I lived outside India for 30 years. That’s a big chunk out of a writer’s life.

At the start of my self-imposed exile, I had no ambitions to write. I went abroad to study engineering, a bad choice as I was lousy in maths. I had loved books ever since I could read and my father had a huge collection, ranging from science, history, philosophy, travel to fiction. Very few of them were written by Indians. And none at all for children. Only Rudyard Kipling wrote novels on India, not so much for Indian children, but for his English readers. Apart from reading, my grandmother filled my imagination with our mythical tales.

Failing miserably as an engineer, I went to McGill University to study political science and history. I became a writer there purely by chance. I had worked in a logging camp in Queen Charlotte’s Islands (British Columbia) one summer to pay my way through college. On my return to university, instead of working on a history paper, I doodled an offbeat story on my logging experience. It was journalistic fiction, a sort of short story.

At that time, I admired two newspapers – The New York Herald Tribune and the (then) Manchester Guardian. They had some great writers working for them, and they both had a distinct literary style. The Tribune was just folding and, on a whim, I sent my story to the Guardian. I heard nothing further, forgot about it, and immersed myself in studies until, fatefully, one day, I opened the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian. My story filled a whole precious page of that slim weekly. As anyone knows, seeing one’s name in print the first time is the closest to having an orgasm without the sex.

I had found my calling – to be a writer, or at least a journalist. I wrote a couple more pieces on Canadian life for the Guardian, saw them published, and, with those clippings in hand, landed a job in a small town Canadian newspaper. I was taught the reporting craft by the editor who hired me, Don Soutter. When he left for a big city job, the incoming editor fired me immediately, as I was a brown person cluttering his all-white newsroom. He was frank – my presence, he said, disturbed him. My fellow reporters, knowing why I was fired, wanted to strike. I was touched by their loyalty, and dissuaded them from industrial action. I had other ambitions.

 

I moved to London and walked into The Guardian. The Guardian, embarrassed to find I was Indian, and not Italian as they had presumed from my name, gave me a subbing job. I continued to write features for it in my spare time. Back then, The Guardian published just a few pages, unlike today’s Guardian that is as fat as the New York Times, and so there was very limited space. You had to have talent, and write imaginatively with a distinctive style of your own. The highest back-handed compliment I ever received was from the then features editor, Christopher Driver. He wandered over to my desk one day with my copy in hand and said: ‘You’re like the rest of them here. You don’t have any grammar and you can’t spell.’ The company I kept then were Eton/Harrow/Oxford/Cambridge old boys.

Many years later when I met Amitav Ghosh, he gushed that in those days I was the only Indian writing and he had read everything I wrote. However, there was a far more famous Indian writing at the same time, V.S. Naipaul. I admired his writings, novels set in the Caribbean and Africa, and for Indians, his controversial, An Area of Darkness. Yet, although he lived in England, he never set his works in that country. I wished he would have written about his immigrant experience. But he never did, apart from a very sharp short story published a couple of years ago in the New Yorker. I wondered about that, in some ways envious, as I could not write from such a distance.

 

I never wrote on India, except once. When the French film director Louis Malle made his documentaries on India, and was pilloried by the Indian government and press, I defended his right in The Guardian to make films on what he saw. Otherwise, I wrote only about the England I knew. I had been away from India too long, and only possessed childhood and adolescent memories of India. I did visit India annually, to see my widowed father and spent most of my time with him, though I would take a week off to travel in India.

My first novel, The Marriage, did have Indian characters but it was set entirely in Midlands, and was the first novel on the Indian diaspora published in England. The novel, set in and around Coventry, was about first-generation Punjabis with discrimination and labour problems. Entwined with the story was another about the love affair between an Indian girl, daughter of the Punjabi union organiser, and an English boy. The novel had very good, but patronising, reviews and didn’t set the world on fire. Since then, of course, there’s been a cascade of novels about the diaspora.

My next book was a non-fiction work, The New Savages, set in Liverpool’s Toxteth area and revolved around the teenage gangs, Black versus White, that battled each other along the borders of their tenement estates. I was savaged by the press and the critics. They accused me of fabricating the lives of the Black and White kids and the racial tensions between them. There was a complacency then that all was well between the races, and I had disturbed that perceived harmony. A couple of newspapers did make an effort to check out my findings, and did report that I had accurately reflected the racial problems.

What stung most, however, was the indignation that the ‘Man from Madras’ had dared to write on such subjects, the preserve of the White Briton. I realized then I was an outsider, and would always remain one, no matter how long I lived in England, then near to 15 years. The English, even today, are an island and insular race. Sadly, I was vindicated in my prediction of racial problems – a year after the publication of The New Savages there was a major race riot in Liverpool, in Toxteth, exactly along the territorial lines in my book.

 

Someone suggested I should write on Indian gangs but I had to admit I knew little about them. I was quite well-entrenched in England – with English friends, an English girlfriend, playing cricket for The Guardian and other teams, including Harold Pinter’s XI, propping the pub, occasionally having a curry meal to remind me of my roots. How could I write on India from such a distance? I made a couple of attempts, neither very satisfactory and my fiction, The Oblivion Tapes and Lovers are Not People, continued to be set in the West, without an Indian in sight between the covers.

It was on one of my annual visits that I went to Mysore and, crassly, gatecrashed into R.K. Narayan’s home. He was a wonderfully courteous, gentle man and I had read all his novels. We chatted on politics, writing and writers over cups of tea. I returned to visit him a year later and this time he made the remark, ‘How can you write about India from so far away? You only catch a glimpse of life here, like any tourist.’ That comment stayed with me a long time, though I had admitted to R.K. that I hadn’t yet attempted to write a novel set in India. He had very kindly replied that he hoped I would, one day.

 

I moved to New York and between writing for The Guardian and making television documentaries – Only An America, for a British TV company – decided to write my ‘Indian’ novel. R.K. was right – from that distance, I couldn’t write about the present. I didn’t know all the nuances and characters I would need to write about and, most important, if I got it wrong, the reader would notice the mistakes. I chose the safe path of the past. ‘The past is another country’ is the first line of J.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between.

I’d be safe in that country as I was the only one who knew its characters, the geography, the family conflicts. Field of Honor was published by Simon and Schuster in New York (Methuen in London) and I was privileged to have the hottest editor in the literary universe, Michael Korda, as my editor. I was invited to join him for a lunch or two at his favourite table at the Four Seasons. I’d also been having an intermittent communication, not really letters, with Graham Greene, another writer I admired and I had read all his novels. I sent him the book and he sent back a note with his opinion – ‘I was very much impressed with Field of Honor’, which, of course, I used. Unfortunately, the novel vanished without a trace, though it was optioned for a film by a Hollywood producer.

‘You must write another novel on India,’ my agent encouraged me. Unfortunately, I was hit with a sort of writer’s block. I had spent many months researching and filming homicide detectives in the South Bronx and had made good friends of a couple of them. Cops are great storytellers. So, when I got down to write my next Indian novel, out came a cop story, The Shooter, a ‘police procedural’, set in New York. It had surprisingly good reviews and it did cleanse me of my cop stories.

Now, I was ready for my next Indian novel. It would be set in Madras, my home town. It didn’t happen. Instead, distracted by a disparaging remark by my wife, when we visited the Taj Mahal 25 years ago, about my ignorance of the Mughal period, I returned to New York to brush up my history to disprove her. Out came Taj, A Story of Mughal India. It became a bestseller in the UK, France and in all the European languages. It is still in print and has now notched up the 17th translation – Russian. American publishers continually reject it as ‘too complex for American readers.’

 

As history had been my earlier passion, I returned to it with some vengeance. My next novel was set at the turn of the 20th century. The British Empire was at its very height – Queen Victoria was Empress of India and Lord Curzon her Viceroy – and looked as if it would last forever. Yet, within a few years, the end of British rule in India was beginning. I needed a central character for the novel, someone who reflected the ambiguity of belonging, even as I was experiencing it, living in New York. The Imperial Agent was Kipling’s Kim. Here was someone who could wander, belonging to both the British and the Indian, and he meets all the real men and women – Tilak, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal, Gandhi – who were the founders of the Indian freedom movement.

As the novel was too long, my editor suggested I publish it in two parts. Any writer is delighted with that kind of suggestion, as it gets him two bites of the same apple. The Last Victory followed and it ended with the massacres at Jallianwallah Bagh. After its success, my editor, Mary Sandys, advised me to stay with historical fiction. It was easier to write, for me anyway, from that distance as it was ‘another country’.

 

But I began to tire of my exile. The decision to return home was made for me – my father was increasingly unwell and there were the usual property problems that he could not cope with. As if waiting for my return, my father passed away and I had to grapple with the property. Both experiences were emotionally exhausting. I squeezed out my first set-in-India contemporary novel, Enduring Affairs, published by Picador. It was a semi-political novel, set in Madras and America, but I understood what R.K. Narayan meant so many years ago – I needed to be here to write, I felt.

Writing fiction can be draining and I had been nurturing ambitions to make films. I had a script, I needed the money. A couple of years of trying went by before the money came together, but on the condition that someone else directed my script. When both the director, Amol Palekar, and his cameraman, read the script, their first comment was, ‘How could a videshi write such a very Indian script?’ I wrote it as I had observed and absorbed the India I had avoided for so long.

The Square Circle (Daayra, in Hindi) crossed over long before the term came into vogue and was generally released in the UK, France and Australia. It starred Nirmal Pandey as transvestite and Sonali Kulkarni as the stolen village girl. The Square Circle made Time magazine’s top 10 best films and won flattering reviews, for the script especially, in all the newspapers and in several languages. I did get my revenge for not being allowed to direct the film. The Leicester Haymarket Theatre commissioned me to adapt the film for the stage and direct it. I had for my main lead, a wonderful actress, Parminder Nagra (later of Bend it like Beckham fame) as the village girl stolen from her village. Rahul Bose played Nirmal Pandey’s role on stage.

Since then I’ve written three novels – Arrangements of Love, The Small House and Children of the Enchanted Jungle – and two, what I call memoirs – My Temporary Son and Limping to the Centre of the World: A Journey to Mount Kailas. I doubt I could have written any of them living far away in New York. They all needed a close embrace of the Indian daily way of life, the small incremental changes that took place before my eyes. Writers depend on their observations, and thoughts of course, to write contemporary novels as they cannot set them always in another country.

Even such a gifted writer as Salman Rushdie needs to soak in India. His previous novel, set in Italy and Mughal India, was the writer’s way of ‘another country’, the secure past. Recently, the New Yorker published his short story, ‘In the South’, set in Madras, reflecting his long stays in Madras during his marriage to his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi, a Madrasi. He couldn’t have written about the minutiae of this city’s life from frenetic Manhattan, without spending time here. Other writers in exile do continue to write about India but, for the most part, I’ve always read them as memory literature, the remembrance of things past. They do succeed in capturing an India of their memory, and I do envy them that facility.

However, I had to return home before I could write about this complex, complicated, very extraordinary society and culture called India.