New Delhi, June 21 -- Books gather where they please. They belong in my kitchen too, on a wall-mounted shelf tucked into a nook behind the fridge. Here's where I keep my stack of cookbooks and a motley pile of notebooks, diaries, all filled over 15 years of travelling across India to document how it eats. I call them my field notes. One day I took them all down and made a pile on the kitchen floor-it was a map of my own mind, my life, in my own scrawly hand.

There are fat spiral pads and slim pocketbooks, a cloth-covered notebook from Leh, a handmade-paper journal with an elephant on its cover, calendar diaries from years ago, each date filled-in with a recipe. There are pads stamped with the names of pharmaceutical companies, because th...