Malgudi Days (2 page)

The stories in
Malgudi Days
leave the gate running, at once assuming and securing the reader's interest. The concentration of Narayan's prose is astonishing. While other writers rely on paragraphs and pages to get their points across, Narayan extracts the full capacity of each sentence, so much so that his stories seem bound by an invisible yet essential mechanism, similar to the metrical and quantitative constraints of poetry. Narayan wrote many of these stories under deadline, within the limits of word count and column length for
The Hindu
, a Madras newspaper for which Narayan had a contract for a weekly submission beginning in 1939. At the same time there is nothing formulaic about them—if anything, they seem spontaneously and effortlessly composed. Each stands on its own, and while they are not linked in today's fashionable parlance, they are inherently intertwined while remaining independent from each other. Their binding agent is the town of Malgudi, a place we can safely assume is located in the southern part of India, in the general vicinity of Madras, where Narayan was born, and Mysore, where he lived for most of his adult life. Stepping back from the individual stories, one takes in the fictional equivalent of something resembling a village-scape by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, teeming with inhabitants in close proximity, fiercely realistic yet whimsically portrayed. We encounter specific characters and appreciate their specific predicaments while remaining aware of the broader community to which they belong.

Malgudi is on that wonderful map of places in the literary universe, either real or imaginary, that not only provide a setting but possess a soul. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, García Márquez's Macondo, and Joyce's Dublin are just three examples of the way certain writers cling stubbornly to a single terrain, entering its countless doors and portraying the residents within. Narayan does so with the assiduousness of a census taker but with an artist's compassion and intimacy. Malgudi is the setting not only for the stories in this volume, but for practically everything else Narayan has written. It is a small, self-contained, bustling town that is neither fully cosmopolitan nor agrarian in sprit. There is a college, a train station, a tourist bureau, even a film studio. It is the sort of place that carnivals and expos pass through, the sort of energetic, idiosyncratic community that is increasingly rare not only in America but all over the world as suburbs take up more and more space. So vivid is Narayan's fictional epicenter that it has inspired the delightful map reprinted in this volume originally drawn by Dr. James M. Fennelly, a scholar of his work, depicting the physical attributes of the town. Narayan does not just give the town an invented name; he names its streets, its buildings, its temples, and its restaurants, injecting local color at every turn.

Perhaps Malgudi's most memorable and trafficked region is the marketplace, filled with fruit sellers and cobblers and snake charmers and knife grinders, all expertly and sometimes desperately cajoling the public for business. Narayan's descriptions of the marketplace are always fresh, always stimulating—like the person who goes each day into the heart of his or her community for daily provisions, he, and thereby his reader, always see something new. It is against this impersonal, importunate backdrop that so many of the adventures and misadventures in this book happen. Here is one example, from “Trail of the Green Blazer”: “The jabber and babble of the marketplace was there, as people harangued, disputed prices, haggled or greeted each other; over it all boomed the voice of a bible-preacher, and when he paused for breath, from another corner the loudspeaker of a health van amplified on malaria and tuberculosis.” Narayan is describing the sort of commercial cacophony millions of people pass through each day of their lives, a timeless civic phenomenon that bridges such disparate parts of the earth as New York's Times Square, Calcutta's Howrah Station and London's Piccadilly Circus. The protagonist of “Trail of the Green Blazer” is typical of such places—he is a pickpocket. Narayan writes, “When he watched a crowd he did it with concentration. It was his professional occupation.” Narayan may as well be describing his own vocation, observing his world with a keen and voracious eye, and also reminding us of the adage that writers must steal from life for their work.

Like the pickpocket, who lives quite literally hand-to-mouth, most of the residents of Malgudi lead difficult if not wholly destitute lives, toiling hard in order to keep a household afloat. The fact that the characters are wanting does not necessarily make them admirable. In fact, many of Narayan's characters, like the pickpocket, are far from admirable. They represent a series of human faults and foibles, from the petty to the absurd: laziness, avarice, dishonesty, cowardice, chicanery. They are haunted by debts and failures. They are almost always guilty of things: a man stands up his daughter for a night out at the movies. One breaks open his son's piggy bank so that he can gamble. Another considers kidnapping a child. Narayan writes with a light heart and a light hand, but the effect of his tales is always melancholy and frequently heart-breaking. We are a flawed, weak species, he gently reminds us in these pages, focusing his attention, clearly and without sentiment, on those who will stoop low, those who will stop at nothing. What makes us care for such frequently pathetic characters is that they, like most of the rest of us, are strivers, driven by hopes for a slightly better life.

In spite of the public circumstances of so many of these tales, Narayan's treatment of his characters is always a personal matter. Anyone familiar with India, be it once or over the course of a lifetime, is exposed to the intense street life of merchants and peddlers and mendicants. One encounters them, is either charmed or pestered by them, but rarely does one ever actually stop to know them. In real life these figures pass through us as they must. Reading Narayan, they enter us and endure. A story like “The Edge” takes us into the inner life of such a person, giving one member of India's illiterate, industrious masses dignity and complexity. The protagonist, Ranga, is a knife grinder who takes pride in an outmoded trade in Malgudi. Ranga exists at a remove from life: “apparently he never looked at a calendar, watch, almanac or even a mirror.” Such ignorance may be bliss but cannot satisfy the demands of existence. He leads two lives, one in the city where he works, another in the village where he dwells, typifying the reality of millions of Indians who commute daily into towns in order to make a living. Ranga has aspirations for his daughter to be a doctor. His wife wants the daughter to marry and repeat the limited arc of her own life, but ironically accuses Ranga of “lack of push.” He falls for a dubious scheme, a quick way to make money that he thinks will solve his problems. We know it will lead to trouble but are unsure of its extent until a shocking moment I will not divulge beforehand. Realizing his fate, he escapes it, with a “desperate energy” that informs his life and so many others in Malgudi. Ranga is one of the rare heroes in these pages, an upstanding, industrious man whose life, by the story's end, is neither unraveled nor fully destroyed. It remains imperfect but intact. “An erratic and unreliable lot” is how Ranga describes his customers, but these words also speak for Narayan's understanding of mankind, where so few can be trusted, so few remain true.

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.