We suffered black-out, food rationing, alarums and excursions even in our distant corner of Mysore, but in addition to what the public suffered, I had my own personal losses to count. My agent, David Higham, now perhaps a major general, was away on army duty. The British publishers were nowhere to be seen, all copies of my books, waiting to be sold, were destroyed in a London blitz, and the little royalties trickling in half-yearly were gone. The Hindu could not take in as many contributions as it used to owing to newsprint shortage, printing-ink shortage, and god knew what else. It was necessary for me to do something else to keep myself going. No way left for a writer to reach a public. Journalists and writers who could get into the propaganda organization were saved, but I was outside such activity. Neither politics nor the war were of any interest to me. The Hindu provided a little space for my contributions, but I was getting tired of recording my observations of the life around. The constant state of receptivity and then the eight-hundred-word expression thereof were becoming tiresome—I wanted to put an end to this activity before the readers of The Hindu should also begin to think likewise.
