Son of a locomotive driver, 77-year-old Carl Muller survived three school dismissals, the Royal Ceylon Navy and Army, before settling down as a writer. At his colonial-style house in Peradeniya, central Sri Lanka, he looked anything but a cancer patient who, according to doctors, has six months to live, during the interview with our Colombo correspondent P K Balachandran. Your early work on the Burghers (Euro-Lankan people) were denounced. But your Burgher trilogy was very popular. Then you started writing on Sri Lanka’s history. Why mix fact with fiction?