Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a hard man to catch in the weeks leading up to the announcement of the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012. With a host of literature festivals making demands on his time, he’s travelling between countries. His exquisitely written book, Between Clay and Dust, takes us back to a time when life was more quaint, more dainty, and more principled than today. Ambiguous in its setting, it looks at the slow disintegration of the arts at a time when two ne