Great! They have a Muscatel Okayti, then, that’s what I’ll be drinking,” Amitav Ghosh, reveals to the attendant, after studying the menu at a quaint, charming tea room housed in a restored bungalow in Bandra. He’s a tea-drinker, and a serious one we learn as he settles in for the interview. It’s no coincidence that it plays a key role in his writing and routines. “I am a Calcutta boy, after all; so, yes, I grew up drinking tea (grins).”

Just like this fine Darjeeling-origin tea’s sweet, dry complexities and depth that are organically complemented by undertones of the muscatel grape, his new book, Wild Fictions (HarperCollins), a collection of 26 essays, is a diverse, probing periscopic lens on Planet Earth. At times, it reads like a love letter to the many lands of his novels, its people and its natural riches.