198(Ht mm) 129(Wdt mm) 304

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession. His novels include <i>A House for Mr Biswas</i>, <i>The Mimic Men</i>, <i>Guerrillas</i>, <i>A Bend in the River</i>, and <i>The Enigma of Arrival</i>. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for <i>In a Free State</i>. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include <i>Among the Believers</i>, <i>Beyond Belief</i>, <i>The Masque of Africa</i>, and a trio of books about India: <i>An Area of Darkness</i>, <i>India: A Wounded Civilization</i> and <i>India: A Million Mutinies Now</i>. In 1990, V. S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018. Willy Chandra whom we first met in 'Half a Life' is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister and his own listlessness and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years in jail convince him that the revolution "had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for".