Half a Life

Willie Chandran grows up in a small Indian city dominated by a maharaja's palace, the son of a brahmin father, a member of the highest Hindu priestly caste, who has become a local holy man and a mother from a low-caste group known as "backwards," a period term for communities historically excluded from social privileges. The novel traces Willie's life across three countries and two decades, exploring how colonial and postcolonial displacement shapes identity.

The story begins with Willie asking his father about his middle name, Somerset. His father responds with a life story that takes years to tell. In the 1930s, a famous English writer, implied to be Somerset Maugham, visited India gathering material for a novel about spirituality. Willie's father was then living as a mendicant, or wandering ascetic, in the outer courtyard of a large temple, having taken a vow of silence to protect himself from persecution by the maharaja's officials. The writer published flattering pages about him, and foreign critics identified Willie's father as the spiritual source behind the writer's famous novel. The attention transformed his life: the maharaja's officials reversed their persecution, foreign visitors arrived regularly, and Willie's father found himself trapped in a role he never intended.

His father explains the family's descent from temple priests who became destitute under Muslim and then British rule. His grandfather fled the starving temple community, walked three days to a railway station, and eventually became a clerk in the maharaja's palace. Willie's father was expected to continue this upward climb, earn a degree, and marry the college principal's daughter. Instead, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's call for students to boycott universities, he resolved to make a life of sacrifice by marrying the lowest-caste person he could find. He fixated on a dark-skinned backward scholarship girl at the university. The girl's uncle, a firebrand labor activist, threatened violence, and Willie's father hid the girl with an image-maker. Working in the maharaja's Land Tax department, he began destroying records out of sympathy for cheated peasants and was investigated for corruption. Caught between multiple threats, he shaved his head and took sanctuary in the temple. The firebrand's protest procession kept authorities at bay, and the famous writer's return visit cemented his status as a holy man permanently protected by foreign regard.

He eventually married the backward girl, but his private life is one of shame and melancholy. He examines his children obsessively for signs of low-caste inheritance. When the story concludes, Willie tells his father, "I despise you" (35).

Willie and his sister Sarojini attend a Canadian mission school. Willie grows ashamed of both parents and channels his anger into dark stories, including a parable in which a brahmin sacrifices children annually for treasure, only to discover the final victims are his own. His father reads the story as an attack on the family and resolves to send Willie far away. After most foreign contacts ignore his requests, a lord in the House of Lords arranges a scholarship at a college of education in London.

Willie arrives in London at twenty, overwhelmed and disappointed. He contacts two of his father's acquaintances: a condescending journalist and the famous writer, who sends a politely empty form letter. Willie begins to feel sympathy for his father for the first time. At college, he discovers that distance from home grants him freedom to reinvent himself. No one knows the caste rules of his place, and he remakes his background: his mother becomes a member of an ancient Christian community, her uncle becomes a pioneer of workers' rights. He befriends Percy Cato, a Jamaican of mixed parentage from Panama, and through Percy enters the bohemian immigrant social world of late 1950s London. Percy's girlfriend June takes Willie to a room in Notting Hill, where they have sex.

Willie begins writing radio scripts for the BBC and develops a friendship with Roger, a young lawyer who opens a different, more established London to him. Roger critiques Willie's old stories sharply, and Willie, inspired by Hemingway's early work, rewrites them into a collection of 26 stories set in a vague, half-real Indian town. Roger helps Willie place the collection with a publisher, but the contract is exploitative and the reviews sparse. Willie resolves to write no more. Then a letter arrives from a young woman named Ana, from a Portuguese African country, who writes that she found moments in Willie's stories that mirror her own life.

The Notting Hill race riots erupt. Percy disappears. Willie hides at the college, feeling exposed. When Ana comes to meet him, all his anxieties fall away. She is young, pretty, and possessed of an easy manner. For the first time, Willie feels completely accepted. His sister Sarojini, now married to an older German filmmaker named Wolf, visits London and challenges Willie about his aimless life. Willie decides to go with Ana to Africa, recognizing her as his only sign of where he should go. They arrive at Ana's estate, a concrete house among cashew groves in a northern province. Willie resolves never to unpack. He stays for 18 years.

The novel's third part is framed as Willie's retrospective account of those years, told to Sarojini in Berlin. It opens with the scene of departure: Willie slips on the estate's mossy marble steps and wakes in a military hospital, telling Ana he is leaving. Six weeks later he arrives at Sarojini's flat in Charlottenburg.

He describes his dependence on Ana and his gradual integration into the social world of mixed-race estate owners. Ana's family history emerges in layers: her grandfather came to the colony, became half-African, made a fortune during World War I, and sent his daughters to Portugal to marry proper Portuguese men. Ana's father eventually disappeared, having secretly mortgaged away half the estate. Willie's passport is stolen, and Ana summons a fetish-man, a local spiritual healer with the power to divine wrongdoing. As the fetish-man's arrival approaches, the stolen items reappear one by one, revealing a hidden structure of power among the African workers.

News of a massacre of Portuguese settlers in another colony introduces the threat of war. The garrison expands, and Jacinto Correia, a neighbor, grows wealthy through military procurement before a corruption scandal exposes the precariousness of the colonial world. Álvaro, the Correias' estate manager, introduces Willie to the sexual life of the garrison town. The experience gives Willie a new idea of himself, but the visits eventually become mechanical and unsatisfying.

Jacinto dies, and his wife Carla sells the estate. A new manager, Luis, and his wife Graça arrive. Willie and Graça begin a passionate affair, meeting at an abandoned estate house deep in the bush. Their relationship reaches a depth Willie has never known. Meanwhile, the colonial order fractures. Júlio the carpenter's daughter defiantly places excrement on Ana's bed, declaring she will return and not as a servant. A missionary reports that guerrillas have infiltrated the area.

Luis disappears into the bush and returns with a ruined mind. The colonial government collapses, the guerrillas take over, and the concrete world decays. Graça embraces the new regime. Ana refuses to leave, determined to protect her grandfather's legacy. A new tribal war begins, backed by the white government to the west. Willie, waking in the military hospital after his fall, tells Ana he is tired of living her life. Ana replies, "Perhaps it wasn't really my life either" (211). Willie dictates a letter to Sarojini and, six weeks later, arrives in Berlin to begin again at forty-one.