Around the time that he died in 2001, I discovered the delightful writer R. K. Narayan—his publishing byline conceals his more interesting full name of Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami. A more important reader’s discovery of Narayan was Graham Greene’s, because Greene helped find a publisher for Narayan’s early books. Narayan’s notice by other authors, E. M. Forster and John Updike among them, makes him something of a writer’s writer.
Part of Narayan’s appeal is a simple, unadorned style from which humor is practically never absent. But his subjects are also appealing: he invents a small town called Malgudi, where most of his stories are set and where the residents each have interesting histories and small daily adventures.
My first experience with Narayan was with his 1976 novel, A Painter of Signs. Raman, the painter of signs, makes less than he ought to because his aesthetic sense leads him to argue with clients over colors and letter styles, and he’s pretty ineffectual in any situation where there is the least conflict. He lives alone with his aunt, who cooks for him. He fancies himself an intellectual because he reads a few pages of a different book each afternoon before falling asleep. He socializes at a hotel and restaurant ironically called the Boardless—that is, it has no sign.
Then he meets Daisy, the Family Planning Centre missionary, strangely affectless, independent, and determined that no emotion will impede her work. Though so different in temperament, Raman is attracted, follows her into the hills on an austere tour of villages to spread the birth control word, and on the way back makes a disastrous pass at Daisy. But she shows up at his house some days later, and their romance progresses to the point of a proposal. The aunt goes off on a pilgrimage to the Ganges and holy places, determined not to return.
Then Daisy balks, taking off on missionary work in a region where the birth numbers have risen shockingly the previous year. Raman gets on his bicycle and heads for the Boardless.
Narayan is wonderful with dialogue, capturing the quaint charm of the many speakers of Indian English: “Long time since I saw you, what have you been doing with yourself all along?” The book is set in Malgudi, below the Mempi Hills, in 1972.
In 1982, Narayan published Malgudi Days, a collection of thirty-two stories spanning four decades, selected from previous books and more recent work. Some have a touch of the supernatural, but most merely describe the residents of his fictional town of Malgudi during a crucial day or moment of their lives. An astrologer, “as much a stranger to the stars as were his innocent customers,” is consulted by the man he left for dead in their village years ago. A mailman risks dismissal by holding back a piece of mail that would have spoiled a wedding celebration. A doctor breaks his rule of never deceiving a patient to reassure a dying friend, who then recovers. A loyal retired doorman discovers that official news is not always bad. A dog, offered his freedom, returns to the blind man who abuses him. A Brahmin, threatened by a bully on a train, refrains from violence, but defeats his adversary by conning him.
Some of the stories here are told by the Talkative Man, who may or may not have bested a tiger that held him at bay in a tiny railway station, may have taken a 20-ft. statue of an imperialist Brit off the municipality’s hands, thinking to make a profit, and may or may not have won at a fair a steamroller that becomes an impossible burden. He learns to play the flute, repulses a beggar who then curses him, and then finds you cannot play the snake song just once. The Talkative Man introduces tall tales with Narayan’s casual realism. There is little interpretation in Narayan’s straightforward prose, where again and again he shows the exceptional ability to compress a whole view of a character’s life into ten pages—an ability noted by Graham Greene, Jumpa Lahiri, and others who have compared Narayan’s short stories to those of Gogol, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, and Chekhov.
Iswaran nearly throws himself into the sea in despair at yet another failed examination until he checks the results, discovers he has passed, and accidentally drowns during his excessive celebration. A statue of Shiva as the dancing Nataraja is so perfect it nearly destroys its village until the god takes things into his own hands. Young Swaminathan discovers the dangers of malingering and lying about his teachers’ mistreating him. A gentle dog named Attila, in hopes he would grow up fierce, captures a robber with affection.
A child’s balloon in a purse Raju has stolen causes the thief to attempt to return it and to be arrested in the process. Sambu is eager to see the last film of his dead father, but his mother resists until the day of the last showing. She faints when she sees him. Sambu bursts into tears when he sees how she is affected, thinking that he has had “the final parting” with his father.
In later stories, Narayan gives us a conversation between a hippie, who feels guilt for his part in the Vietnam War, and a cobbler, who keeps thinking “he might be talking to a god or his agent.” The story, “God and the Cobbler,” appeared in Playboy in 1976. The final selection is “Emden,” about a very old man remembering an assignation many years ago and trying on his daily walk to find the place. A dog steals the bag of sweets he has brought in the vain hope of giving it to the girl he mistreated so long in the past, and Emden thinks his long-ago lover might possibly be in this incarnation now.
The Talkative Man is also a feature in a collection published in 1985, Under the Banyan Tree & Other Stories. The first story “Nitya,” is about a boy reluctant to let his parents honor their vow to bring him with shaved head to a shrine—he’s now in his twenties and the vow was made when he was two and very ill. The second story is called “The House Opposite” and concerns a hermit so tormented by a prostitute living opposite him that he eventually determines to leave his house and go away; as he leaves she comes to him with a tray of fruit and flowers as an offering in remembrance of her mother and asks his blessing. “A Horse and Two Goats” is a very funny story about a conversation between an old man with two goats and an Englishman who wants to buy the clay horse on whose pedestal the old man is sitting. As the old man speaks only Tamil (except for “yes, no,” his two words of English that he repeats together) and the other man only English, there isn’t a lot of communication, although there is a lot of talk. Several of these stories, as in Malgudi Days, begin, “The Talkative Man said.” In one the narrator helps an archaeologist and finds a statuette which the archaeologist convinces himself is a Roman antiquity but which is actually contemporary and local. In another the narrator is cheated by an energetic, charming young con-man named Ramu that the narrator eventually sees again as a blind beggar on the steps of a temple. Still another is a ghost story called “The Old Man of the Temple,” in which the narrator’s cab driver is temporarily taken over by the ghost of a five-hundred-year-old man.
The final tale, which is the title story, might seem a Prospero-like artist’s farewell to his art: its subject is the village story-teller, who decides that he should cease telling his stories before they become boring and repetitious, so he takes a vow of silence. But more novels and one more story collection came from Narayan’s pen, as well as essays and autobiographical works. In all there were fifteen novels and six short-story collections as well as the nonfiction work. Narayan was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize, but never won. In 2019, a panel of writers chose that first novel that Graham Greene discovered (and persuaded Narayan to rename), Swami and Friends, for the BBC list of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
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