Book Excerpt: Never at Home by Dom Moraes

Title: Never at Home: An Autobiography

Author: Dom Moraes

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books, 2020

I arrived in Bombay towards the end of the monsoon. This had always been one of my favourite seasons as an adolescent, but I now found myself looking at it in a different way. It made a mess of the roads, and the city seemed to founder under it. I realized with a certain wonder that I was seeing it as a foreigner; that I was seeing it as a foreign city, though it was less than five years since I had lived there. My encounters with people I had previously known had a certain dreamlike quality: their personalities, familiar before, now seemed seen through a kind of mist. I was treated with some awe, because I had won the Hawthornden. I assumed a posture of arrogance, and secretly felt a little ashamed. The newspapers spoke of the book I had come to write.

Actually, I hadn’t planned this book at all; the thought of starting on it slightly terrified me. I didn’t know where or how to start: I had never tried anything like this before. In these circumstances, as often in the past, I consulted my father. He said, ‘I imagine you want to write this book as an outsider looking in. I couldn’t do that myself, about India. The only way I can help is by imagining that you are an outsider.’ There was a slight double edge to this remark, untypical of him. But then he was entitled to it.