My Days (12 page)

“Keep them engaged for an hour. Don't let them off. We are trying to teach them also
Surya Namaskar
.”

“I know nothing about it.”

“We will help you to learn it by and by. Today keep them engaged. Take the roll-call and make note of the absentees.”

And so I found myself in the drill field surveying an array of fifty boys standing in two rows under the evening sun. The sun hit us from the west. Many others, including teachers, stood around to watch my performance. I inspected the boys closely, like a commander reviewing an army, cried “Right, left, right, left,” marched them, made them perform high jumps, long jumps, swing their arms, kick their legs in the air. I engaged them as long as I could; still no bell rang to indicate the end of the hour. I cried, “Stand at ease!” and then, “Dismissed!” and the whole crowd vanished in a second.

I slept in my host's house in the hall, the meek man curling up in a corner, and his wife sleeping beside the oven on the kitchen floor, perhaps. I felt guilty to be separating the pair thus. In the morning it was especially embarrassing to get started with one's washing and toilet since they had a minimal arrangement for such activities. The latrine was at the back yard, four dwarfish mud walls screening you but without a door, open to the sky; you were visible outside over the short wall until you squatted down. I had a fear of being seen by the lady in this situation. For my bath, I had to go behind a tin screen. My host and hostess kept themselves rigorously in the background while I was getting through my ablutions, but still I felt extremely nervous and exposed to public view.

I got ready for the school. The man left for his bank. I suddenly felt it would be impossible to spend another day at school or in this house. I knew the bus would be coming in half an hour under the tree. Got a coolie to carry my box and roll of bedding, banged the street door until the lady came up behind it, mentioned to her I was leaving for Mysore, and caught the bus for Mysore again.

T
hat settled it. After the final and irrevocable stand I took, I felt lighter and happier. I did not encourage anyone to comment on my deed or involve myself in any discussion. I sensed that I was respected for it. At least there was an appreciation of the fact that I knew my mind. I went through my day in a business-like manner, with a serious face. Soon after my morning coffee and bath I took my umbrella and started out for a walk. I needed the umbrella to protect my head from the sun. Sometimes I carried a pen and pad and sat down under the shade of a tree at the foot of Chamundi Hill and wrote. Some days I took out a cycle and rode ten miles along the Karapur Forest Road, sat on a wayside culvert, and wrote or brooded over life and literature, watching some peasant ploughing his field, with a canal flowing glitteringly in the sun. My needs were nil, I did not have plans, there was a delight in being just alive and free from employment. That was a great luxury. I returned home at noon in time for lunch, read something inconsequential for an hour or two. I took care not to read too much or anything that might influence my writing at the moment. I was trying to progress with my first novel. At three o'clock after a cup of coffee I wrote. Day by day
Swami
was developing. The pure delight of watching a novel grow can never be duplicated by any other experience. I cannot recollect how much I wrote each day, perhaps a few hundred words, or a thousand. Swami, my first character, grew up and kept himself alive and active; the novel was episodic, but that was how it naturally shaped itself; a series of episodes, escapades, and adventures of Swami and his companions. Each day as I sat down to write, I had no notion of what would be coming. All that I could be certain of was the central character. I reread the first draft at night to make out how it was shaping and undertook, until far into the night, corrections, revisions, and tightening up of sentences. I began to notice that the sentences acquired a new strength and finality while being rewritten, and the real, final version could emerge only between the original lines and then again in what developed in the jumble of rewritten lines, and above and below them. It was, on the whole, a pleasant experience—which is later 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.

I had to have an objective test of what I was doing, and so I gave my manuscript to Seenu, as usual, who offered not only to read but also to type it on my elephantine machine. He became quite engrossed in the characters and said several good things about the book. That was most encouraging. But still I wanted other tests. So I summoned my neighbour, a very warm-hearted friend named Purna, who is no more, to come up and listen to me while I read out the chapters to him each day. He went on crying, “Brilliant, brilliant!” He knew no lesser expression than “brilliant,” and that was very sustaining. It shielded me against the sly attacks from my father's friends when they met me in the street. “Unwisdom! unwisdom!” one of my father's friends would say and add, “You must not cause all this worry to your father. This is a time when you should help him. Why don't you join a newspaper if you want to be a writer?”

Most of my father's friends did not know the difference between a novel and a newspaper, yet I explained, “I want to finish my novel, and when it is published, it will solve all problems. Until then one has to wait.” I still had no conception of myself as an economic entity.

“Unwisdom, unwisdom!” the gentleman cried. “You could write as a hobby, how can you make a living as a writer? The notion is very unpractical.”

This was more or less the tenor of everybody's advice to me, but it was impossible for me to acquire a view of myself as an economic entity. I did not have even a rupee at my command. The only luxury that I indulged in was smoking—two cigarettes a day while walking in the evenings. Gold Flake cost in those days only two pice each, and if I had a couple of annas for my expenses each day, I was quite satisfied, and did not look for more.

From time to time an uncle, my mother's younger brother (known as “Junior,” the one who brought me up at Madras being the “Senior”), visited us and stayed at our house for weeks on end. We always felt happy at his arrival. He was an automobile salesman and his pockets burst with cash. He took us to restaurants and for long car drives, bought us whatever we asked for—clothes, shoes, odds and ends. He loved eating, and brought baskets filled with vegetables and foodstuff and fruits home from the market. He was very devoted to my mother, and kept us free from financial worries, at least when he stayed with us. He always carried a tin of cigarettes and we had the use of it. Although it was inconceivable that one could smoke in an uncle's presence, one could have his cigarettes and the uncle would only joke about it.

But he drank a lot every evening and behaved wildly. He would insist on our company in the evenings while out driving his car, but he sat till ten o'clock at the bar, and when returning home, threatened to run over every pedestrian and scare him off the street, argued with every policeman at traffic points, attempted to take his car up the steps of the Maharaja's statue at the palace gate, and came home late. My father discreetly kept himself in his own room at such moments, since he knew that my uncle had much regard for him. My father was very puritanical, and though his adversaries alleged—because of his fair complexion flushed red when cycling down to school, and his gruff voice—that he came to school drunk, he was a teetotaler and tolerated a drunken brother-in-law only out of consideration for my mother.

After dinner this drunken uncle settled down to a nice chat with the family and insisted on having everyone around him. He enjoyed teasing me and Seenu, but left alone my elder brother, who would spurn him at such moments. He would ask Seenu: “Did you buy betel leaves at the market?” which he would want for chewing after dinner.

“Yes,
Mama
.”

“How many leaves were in the bundle?”

“One hundred, as you wanted. . . .”

“Did you count the leaves in the bundle?”

“But the woman who sold it counted . . .”

“You mean to say that you took her word for it? Ha, ha, very well. Count it now. . . . Go on.” Seenu would be bullied into counting the leaves, one by one, loudly, watched over by the uncle. If the bundle contained ninety-nine, he would glare at Seenu and say, “Now go to the market and get the remaining one”; or if Seenu counted one hundred and one, he would be ordered, “Take the extra one leaf and give it back to the woman. We must not cheat her.”

“All right. When?”

“Now, this minute. It will teach you to be careful when you buy anything in the market.” Market being two miles away and the time being near midnight, this was a reckless suggestion, but my brother said “Yes” and vanished, quietly shut himself in his room, and studied his lessons.

Uncle's teasing of me, however, took a different turn at these assemblies. He would suddenly say, “Do I hear aright when people say that you plan to be a writer?” I could not say “Yes” or “No.” There was danger in either. I wished that I could leave the scene as my brother did, but Uncle would feel outraged if he were abandoned thus and become theatrical and upset my mother, who needed our presence at this moment. When I confirmed his suspicion that I wished to be a writer, he would demand to see what I was writing. Urged by my mother, who somehow felt that it would help me in some way, I would show him the typed sheets. He held one to the light and read out, “‘It was Monday morning.' Oh, oh, Monday! why not Tuesday or Friday?” He glanced through the others and said, “What the hell is this? You write that he got up, picked up tooth powder, rinsed his teeth, poured water over his head—just a catalogue! H'm. I could also write a novel if all that is expected of me is to say that I got up, picked up a towel, rubbed the soap, dried myself, shook off the water, combed. . . . I could also become a novelist if this was all that was expected, but I have no time to write a detailed catalogue. And what's this Malgudi? Where is it? Why do you write about some vague place not found anywhere, while there are millions of real places you can write about? Don't write about unreal places. You must read Dickens' novels. You chaps think you are all very clever. I have read every line Dickens has written. There you have a model, write like him.”

I bore all this patiently. As a reward for my patience, he offered to introduce me to some persons in the writing line so that I might make some money—even if I wasn't going to be a good writer. During his next visit to Bangalore, he took me along in his car, determined to help me in spite of my notions.

In addition to my novel, I had on hand about twenty short stories written mainly to see if other subjects than love (which appeared to be the sole theme for every novel, short story, poem, or drama in existence) could be written about. I wished to attack the tyranny of Love and see if Life could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to a writer. I found in the short-story pages of
John o' London's
stories which appealed to me, themes centering around a moment or a mood with a crisis. I found in the life around me plenty of material. The atmosphere and mood were all-important. Life offered enough material to keep me continuously busy. I could write one story a day. I noted in a diary possible themes, and developed them at my leisure, whenever I felt the need for a change from the novel. In addition to this, I also wrote in about two hundred words, each day, a little essay of impressions or vignettes—these were often flimsy, affected, and self-conscious, echoes of something I had been reading, but it was a good exercise and a daily discipline. Thus I had quite a handful to show any publisher who might take an interest in me—a novel in progress, short stories, skits, and essays.

My uncle took me here and there in Bangalore. “Mysore is no good, a sleepy place. If you want to get on, seek your prospects in a city like Bangalore or Madras,” he would say. He took me out with him every morning in his car. He drove his demonstration car nearly a hundred miles a day, saw dozens of persons, subjected them to his sales-talk, and booked at least one order a day and celebrated his success with four gins before lunch. He kept me in his company throughout, and I acquired valuable experience and familiarity with a variety of human types, their style of talk and outlook. Above all, my uncle himself was an inescapable model for me—his approach to other human beings, his aggressive talk wherever he went, his dash and recklessness (he had had the unique record of taking the Maharaja of Mysore, an absolutely inaccessible recluse, hedged in with security and protocol, for a demonstration in his car); especially his abandon to alcohol in every form all through the day. (I portrayed him as Kailas, in
The Bachelor of Arts
, and he provided all the substance whenever I had to portray a drunken character.) Once, as a result of imbibing a full bottle of George IV whiskey during a motor trip to Nilgiri Mountain, he flung the bottle out into a valley, crying “What the hell is an empty doing here?” and later had a conviction that he was turning into a tiger and snarled and stalked behind strangers in the hotel corridor the whole evening until sleep overcame him.

Now, at Bangalore, he mentioned a crony of his whom he described as one interested in “all sorts of arts—writer and journalist and a man who has published many books and articles. I'm sure he will help you. Unless you get in touch with other writers, how can you hope to get started?” But I gathered later that this literatus's chief source of livelihood was through acting as a broker. For every “prospect” that he introduced to my uncle, he received fifty rupees and a couple of drinks if he happened to be around at drinking time. He was addressed as “Prince,” as he claimed to be a member of the Cochin Royal Family. He sat beside my uncle in the car, and I heard their talk from the back seat and learnt much about life in general. At a party my uncle once got into a fight with this Prince. During the scuffle the Prince tugged and tore my uncle's shirt; my uncle immediately left in order to search for an iron rod, swearing to crack his skull. Sensing danger, swiftly the Prince fled by a back stair and ran for his life down the road to his house and shut himself in. With the iron rod clutched in his hand and finding his prey gone, my uncle ran down to his car, started it, drove up and rammed the gate of the Prince's house with the car, demolished a portion of his wall, and challenged: “Open the door, you bastard Prince. . . .” The man kept himself in determinedly, whereupon my uncle turned his car round and came home and slept, waking up to find his shirt torn and in tatters. Next morning the Prince was back at our house and joined Uncle at breakfast as if nothing had happened, only saying, “Do you know your uncle would have murdered me last night? What a scare he gave me!”