"Labhu," I would say," I am sure it is impossible to track any prey when you are half up the side of a hillock."

"Achha," he would say," I will show you. Stand still and listen."

I did so and we both heard a pebble drop. Up he darted on the stony ridge in the direction whence the sound had come, jumping from crag to crag, securing a precarious foothold on a small stone here and a sure one on a boulder there, till he was tearing through a flock of sheep, towards a little gully where a ram had taken shelter in a cave, secure in the belief that it would escape its pursuer."

That little excerpt has been taken fro a short story, "The Liar" by Mulk Raj Anand. He is considered to be one of the fathers of Indian  literature in English along with R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao.

Mulk Raj Anand passed away at the age of 99 at Pune on 28th September this year. With his death comes an era of Indian English in literature. He was a short story writer, a novelist and an art critic. He was among the first Indians to render Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into his writings. Most of Mulk Raj Anands stories portray a realistic picture of the poor in India.

His style of writing is simple but his sentences are a little long winded. This was the norm in those days . However, Mulk Raj`s Anands writing has a richness of imagery which is difficult to beat.

He was born in 1905 in Peshawar, now in Pakistan to Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier and Ishwar Kaur. He studies at Khalsa College in Amritsar and later at the University of Punjab. Later he went to England to study at Cambridge and London University and received his Ph.D. in 1929. During World War II he worked for BBC and among his friends was the well known George Orwell who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm and H.G. Wells who wrote many sci- fi novels. After the war Anand returned to India.

He began to write at an early age and some of his first texts were a reaction to the suicide of his aunt. while some of his early poetry stemmed from feelings of  an unrequited love with a Muslim girl.

"The Untouchables", "Coolies" and "Two leaves and a Bud" are some of his most memorable early works. While "Untouchables" deals with a day in the life of an outcaste called Bakha, "Coolie" is the story of a fifteen year old child labourer who dies of tuberculosis. "Two Leaves and a Bud" was a socially conscious novel set in a tea estate and is about the exploitation of a poor Punajbi peasant by a British officer.

Mulk Raj Anad also published many other books and wrote on a variety of subjects including Nehru, Tagore, Aesop`s fables, ivories and the theories of Marx and Engels.

He founded a fine arts magazine called Marg and became director of a publishing company while teaching at various Indian Universities. He married an Englishwoman and divorced her before marrying a Parsee lady by the name of Shirin Vajifdar  They have a daughter called Sushila Anand who is also a writer and a historian.