If the fortune was to be recovered and their claim accepted, he said it would go to his son. He also disclosed that the Crawfords, who have been looking for the treasure for two years, had a long association with the Kapurthala clan, as Mr Crawford's grandfather was "our family surgeon".. India's first great novelist in English, RK Narayan, died yesterday morning in Madras of heart failure at the age of 94. India's first great novelist in English, RK Narayan, died yesterday morning in Madras of heart failure at the age of 94.Born in Madras, Narayan did only moderately well at school, despite being the son of a college headmaster, and floundered as a teacher and journalist before finding his direction with his first novel, Swami and Friends, which was published in 1935.

Graham Greene, who praised the book's mixture of "beauty and sadness", helped Narayan to find a British publisher and make a name for himself in the West. But although Narayan wrote in English and was the product of the tiny anglicised middle class, all his books were rooted in everyday Indian provincial life, and many were set in the imaginary town of Malgudi, loosely based on the former princely state of Mysore in present-day Karnataka, west India. His style was deliciously elegant, in the plainest possible way; the humour gentle and genial. Whatever the pains or difficulties experienced by his characters, there is in his work an abiding sense of the rhythms of a deeply rooted society persisting in the background.The sadness that Greene noticed became more marked in his later books because of personal tragedy. The serenely happy life he enjoyed with his wife, Rajam, was cut brutally short after a mere six years, in 1939, when she contracted typhoid and died. Both the happy marriage and the bitter end of it are evoked in his novel The English Teacher, in which the bereaved protagonist uses mediums to try to contact his wife beyond the grave. Narayan made the same attempt himself.But if there was sadness there was little perturbation, little sense that Narayan was writing from within a society on the cusp of drastic change.

The Anglo-Indian world of little railway stations and dusty streets, modest homes and fussing relatives seems immutably calm and settled. In his book An Area of Darkness, VS Naipaul wrote: "The virtues of RK Narayan are Indian failings magically transmuted He operates from deep within his society ... the India of Narayan's novels is not the India the visitor sees ... Too much that is overwhelming has been left out." Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan wrote 34 novels in all, and in 1984 was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's highest civilian decoration.He is survived by a brother, RK Laxman, the Times of India's legendary cartoonist, two grandsons, and the son-in-law with whom he spent his last years.. Zimbabwe's beleaguered opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been forced to take much of its political activity "underground" to avoid the violence of a government widening its net of repression and terror to attack diplomats and aid workers.