He seemed to remember what I had told him 11 years ago during an interview for The Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle before The White Tiger had won the Booker Prize. Though his foot had to be operated upon, he was hoping to be home soon.

On 20 January, he wrote that he had injured his foot in an accident in Bangalore (he’d not call it Bengaluru). His novel was due to release on 18 February. Last year, when his latest novel, Amnesty (Picador/Pan Macmillan India), the story of an illegal Sri Lankan immigrant in Sydney, had come out, we had connected for an interview for The Indian Express, where I was working then. In an inversion of the mantra that marketing is a necessary evil, the bane of an author’s existence that ultimately has its reward, he refuses to do too much publicity around his books, often to the chagrin of his publishers. Like Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger, his American prototypes, the 45-year-old author shies away from self-promotion. In an age when the writers are wont to taking the cloak of performers and clubbing themselves with various ‘camps’, Adiga forges - and walks - a lonely path. A self-avowed misfit, he is not a fixture at literary festivals and his public appearances and interviews in the media, especially in India, are few and far between. Aravind Adiga, the Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger (2008), has always struck me as India’s most famous literary recluse, an anomaly in the modern publishing world where the order of the day seems to be: Publicise or be damned.

Adiga aravind the white tiger 2008