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LP Hartley once said, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The search for continuity and the need for identity, for a personal myth, is one reason that drives writers to write. Through their flawed, perception and from the broken mirrors of unreliable memory, they try to recreate their version of reality in a book that will to some extent restore for them an experience which they could never hope to relive again, an experience that has been irretrievably sucked into the whirlpool of the past. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie describes his first visit to Bombay in 40 years. Although his old house has changed hands, it still stands as in the fading photographs, 'a three-storied, gabled affair' as he calls it. When he looks up an old telephone directory, his father's name is still listed along with their old address, as if it were insisting that he had only been away for a few days, not an entire lifetime.

The narrator trying to relive experience through fragmented recollections is a recurring theme in Ishiguro's novels. In 'Remains of the Day', the butler Stevens embarks on a short holiday to Cornwall, during which he has the luxury of musing upon his past. He is obsessed with that elusive characteristic that sets apart a great butler, 'dignity', which, like one's clothes, must be worn at all times except when one is alone. It is a quality rarely found these days - it belongs to a different era, a different way of life. In voicing his debatable notions of dignity and loyalty, Stevens unwittingly exposes lives like his, wasted on lost causes and misplaced loyalty. Lord Darlington, a well-meaning meddler in foreign affairs, in whose assiduous service he has spent almost his entire career in the conviction that he is assisting a great cause, eventually becomes a liability to the British government. One of the most poignant scenes in the novel occurs when Stevens is unable to quit his post at Lord Darlington's dinner table as Miss Kenton quietly informs him that his father lies dying upstairs. Duty must come first, at whatever price. While pitying the butler, one cannot help but admire him for his sang froid in times of personal crises. ("Why do you have to pretend?" asks Miss Kenton. She probably understands the butler's feelings better than he does himself.) Those days that he spent in the service of Lord Darlington, those occasional walks with Miss. Kenton in the sprawling gardens of Darlington Hall are the pieces of a past that he must painstakingly retrieve and reconstruct into an altogether different kind of existence.

When I visited Madras last December, I walked past my old apartment amidst the thundering water-lorries and the screeching autos, dodging the oily puddles and trying to keep out the black smoke from my nostrils. It was a sleepy place once, the only sounds breaking the long languorous afternoons being the occasional knocking of one of the overhanging branches of the flame-of-the-forest at the window, the swishing of its leaves in the sea-breeze, the Mami next door arguing with the milkman, a distant dog barking, and on a still day the rumble of the sea. We could just see it from the terrace, a strip of blue ribbon laid out on the horizon. In spring the trees that lined our avenue would light up in vivid reds and yellows.I would sit for hours in a shady corner of the terrace reading Agatha Christie, tip-toeing with Hercule Poirot looking for clues, or simply staring at the kite-lined sky and dreaming of distant lands. Now it is those days that seem a distant land.

I do not necessarily want to have my time over again. Seen through the haze of memory, it seems rosier that it really was. Those were difficult days of looming examinations and report cards, of bullies on the playground and wild-eyed teachers of trigonometry. And yet, there is this sense of a lost time and place. Faded memories of childhood friends who moved away; Of parents laughing and young; Of relatives who came to tea with their boisterous voices taking your mind off Chemistry and stayed on past dinner when you were nearly nodding in your chair; Of the eagerly awaited serial on Sunday morning (You wondered why they had the channel knob on the telly, because the was only DD, anyway). Of Bittu and Kaalee Bindra from Udaipur, the eternal favourites of AIR. (AIR would invariably mention their names on 'Man Chahe Geet' before playing 'Sau Saal Pehle', which seemed about the only song those discerning sisters wanted to hear). Of birthdays in new clothes, when, for once you took the stairs one at a time instead of free-wheeling down the hand-rail imitating a space shuttle on re-entry.

Even if by some kind of miracle the home that one has known has been preserved exactly as it was, can you go back and take up where you left off? I would think not, because all your experiences in the time you were away have changed you and you may not quite fit in the way you did once. Indeed, this change is inevitable if not always desirable. Towards the end of the Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins feels a certain listlessness. Every now and then the memories of his adventures in Middle Earth haunt him and he can no longer be the laughing hobbit that he was. The other hobbits of Shire do not quite accept him and think his travels have made him a little queer. But if Frodo had not gone away, would he not still be a slightly boring Hobbit, fond of his hearth, his elevenses, his pipe and his siesta, instead of the the last hope for the free peoples against the might of Mordor, the intrepid ring-bearer who willingly took the burden upon himself? Hang in there, Frodo, I know what it is like!

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