Coming from a family which left India only two generation ago, V. S. Naipaul felt that his roots lay in India. But the country and its attitudes remained outside his experience, in an ‘area of darkness’, until, with some apprehension, he spent a year there. He arrived at Bombay, then travelled as far north as Kashmir, east to Calcutta and south to Madras, talking in a pilgrimage to a holy cave in the Himalayas and a stay on the Dal Lake. With his novelist’s perception and sense of comedy he both describes the places, people and incidents, and manages to convey the meaning which lies behind them.