Shiva Naipaul, an Indian-origin writer in English, was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and settled in England. His novel Fireflies begins by tracing the aspirations and failures of Ram Lutchman, a nondescript bus driver on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Ram’s arranged marriage to Baby Khoja marks his initiation into the influential Khoja clan, where the latter’s hypocritical adherence to an atavistic notion of Hindu communal life complicates the protagonist’s perception of his place within the plural society of the Caribbean. Ram’s ambition is constantly marred by a lack of purpose compounded by his feeling of redundancy and general disquiet. His discontent flourishes within his marital life, where domestic violence becomes the norm, and his inability to imagine his wife as an object of desire compounds his need to seek release from the constraints of domesticity outside.