as I linger on the descriptions of childhood in an English boarding school, travel to a graveyard in Sri Lanka and to monasteries in Japan, and a surreal-sounding trip to Benaras.

That evening, I go for a walk with my mother. She has spent the last year convalescing. When she chooses a path that climbs steeply up a slope, I feel happy that she is better. I think back to Pico Iyer – “It’s so easy to place paradise in the past or the future, anywhere but here”, he says. Perhaps this is what both my books have been trying to tell me – that paradise is less a place than a moment, and that, if I permit it to be, this mother-daughter walk by the Arabian Sea could be what paradise looks like.

What about you, dear Reader? Which places would you visit in search of paradise? And what are your moments of paradise? Do write in with your reflections. And until next week, happy reading.

PS - The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş turns out to be a novel. And on Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2024 list. There are many more things I could say about it, but for now, I will stop at two words - read it!

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com

The views expressed are personal