After several weeks boozing up a storm in Vietnam, I set myself a Herculean task: I wouldn’t touch a drop in India, my next destination, for a full three months.

This was somewhat out of character. With me, drinking has always been part of the package, as integral, I thought, to my personality—or at least the personality I wished to project—as my writing or sparkling wit. That my sentences grew longer and more tortuous with each beer, and my sparkling wit duller with each glass of sparkling, was never something I really thought about.