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OBITUARY: R.K. NARAYAN
The Master Of Malgudi
By Geeta
Doctor
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R.K. Narayan
1906-2001
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Do you know they
took me to the Marina Beach in the middle of the afternoon and made me
pose against the sand?" asked R.K. Narayan, the first time I met
him in the quiet surroundings of his Alwarpet apartment in Chennai. Since
I was also trying to get him to agree to an interview for the Illustrated
Weekly to mark his 86th anniversary, he glared at me very fiercely through
his thick-lensed spectacles. "I will not be photographed again,"
he annou-nced. His smooth unlined face, almost baby pink in spite of his
apparent age, was shaking with a sudden rage.
It was impossible to tell him that there was
a strange aptness about the choice. Summer is Narayan's territory, just
as the fictional town of Malgudi, made accessible to a non-reading public
through the television series, will forever be a celebration of small-town
fears and dreams, gilded by the glow of artificial lighting.
This is a gentler, more innocent image of eternal
India seen through the eyes of Swami, the eponymous hero of Narayan's
first book Swami and Friends, published as long ago as l935, whose entry
into the publishing world was given a mid-wifely heave-ho by Graham Greene,
as recorded by Narayan in his biography, when he received a telegram saying
"Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible," from his friend Purna
at Oxford.
Perhaps it was the warmth of the Indian sun
that held Greene's attention. For it is a small boy's evocation of the
long, dusty afternoons playing cricket in the small town of Malgudi, transformed
by the thwack of a cricket ball on willow into an English village green,
Narayan's bio-polar literary heritage, that makes the book so memorable.
"Do you ever dream about Malgudi?"
I asked him. "Why should I dream about it?" he replied. "It's
not a real place, you know. I don't think about it at all, except when
I write." But Malgudi is the most memorable of Narayan's characters,
as central to his imagination as Hardy's Wessex, or Jane Austen's interior
world of social obligations. Indeed, it would not be wrong to describe
Narayan as the last of the Victorians, his imagination steeped, as he
himself tells us in his biography, in the novels of Scott and Dickens,
no less than the womanly fiction of Mrs Henry Wood and Marie Corelli,
the heavy breathers of their time.
From his artlessly evoked biography My Days,
in which Narayan relives his early days spent in the environs of Mysore
where his father was employed as a headmaster, as a schoolboy more interested
in roaming around the place, the idea of letting children just be, gains
ground. There is a certain voluptuousness in the rapture of being a child
that has remained with Narayan. Like the flaneur of the Parisian boulevards,
Narayan's child roams through the streets of his Malgudi, listening to
the "Vendor of Sweets" hoping for a turn of heart in his materialistic
son, or the "Bachelor of Arts" looking for love, or watching
"The Painter of Signs" transform his life through a flourish
of his brush.
Indeed, Narayan almost enjoys describing his
many failures in the academic field, and how, having botched a qualifying
exam in English, he spent an entire year wandering by himself, reading
all the books on fiction on which he could lay his hands. Many years later,
as a member of the Rajya Sabha, he made a fervent plea that young students
walking to school with their punishing loads of "homework" be
spared, as though in remembrance of his own carefree days. There's a parallel
here to the idyllic childhood of the Durrell brothers on the island of
Corfu, that speaks of a more liberal approach to the educational needs
of children. That, as in the case of the two Durrells, is vindicated in
the example of both Narayan and his equally gifted brother, R.K. Laxman.
It's easy to forget now that at his prime Narayan
was the first amongst the greats. At New York's Algonquin Club, in the
early l960s, jostling elbows with the literary set, as he tells us in
his Dateless Diary, he was hailed as one of the three great writers of
the world-Faulkner, Hemingway and Narayan. One of the persons whose elbow
he happened to nudge in those heady days while having breakfast with the
playwright Arthur Miller, was the dramatists' wife, Marilyn Monroe. It's
part of the Narayan repertoire of stories: "She was beautiful, truly
beautiful," he said cupping his hands together to indicate the low
neckline of the dress that she wore for breakfast, when they met. "She
was like a bowl of fruit, golden apples." There's a wicked schoolboy
grin on his face.
For R.K. Narayan, it will always be a summer
of golden youth. The Master of Malgudi has gone to rejoin his friends.
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