R.K. Narayan, MY DAYS

(Saroja)


All day long I sat half-buried in castles and mountain ranges, unaware of the fierce Madras sun overhead. I had a peacock and a monkey for company.


I am startled at this beginning! When I read Narayan's story of the snake charmer's child, who had only a dull snake, Naga, and an unruly monkey for company, little had I imagined that these might have been drawn from the author's own boyhood memories.


I am on page 55 or thereabouts. Many times already, I have thought of the stories my parents would tell me about their village schools, the stern headmasters, the games on muddy playgrounds. No momentous stories here, but as Megha said, this book "makes you feel good". I too have an autobiography, it reminds me -- a life, however little in the magnitude of its events.

(25/08/08)

I read like a madwoman today in the train. Was smiling to myself as I devoured page after page on my way to college in the morning, oblivious of the people seated around me who must have been staring. Narayan's descriptions of his school and college days, with his caricatures of headmasters and college professors, and his humorous accounts of the distractions that tempted him away from studying, the statagems invented to pass exams and the excuses made to miss classes are all presented with such an unhesitating and honest philosophical sureness that I feel vindicated at having (erm... confession time) bunked class at the university again today. Suddenly, in place of a pricking conscience that accuses me of being a blotch on my profession, I find myself in possession of a lightening self-assuredness. Just as The English Teacher never fails to bring a flood of relief, letting that reflection in the glass keep its human proportions.


How could I tell the teacher, after he had lectured to us a whole morning, that I existed under a cloud of unknowing? My trouble was absolute abstraction from my surroundings. My mind was busy elsewhere -- watching through the large windows the cows grazing the fields.


Really, Narayan should be made compulsory reading for teachers.


It was a surprise to learn that Narayan had failed in English, of all subjects, in his university entrance exams. The story of this feat is enough to make him a true hero in my eyes, albeit one I might never dare to emulate:


One of our English texts was a grey-bound book of chilling dullness called Explorations and Discoveries, pages full of Mungo Park's expeditions and so forth. In my whole career I have not come across any book to match its unreadability. I had found it impossible, and totally abolished it from my universe, deciding to depend upon other questions in the examination from Oliver Twist or Poetical Selections. But I found in the examination hall that four out of six questions were based on Explorations -- that horrible man the question setter seemed to have been an abnormal explorationist...


In the year that followed, allowing him free time to wander about and do what he pleased till he took his exams again, Narayan himself engaged in explorations -- of the wild country in Mysore and of all the books and literary magazines that would flood his house as his father was the Headmaster of a school. It was a stage when sentimentality and tragedy greatly appealed to his adolescent mind, his favourite novels being ones in which the heroine wasted away in comsumption or stooped to folly.

Even more gratifying is his account of initial struggles with getting published. The collegian Narayan wrote Romantic prose and cultivated a select group of admirers by bribing them with cups of coffee, and these would please him with just the responses he sought. Narayan recalls that though he was himself unsure of the meaning of an early creation, The Divine Music, he was outraged to receive a rejection slip after days of waiting.


I have wondered for long how this man must have begun a writing career. I was impressed when I learnt that he simply refused to do anything else and stomped out of a school where he did not want to teach.

(26/08/08)

Finished the book. As expected, it will stay with me for a long time.


Narayan's autobiography has nothing of the critical, self-reflectivity writers project before the world as if constant self-scrutiny were second nature to them -- it is simple to the extent that there isn't even the stating of choices and beliefs, let alone defence. Narayan's writing never gives me the impression of self-deprecation or confession; everything is stated plainly -- including his follies and his acts of dishonesty -- in the same manner as he says "I had to look for a new house, big enough for my family". The incidents in his life are those of the common man (no wonder that phrase has come to be unforgettably associated with his cartoonist brother, who lived with him in a middle-class joint family). I was reading, not the story of a writer's life, but the story of the life of a man who wanted to be a writer. Narayan seems to have remained free of the status of rich celebrity for most of his life. When Dev Anand came to visit him to obtain rights for the filming of The Guide, he recollects, there was a small fan-crowd near the door. Narayan himself lived like any other familiar face in the neighbourhood.


At the point in the book when the young Narayan receives a cable from his friend Purna, saying "Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible", I felt overjoyed. Narayan's struggles with paying rents, his efforts at building houses and at trying to understand agriculture absorbed me as much as the origin and development of his novels. Living under an imagined aura that emerges out of the books we read, we readers may find the two images of writer and ordinary man incompatible. But here they are seamless.

The sunny humour of the book shifted to deep pathos so suddenly that I found myself shaken. In Narayan's account of his wife's death and his subsequent experience of unbearable loneliness, there is the same simplicity that characterises his narration of the lighter aspects of life. Yet, it is immediate and convincing, transparent as it is. It was deeply moving to read about the quiet suffering of this passionate, a trifle impatient and sometimes short-tempered man. It is an experience that can't be shared -- it can only be stated.

Expressing his condolence, Dr. Paul Burton, a friend, wrote to Narayan:


You will write a book which is within you, all ready now, and it is bound to come out sooner or later...

It is not just a novel, The English Teacher, that grew out of this pain and its overcoming, but a fullness of understanding. The experiences themselves may appear strange and even irrational to sceptic rationalists but the sincerity of the narration cannot but move any reader.
  another, as Narayan himself admits, but the tranquility they brought to him became life-defining.


I was delighted to learn of the writing of The Guide during Narayan's stay at Berkeley on a travel grant.

Graham Greene liked the story when I narrated it to him in London. While I was hesitating whether to leave my hero alive or dead at the end of the story, Graham was definite he should die. So I have on my hands the life of a man condemned to death before he was born and grown, and I have to plan my narrative to lead to it.

The film version of the novel not only abolished Malgudi, but converted his humane story into a glamorous flick. In the pages where he records his disappointment in characteristically unjudgemental terms, Narayan comes across as a simple man duped by bigwigs.




My Days  
The autobiography ends with the picture of a contended grandfather still exploring the mysteries of innocence in cultivating plants and playing with children.

I will always regret the fact that I could not meet this writer in his lifetime.

(27/08/08)