Nowhere man essay

In The Nowhere Man this character is Srinivas, an elderly spice importer, native of India, and decades-long resident of a leafy South London suburb. Along with many newer arrivals from South Asia and the Caribbean, Srinivas realizes with horror that, at nearly seventy years old, he has been marked as a pariah, ‘a convict on parole’.

Laxman, who has settled in Plymouth and absorbed himself in his own family and career, barely keeps in touch. Isolated and bereft, Srinivas is afflicted with a depression bordering on catatonia. In the kind of perfectly turned metaphor that induces a shiver of recognition, his life is described as ‘a dust bowl of being.

Markandaya wrote under a pseudonym: she was born Kamala Purnaiya and became Kamala Taylor when she married her English husband, Bernard Taylor, in 1948. She rarely granted interviews, and brushed aside suggestions that her novels contained autobiographical details.