BOOKS | The movements of unchanging things

The New Yorker on R.K. Narayan:

With his fourth novel, The English Teacher (1945), Narayan’s point of view began to change, and this change is almost certainly related to a tragic event in his life. In the novel, Krishna, the protagonist, is, like earlier Narayan heroes, unhappy with his place in the world, “constantly nagged by the feeling that [he] was doing the wrong work”. One day, Krishna and his wife, Susila – their happy marriage nothing like the miserable one of The Dark Room – go house-hunting. Strolling through the grounds of one property, Susila takes leave of Krishna to use an outhouse in a distant corner of the garden. Once she closes the door, though, it jams, trapping her in the fetid, fly-filled dark. When Krishna, who grows concerned at her absence, hears Susila’s cries and locates the outhouse, kicking in its door, his wife is frantic: A fly, then a carrier of incurable diseases, has landed on her lip. Weeks later, she dies of typhoid.

Narayan, once an English teacher like Krishna, lost his own young wife, Rajam, to typhoid, in 1939, after just such an encounter with a fly. Her death affected Narayan deeply. “The world appears very vacant and vague now,” he told Greene in a letter, “and I too feel dead.” For years, Narayan was unable to write, but, when he resumed, his books had changed – a change that was both a function of what he had lost and what, through the nature of that loss, he discovered. Narayan had first seen his wife on a street corner and had courted her against the conventions of the time, which favoured arranged marriages. Having already ignored convention, the couple then learned that their horoscopes – the consideration of which was essential to marriage – deemed them incompatible: Narayan and Rajam were told that they must not marry. Were they to defy the stars, their charts made clear, Narayan would be a young widower. Deciding that superstitions and conventions did not apply to him, Narayan married the woman he loved. When the tragedy came, it seems to have instilled in him a deep sense of the inexorability of fate, a conviction that, naturally, influenced his view of character. “We are what we are,” Narayan later told a biographer. “Whether you grow older, more decrepit, inside, the sense of awareness, of being, is the same throughout. I don’t see any difference between myself when I was seven years old in Madras and now here in Mysore. The chap inside is the same, unchanged.”

If the novels that Narayan wrote before the death of his wife were all documents of frustrated flight, those that came after chart the comedy of trying to resist fate at all. Now resistance isn’t so much futile as fundamental to our humanness: We are always resisting only ourselves, a fact that – once you get over the abject horror of it – is really very funny. As the titles suggest – The Printer of Malgudi (1949); The Financial Expert (1952); The Guide (1958); The Vendor of Sweets (1967); The Painter of Signs (1976) – the protagonists of Narayan’s mature novels are all defined by their lot in life. All the books are comic, animated by the degree to which the inner self, however much it might question its place in the world, is constantly shown to be stubbornly consistent. These are not documents of frustration but, rather, delicately tuned farces of being.

The richest of these is The Guide. Upon his release from prison, a man must once again find a place for himself in the world. Raju, when we meet him, is sitting on steps that lead into a river, the very river where Savitri failed to end her life. Raju has no suicidal thoughts, only worries and sorrows. At the opening of the novel, a stranger approaches:

Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt amused and embarrassed. “Sit down if you like,” Raju said, to break the spell. The other accepted the suggestion with a grateful nod and went down the river steps to wash his feet and face, came up wiping himself dry with the end of a checkered yellow towel on his shoulder, and took his seat two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine. The branches of the trees canopying the river rustled and trembled with the agitation of birds and monkeys settling down for the night. Upstream beyond the hills the sun was setting. Raju waited for the other to say something. But he was too polite to open a conversation.

It transpires that the man, a villager named Velan, is not being polite but reverential: Raju’s seated pose by the shrine has led Velan to mistake him for a holy man. This initial error furnishes the book’s premise; Raju, content to be misconstrued, begins dispensing advice to Velan, and then to his neighbours. It is, after all, to Raju’s profit: His worshippers bring him offerings of food, leaving him no reason to go anywhere else. Sweetly comic sections in which Raju shares his wisdom—inscrutable non-answers that exhort the villagers to seek answers within themselves—are all narrated in the third person. They alternate with Raju’s first-person account of the life that has brought him to this pass: his childhood in his father’s shop; his work as a successful tour guide, ignorant of history but adept at spinning colourful lies about attractions; his seduction of a tourist’s wife; and his attempt to defraud the woman by forging her name. This is the act that lands him in prison, and there is a comic counterpoint between the legal punishments for not being oneself and the worldly rewards that such behaviour attracts. As Raju concludes his life story, and as his fame as a spiritual guide ironically reaches its apex, we realise that he has been confessing his misdeeds to Velan. Raju asks if Velan has heard his confession:

“Yes, Swami.”
Raju was taken aback at still being addressed as “Swami”.
“What do you think of it?”
Velan looked quite pained at having to answer such a question. “I don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such length your humble servant.”

In a Western comedy of mistaken identity, the revelation of the hero’s falsity would be a likely dénouement. But, in Narayan’s comedy, the joke is that Raju’s sense of who he is is trumped by the world’s view of him. After all, if one acts as a guide – dispensing wisdom, fasting when appropriate, attracting followers – one is a guide.

It is through this idea – that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one – that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not – indeed, cannot – chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land”, are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.