Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore, while travelling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai, watched the snakeboat races at Arunmala, stayed with Syriac Christians at Cochin and was offered heroin in the Jewish cemetery. Wherever he went he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbours. As Major Trivedi warned him nothing is as fixed as you think . Three Quarters of a Footprint has long fascinated readers with its gentle, perceptive humour, chilled occasionally by a shadow of menace, as if the spirit and wit of R K Narayan had been reborn in an Englishman.

Joe Roberts was born in Bath in 1958. Educated in England, in his twenties he lived in America working as a bookseller in Manhattan and a baker in Austin, Texas, returning to Bath to continue work as a bookseller and restaurant cook. In 1990 he travelled to southern India for seven months, the first of many trips to a country he visited regularly and wrote about for the rest of his life - and where he met his wife, Emma. Three-Quarters of a Footprint was first published by Bantam in 1994. It was followed by The House of Blue Lights and Abdul's Taxi to Kalighat and Bengal, The Cold Weather, 1873, about Edward Lear's visit to India. He also taught creative writing at Bath Spa University and Ashoka University. A gifted cook, talker and maker of friends, Joe's family table (he and Emma had three sons) was always a place for good food and lively conversation. Joe's interests were broad, but his real passion was always for India. At the time of his unexpected death in 2023 he was working on a childhood memoir.