But Murari, 66, is no stranger to biases. In the Capital to formally launch his latest novel The Small House (Penguin, Rs 395), Murari talks about his first job as a reporter at the Kingston Whig Standard in Ontario and how he was fired because the new editor was quite disturbed by his colour. Perhaps that was a good turning point. He went on to work for The Guardian in London and write his first novel, The Marriage, in 1973.

“Thirty-five years ago, Indians writing in English weren’t the flavour of the season. I went through an agent who pushed my work and finally Macmillan picked it up,” says Murari. He says journalism — he worked on both sides of the pond before settling down in Chennai — fed his fiction. “As a feature writer, I profiled a lot of celebrities. All that helped me when I wrote about a character,” says Murari. “But I’m a storyteller, not an intellectual writer. My works don’t have a deep message for the readers.”

In The Small House, he writes of a historian who finds out that her husband is keeping a chinnawheedu or small house, for a second wife, and she decides that she would like to swap places with the woman. Murari weaves the personal and the historical in his lucid prose as he travels back and forth with the protagonist. “A person’s past is memory. A nation’s past is history. What will happen when they merge?” he asks.