Not many people may have noticed a small item in the newspapers informing people in India that G V Desani, the author of All About H. Hatterr (1948), died on November 15, 2000 at Austin, Texas at the age of ninety two. If a classic can be defined as a book that everyone has heard of but very few have read, Hatterr had definitely attained that status specially after 1970 when Anthony Burgess wrote the preface to the novel in the Penguin Modern Classic edition. After writing only one short play a few years later -– Hali — first serialised in The Illustrated Weekly of India and subsequently published by The Writers Workshop in Calcutta, Desani fell into a meditative silence that lasted nearly half a century. Born of Sindhi parents in East Africa, he spent his adolescence in England. He studied Philosophy, Buddhism and Yoga, and like Raja Rao taught in the University of Texas most of his adult life. At the time of his death he was a Professor Emeritus there.

In several ways Desani was a writer born before the readers were ready for his kind of writing. In Hatterr he played with the English language, Indianising it with comic abandon and whimsical self-mockery, and celebrated hybridity and dislocation long before Salman Rushdie made such things trendy.