Malgudi Days Read online

  Malgudi Days, originally published in 1982, combines selections from two of Narayan’s collections: An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947) and Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956), as well as later, previously uncollected stories that originally appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Playboy , and Antaeus. The result is work spanning approximately forty years by an author whose hundredth birthday coincides with the publication of this edition. Less than a decade passed between the publication of An Astrologer’s Day and Lawley Road, and in that time India, which gained its independence from Great Britain the same year the former collection was published, was reborn as a nation. Narayan has been faulted by some critics for turning a blind eye to India’s violent and protracted struggle for sovereignty, for continuing to write about an insulated town that is largely disconnected from the insurgence of the time. It is true that there is a timeless quality to Malgudi, that in many ways it remains sheltered from the greater forces of the world. While Malgudi may appear to be a seemingly fixed place, the stories repeatedly illustrate that nothing is fixed, that no one is protected, that life is always changing, occasionally for the better but typically for the worse. It is also true that in these stories Narayan is not concerned overtly with changes in India’s history through the course of the twentieth century. Still, Malgudi Days reveals how broader changes, both social and political, alter the everyday lives of people.

  In the title story of Lawley Road, for example, the Municipality of Malgudi decides to rename the town’s streets and institutions to reflect nationhood, foreshadowing the way in which India’s largest cities were officially changed—from Madras to Chennai, for instance—a few years ago: “They made a start with the park at the Market Square. It used to be called the Coronation Park—whose coronation God alone knew; it might have been the coronation of Victoria or of Asoka. No one bothered about it. Now the old board was uprooted and lay on the lawn, and a brand-new sign stood in its place declaring it henceforth to be Hamara Hindustan Park.” Typically in a Narayan story, change brings complication, often chaos. As more places are renamed, mayhem ensues, so that “the town became a wilderness with all its landmarks gone.” The chairman of the municipality seizes on a statue of one Sir Frederick Lawley, whom they believe had been “a combination of Attila, the Scourge of Europe, and Nadir Shah, with the craftiness of a Machiavelli.” At great cost and effort, the enormous, stubbornly solid statue is hacked away and ultimately removed with the aid of dynamite, only for the chairman to realize that Frederick Lawley had in fact been a virtuous governor who had advocated for India’s independence and died in the attempt to save villagers from drowning in a flood. The statue is restored in a new location whose name, the municipal council decides, “shall be changed [from Kabir Lane] to Lawley Road.” The story is not a reactionary allegory; rather, it points, comically, to the way a political transition can alter not only a nation’s identity but also an individual’s sense of order. One can imagine the potential for similar confusion across the globe, whether in the process of striking down statues in the former Soviet Union or, more recently, in Iraq. In spite of the inevitable evolution and revolutions of nations, the peace and well-being of mankind, Narayan seems to suggest, depends on a world that is predictable, precisely because the human condition is anything but those things.

  In only one story, “God and the Cobbler,” do we encounter a Western character, an unnamed man referred to as “the hippie.” The story is told from a dual perspective: the foreigner who floats through Malgudi and the Indian who repairs his sandals. In the course of their brief encounter, each foolishly idealizes the other. The two characters are at completely opposite ends of life, the hippie consciously shedding all traces of class, race, and place, the cobbler trapped in a frustratingly marginal life. The hippie thinks that the cobbler is somehow divine, happy with nothing, mystically enjoying his menial trade. Seeking a connection, the hippie, in a perfect combination of condescension and respect, offers the cobbler a beedi, knowing it, unlike a cigarette, will establish “rapport with the masses.” When he points out that the flowers that rain all day on the cobbler’s head must be a sign of divinity, the cobbler retorts, “Can I eat this flower?” The exchange speaks volumes for the gulf between them: the luxury the hippie has of escaping his origins, versus the impossibility for the cobbler of doing the same. In the course of their conversation, the cobbler begins to suspect, when their talk turns to religion, that the hippie is himself a god. Both confess to guilt, the cobbler for once burning down a man’s house, the hippie for burning villages in a previous incarnation. They share nothing apart from their mutual delusion, something that joins them without their even realizing. Narayan lays bare their delusion with understanding, without judgment. The story speaks of the value both of belonging and not belonging to a place, and the ways in which human beings both rely upon and reject the worlds that create them.

  While Narayan does not frequently write about political rebellion, he writes often and explicitly about another breed of troublemaker: the artist. I was struck by two stories dealing with the subject explicitly. “Such Perfection” is about a sculptor, Soma, whose creation, a Nataraja representing the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, is deemed too perfect for mortals, and thus a threat to the town. Fearing god’s wrath, a priest advises Soma, “Take your chisel and break off a little toe or some part of the image, and it will be safe.” Unable to bring himself to do so, Soma takes matters into his own hands and attempts to consecrate the statue in his home. An apocalyptic event follows, and Soma is held responsible. Still unable to sacrifice his creation, Soma decides to sacrifice himself. Steps from suicide, he rushes home to glimpse the statue for the last time, and sees that a storm has damaged it. Order returns to the town, the imperfect image is consecrated and Soma’s reputation is celebrated, but his creative life is destroyed. The final sentence reads: “He lived to be ninety-five, but he never touched his mallet and chisel again.” Like Arachne of Greek mythology, Soma suffers the sad fate of a talented mortal who has transgressed limits. A similar story is “A Gateman’s Gift,” in which a man whittles characters out of wood to pass the time during his retirement. He lives in fear that his work will offend his superiors, and in the end he, too, gives up his art. There is also the cautionary tale of “The Snake-Song,” about a musician wanting “wealth and renown” and feeling, as a result of his playing, “among the gods.” These stories express the revolutionary spirit that is necessary to artistic creation. Even the most traditional representations of life are a dangerous thing, stemming from an impulse that, when allowed to flourish, knows no bounds.

  The artists who survive, and endure, are ones like Narayan: disciplined, unassuming, supremely gifted. His determination seems startlingly defiant even in today’s terms—upon graduating from college, he chose, instead of seeking employment, to stay home and write. The boldness of this gesture for a man of Narayan’s time and station is extraordinary; like most of his characters, Narayan came from a middle-class family and did not have the comfort of inherited wealth. In his autobiography, My Days, he talks of his commitment to writing, adhering to daily word counts, and approaching his craft like any other job. At the same time he admits to the difficulty, frustration, and inevitable disruptions of a writer’s life that force a crooked road at best. His first novel, Swami and Friends, was published in 1935 after Kittu Purna, an Oxford-bound friend of Narayan’s, took the manuscript, which had been rejected so many times that Narayan advised Purna to “weight the manuscript with the stone and drown it in the Thames,” to Graham Greene, who in turn put it in the hands of the right person. Narayan went on to publish thirteen other novels, almost as many story collections, three books of retold legends including The Ramayana, and several volumes of essays and other nonfiction. His last novel, The World of Nagaraj, was published when he was eighty-four years old. He was famously private, uninterested in the world’s praise, the prestigious awards, and countless scholarly appraisals of his writ
ing. Indeed, much like the secluded town he engineered and populated with his pen, Narayan remained secluded, sealed off from the literary world. Recalling his early efforts in My Days, he notes that success is at once a blessing and a curse, that part of the pleasure of writing is “lost, to some extent, when one becomes established, with some awareness of one’s publishers, methods, transactions, the trappings of publicity and reviews, and above all a public.” Given the quality and breadth of Narayan’s career, this attitude is something all authors should heed, a reminder that while what one writes may ultimately be read by others, in the process of creation we must answer only to ourselves.

  Raised speaking Tamil at home, Narayan wrote from the beginning in English, a language that, as Ved Mehta points out in a profile he wrote of Narayan in The New Yorker, is “foreign to most of his countrymen and also to most of his characters.” Narayan’s father was a headmaster, and as a result Narayan had access to a library full of English books. His early literary diet included Scott, Dickens, Hardy, Doyle, and Wodehouse. In My Days he recalls, “I . . . started writing, mostly under the influence of events occurring around me and in the style of any writer who was uppermost in my mind at the time.” Why Narayan chose to write in English and not Tamil is something I leave scholars of his work to ponder. As a reader I am simply grateful for the way Narayan, long before so many writers of Indian origin or background writing in English, beautifully knit together the subject matter of one place with the language and narrative tradition of another, achieving what Mehta aptly calls an “astonishing marriage of opposite points of the compass.” It is a helpful way to explain why these stories, about a small, single, old-fangled place, remain strikingly fresh today, and why they contain, a century after their creator’s birth, the workings of the whole world.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Books by R. K. Narayan

  NOVELS

  Swami and Friends (1935)

  The Bachelor of Arts (1937)

  The Dark Room (1938)

  The English Teacher (1945)

  Mr. Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi (1949)

  The Financial Expert (1952)

  Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)

  The Guide (1958)

  The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961)

  The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

  The Painter of Signs (1976)

  A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)

  Talkative Man (1986)

  The World of Nagaraj (1990)

  SHORT FICTION

  *Dodu and Other Stories (1943)

  *Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)

  An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947)

  *Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)

  A Horse and Two Goats (1970)

  Malgudi Days (1982)

  Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

  The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1993)

  RETOLD LEGENDS

  Gods, Demons, and Others (1964)

  The Ramayana (1972)

  The Mahabharata (1978)

  *Published in India only

  MEMOIR

  My Days: A Memoir (1974)

  NONFICTION

  *Mysore (1939)

  *Next Sunday: Sketches and Essays (1960)

  *My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1964)

  *Reluctant Guru (1974)

  *The Emerald Route (1977)

  *A Writer’s Nightmare: Selected Essays 1958-1988 (1988)

  *A Story-Teller’s World (1989)

  *Indian Thought: A Miscellany (1997)

  *The Writerly Life: Selected Non-fiction (2001)

  *Published in India only

  Author’s Introduction

  The short story affords a writer a welcome diversion from hard work. The novel, whether good or bad, printable or otherwise, involves considerable labour. Sheer wordage, anywhere between sixty and one hundred thousand words, looks forbidding at first, as it might well demand concentrated attention over an indefinite stretch of time. Although my novels are rather short by present-day standards, while I am at work on one I feel restless and uneasy at being shackled to a single task for months on end. At such times one’s mind also becomes sentence-ridden: words last written or yet to be written keep ringing about one’s ears, to the exclusion of all other sounds or sense. When the first draft has taken shape one feels lighter at heart, but the relief is short-lived. The first draft will have to be followed by a second, and possibly a third or fourth, until perfection (a chimerical pursuit) is attained. And then someday one arbitrarily decides to pack up the manuscript and mail it to one’s literary agent.

  At the end of every novel I have vowed never to write another one—a propitious moment to attempt a short story or two. I enjoy writing a short story. Unlike the novel, which emerges from relevant, minutely worked-out detail, the short story can be brought into existence through a mere suggestion of detail, the focus being kept on a central idea or climax.

  The material available to a story writer in India is limitless. Within a broad climate of inherited culture there are endless variations: every individual differs from every other individual, not only economically, but in outlook, habits and day-today philosophy. It is stimulating to live in a society that is not standardized or mechanized, and is free from monotony. Under such conditions the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character (and thereby a story).

  A short story must be short—on that point there is universal agreement, but the definition of a story is understood differently at different levels, ranging from the news reporter’s use of the term to the literary pundit’s profundities on the subject of plot, climax, structure and texture, with dos and don’ts for the writer. Speaking for myself, I discover a story when a personality passes through a crisis of spirit or circumstances. In the following thirty-odd tales, almost invariably the central character faces some kind of crisis and either resolves it or lives with it. But some stories may prove to be nothing more than a special or significant moment in someone’s life or a pattern of existence brought to view.

  I have named this volume Malgudi Days in order to give it a plausibly geographical status. I am often asked, ‘Where is Malgudi? ’ All I can say is that it is imaginary and not to be found on any map (although the University of Chicago Press has published a literary atlas with a map of India indicating the location of Malgudi). If I explain that Malgudi is a small town in South India I shall only be expressing a half-truth, for the characteristics of Malgudi seem to me universal.

  I can detect Malgudi characters even in New York: for instance, West Twenty-third Street, where I have lived for months at a time off and on since 1959, possesses every element of Malgudi, with its landmarks and humanity remaining unchanged—the drunk lolling on the steps of the synagogue, the shop sign announcing in blazing letters EVERYTHING IN THIS STORE MUST GO WITHIN A WEEK. FIFTY PER CENT OFF ON ALL ITEMS, the barber, the dentist, the lawyer and the specialist in fishing hooks, tackle and rods, the five-and-ten and the delicatessen (the man greeted me with ‘Hi! Where have you been all this time? Where do you go for your milk and rice nowadays?’ little realizing that I am not a permanent resident of Twenty-third Street or of America either)—all are there as they were, with an air of unshaken permanence and familiarity. Above all, the Chelsea Hotel, where I revisited after many years and was received with a whoop of joy by the manager, who hugged me and summoned all his staff (or those who were still alive) to meet me, including the old gentleman in a wheelchair, now one hundred and sixteen years old, a permanent resident who must have been in his early nineties when I last stayed in that hotel.

  Malgudi has been only a concept but has proved good enough for my purposes. I can’t make it more concrete however much I might be interrogated. When an enthusiastic television producer in London asked me recently if I would cooperate by showing him around Malgudi and introducing him to the characters in my novels for the purpose of producing an hour-long feature, I felt shaken for a moment and said out
of politeness, ‘I am going to be busy working on a new novel . . .’

  ‘Another Malgudi novel?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What will it be about?’

  ‘About a tiger possessing a human soul . . .’

  ‘Oh, that sounds interesting! I think I will wait. It will be marvellous to include the tiger in my documentary . . .’

  R.K.N.

  September 1981

  FROM AN ASTROLOGER’S DAY

  AN ASTROLOGER’S DAY

  Punctually at midday he opened his bag and spread out his professional equipment, which consisted of a dozen cowrie shells, a square piece of cloth with obscure mystic charts on it, a notebook and a bundle of palmyra writing. His forehead was resplendent with sacred ash and vermilion, and his eyes sparkled with a sharp abnormal gleam which was really an outcome of a continual searching look for customers, but which his simple clients took to be a prophetic light and felt comforted. The power of his eyes was considerably enhanced by their position—placed as they were between the painted forehead and the dark whiskers which streamed down his cheeks: even a half-wit’s eyes would sparkle in such a setting. To crown the effect he wound a saffron-coloured turban around his head. This colour scheme never failed. People were attracted to him as bees are attracted to cosmos or dahlia stalks. He sat under the boughs of a spreading tamarind tree which flanked a path running through the Town Hall Park. It was a remarkable place in many ways: a surging crowd was always moving up and down this narrow road morning till night. A variety of trades and occupations was represented all along its way: medicine-sellers, sellers of stolen hardware and junk, magicians and, above all, an auctioneer of cheap cloth, who created enough din all day to attract the whole town. Next to him in vociferousness came a vendor of fried groundnuts, who gave his ware a fancy name each day, calling it Bombay Ice-Cream one day, and on the next Delhi Almond, and on the third Raja’s Delicacy, and so on and so forth, and people flocked to him. A considerable portion of this crowd dallied before the astrologer too. The astrologer transacted his business by the light of a flare which crackled and smoked up above the groundnut heap nearby. Half the enchantment of the place was due to the fact that it did not have the benefit of municipal lighting. The place was lit up by shop lights. One or two had hissing gaslights, some had naked flares stuck on poles, some were lit up by old cycle lamps and one or two, like the astrologer’s, managed without lights of their own. It was a bewildering crisscross of light rays and moving shadows. This suited the astrologer very well, for the simple reason that he had not in the least intended to be an astrologer when he began life; and he knew no more of what was going to happen to others than he knew what was going to happen to himself next minute. He was as much a stranger to the stars as were his innocent customers. Yet he said things which pleased and astonished everyone: that was more a matter of study, practice and shrewd guesswork. All the same, it was as much an honest man’s labour as any other, and he deserved the wages he carried home at the end of a day.