He struggled to survive as a writer and passed through the trauma of his wife's premature death in 1939 from typhoid fever: an experience that prompted his sole novel without much humour, at a time when he was experimenting with spiritualism.From the outset he found drama in the most ordinary of situations. Small wonder that he was very drawn to Gandhi (and also liked Mrs Gandhi, who used his occasional visits to Delhi as a kind of therapy). With his bald nut-brown dome and bubbling sallies of wit Narayan faintly resembled the Mahatma, whose intimate spell and complex laconic personality Narayan subtly sketched in his 1955 novel Waiting for the Mahatma.He could be tough too, like Gandhi. Here, for instance, is his judgement on British colonial rule, taken from an article he once wrote for The New York Times.

The few Britishers in India, wrote Narayan, realised early on that they must utilise Indians themselves to run much of the bureaucratic and military machinery of India. "Very much like the Kheddah operations in Mysore forests," Narayan wrote,where wild elephants are hemmed in and driven into stockades by trained men, and then pushed and pummelled until they realise the advantages of remaining loyal and useful, in order to earn their ration of sugarcane and rice. Take this as a symbol of the British rule in India.Ventures into the political arena were comparatively infrequent for Narayan ­ politics being in his view "the least interesting aspect of life". Nevertheless, in his seventies he agreed to become a nominated member of the Upper House of the Indian Parliament in Delhi.

He used his position to draw attention to his long-standing preoccupation with the environment. "I'm interested in trees which are being cut down by industrialists," he remarked to me. "There's also a lot of goats and sheep who feed on roadside trees. That keeps me active." "How?," I asked, half-expecting him to refer to his patronage of some green organisation or other. "I shout at them," he said instead, half-seriously ­ just as the harmless individuals in his fiction like to do with vain regularity.Once in a while he would come out publicly with some more pointed shaft of wit directed at the idiocies of Indian politicians; the verbal equivalent of the brilliant pocket cartoons of the Common Man that Narayan's younger brother, the cartoonist R K.