Through brown eyes

In this sensitive memoir an Indian architect living in England since 1960 writes of his life there and tells of the aspects and attitudes of British society that the stories of his childhood had never prepared him for: ugly industrial landscapes, bureaucracy, cultural apathy, and naked racial prejudice. How he conquered his isolation and found solace as an artist and writer is here told in a style whose success lies in "short simple sentences with a cumulative density of effect that no literary elaboration could improve on" (from a review of his first book, My Village, My Life).