Attia Hosain Images: Young Attia

Then they [publishers Chatto] kept on at me that you've got to write a novel and anybody else with any sense, any ambitious person would have killed themselves and gone and hidden in a country place, but I had to work.

I was also, as I say, by now suffering deeply from this homesickness. I did go back in 1951 to India for recorded stuff and I went back for a month or six weeks because I had begun to lose hair which falls out with nervousness and unhappiness and the specialist said this "why she is here?" She is obviously a very unhappy person here [in England].

Well, so I came back cured and full of thoughts again and I began to realise I had to write that other book that I had promised Chatto's - not that I did the second and third.

But I sat down to write that one [Sunlight on a Broken Column]. I' work and then I'd go off and sit in the country where I had a friend and stayed with her and she looked after me and shoved the food near the door and I'd go on. Then there'd be a gap because I couldn't go on then. Then I'd pick it up. In the strangest places that book was written. In Rahimyar Khan [Bahawalpur district, Punjab province, Pakistan], which was then like a wild-west outpost.