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life. The British themselves are far away, their presence hinted at only in their institutions: the bank, the mission school. The writer contemplates the lesser life that goes on below: small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means: a life so circumscribed that it appears whole and unviolated, its smallness never a subject for wonder, though India itself is felt to be vast.
    In his autobiography,
My Days
, published in 1974, Narayan fills in the background to his novels. This book, though more exotic in content than the novels, is of a piece with them. It is not more politically explicit or exploratory. The southern city of Madras –one of the earliest English foundations in India, the site leased by the East India Company in 1640 from the last remnant of the Vijayanagar kingdom – was where Narayan spent much of his childhood. Madras was part of a region that had long been pacified, was more Hindu than the north, less Islamized, and had had seventy-five years more of peace. It had known no wars, Narayan says, since the days of Clive. When, during the First World War, the roving German battleship
Emden
appeared in the harbour one night, turned on its searchlights, and began shelling the city, people ‘wondered at the phenomenon of thunder and lightning with a sky full of stars’. Some people fled inland. This flight, Narayan says, ‘was in keeping with an earlier move, when the sea was rough with cyclone and it was prophesied that the world would end that day’.
    The world of Narayan’s childhood was one that had turned in on itself, had become a world of prophecy and magic, removed from great events and removed, it might seem, from the possibility of politics. But politics did come; and it came, as perhaps it could only come, by stealth, and mingled with ritual and religion. At school Narayan joined the Boy Scouts. But the Boy Scouts movement in Madras was controlled by Annie Besant, the Theosophist, who had a larger idea of Indian civilization than most Indians had at that time; and, in sly subversion of Lord Baden-Powell’s imperial purpose, the Besant Scouts sang, to the tune of ‘God Save the King’: ‘God save our motherland, God save our noble land, God save our Ind.’
    One day in 1919 Narayan fell in with a procession that had started from the ancient temple of Iswara. The procession sang ‘patriotic songs’ and shouted slogans and made its way back to the temple, where there was a distribution of sweets. This festive and devout affair was the first nationalist agitation in Madras. And – though Narayan doesn’t say it – it was part of the first all-India protest that had been decreed by Gandhi, aged forty-nine, just three years back from South Africa, and until then relatively unknown in India. Narayan was pleased to have taken part in the procession.But his uncle, a young man and a modern man (one of the earliest amateur photographers in India), was less than pleased. The uncle, Narayan says, was ‘anti-political and did not want me to be misled. He condemned all rulers, governments and administrative machinery as Satanic and saw no logic in seeking a change of rulers.’
    Well, that was where we all began, all of us who are over forty and were colonials, subject people who had learned to live with the idea of subjection. We lived within our lesser world; and we could even pretend it was whole because we had forgotten that it had been shattered. Disturbance, instability, development lay elsewhere; we, who had lost our wars and were removed from great events, were at peace. In life, as in literature, we received tourists. Subjection flattened, made dissimilar places alike. Narayan’s India, with its colonial apparatus, was oddly like the Trinidad of my childhood. His oblique perception of that apparatus, and the rulers, matched my own; and in the Indian life of his novels I found echoes of the life of my own Indian community on the other side of the world.
    But Narayan’s novels did not