The Bachelor of Arts – R.K. Narayan

“There are writers Tolstoy and Henry James to name two whom we hold in awe, writers Turgenev and Chekhov for whom we feel a personal affection, other writers whom we respect Conrad for example but who hold us at a long arm’s length with their ‘courtly foreign grace.’ Narayan (whom I don’t hesitate to name in such a context) more than any of them wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.” Graham Greene