Rao’s fellow student friend, Ahmed Ali, went on to become a famous novelist, another peer, Chetan Anand, an influential film producer–director. Rao also began learning French at Aligarh, which contributed to his decision to go to France a couple of years later. After matriculating in 1927, he returned to Hyderabad to enrol in a BA course at Nizam’s College. Two years later, he graduated, having majored in English and history.

In 1929, Rao won the Asiatic Scholarship of the government of Hyderabad for study abroad. He went out of India for the first time in his life. In a sense, he never quite returned home again. His scholarship took him to the University of Montpellier in France. He was researching the missing link in India’s impact on Europe, especially if the Cathars, whom he believed had been influenced by Buddhism, could provide the vital clue.

At Montpellier he also met Camille Mouly, a French teacher. They married later that same year. As Rao told me, ‘We had a very simple arrangement. I would write and she would support me.’ No question that Camille was the most important person in his life till the marriage broke up some ten years after. She features, thinly disguised as a fictional character, in his major works such as The Serpent and the Rope and The Chessmaster and His Moves.

Rao’s first efforts as a writer were in Kannada, his mother tongue. Between 1931 and 1933, he published three essays and a poem in Kannada in a journal called Jaya Karnataka. For the next two years, he researched the influence of India on Irish literature at the Sorbonne. His first short stories were published in journals such as Asia (New York) and Les Cahiers du Sud (Paris). In 1933, Rao abandoned research to devote himself to writing.

Rao, however, soon shifted to English from Kannada. As he recalled to me, ‘I realized that the time was not ripe to become a global writer in Kannada. Though I was proudly nationalistic, I thought writing in English would make a greater impact on the world.’ His early short stories were published in a collection called The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories in 1947. Another volume, The Policeman and the Rose (1978), came out much later. It retained the seven earlier published stories, with three new ones written in the 1960s.

In addition to novels and short stories, Rao published essays, travelogues and biographical sketches in various journals and popular magazines. Some of these have been collected in The Meaning of India. But much earlier, he co-edited with Iqbal Singh two collections of essays, Changing India (1939) and Whither India (1948). He was also the editor of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1949).