My Days (17 page)

We cannot console ourselves with the thought that this happened three and a half decades ago. Bureaucracy is the same even today the world over. If I should make the mistake of accepting a government commission to write a book today, I am sure it would go through the same process of elucidation and final liquidation through self-defeating procedures.

I
n January 1939 my wife went to her parents' home at Coimbatore for a holiday. It suited me, for the time being, since I had to be away too on business. Mysore was an excellent place to write in, but Madras was my market; I spent a month there and succeeded in selling the Tamil rights of
The Dark Room
to a serial publication, and managed a few other sales too. But the real achievement was a contract with
The Hindu
to write a sketch or a story every week for their Sunday columns, at the rate of thirty rupees apiece. I had also agreed to write features and talks for the All India Radio, and odd items for a film studio, such as scraps of dialogue scenes and “treatment” for the harebrained conceptions fancied by a film producer. When these arrangements were completed, I returned to Mysore.

Now, I found life at home impossible without my wife and child around, and tried to spend my time outside. Leaving early in the morning, I sauntered down Vani Vilas Road, at old Agrahar slowed my steps in order to pray briefly to Ganesha installed under a peepul tree on the roadside; the scent of jasmine sold on the foot-path, and of sandalwood from manufacturers of incense sticks in the neighbourhood, wafted in the air. Sometimes I was trapped by the frying smell emanating from a little restaurant tucked away in a lane off the main road, where I ate a
dosai
, washed it down with coffee, and, lighting a cigarette, resumed my walk. I was careful with money, never spending more than a rupee a day. All morning I wandered. At every turn I found a character fit to go into a story. While walking, ideas were conceived and developed, or sometimes lost through the interludes on the way. One could not traverse the main artery of Mysore, Sayyaji Rao Road, without stopping every few steps to talk to a friend. Mysore is not only reminiscent of an old Greek city in its physical features, but the habits of its citizens are also very Hellenic. Vital issues, including philosophical and political analyses, were examined and settled by people (at least in those days) on the promenades of Mysore. You came across long-lost faces and stopped to enquire what had happened between then and now. If Socrates or Plato were alive, he would have felt at home in Sayyaji Rao Road and carried on his dialogues at the statue square. Apart from such profound encounters, it was also possible that you would run into a man who owed you money or the plumber who had been dodging you, or you could even block your lawyer's path for a consultation. With such interruptions it was possible that ideas got scattered and the thread of a story got lost. However, I generally kept my subject in mind and, returning home, sat at my desk and wrote till the evening. On Wednesdays I had to mail my story for
The Hindu
. The ideal I had in mind was to write and work on it well in advance, and post it smoothly on Wednesday; but it never worked out that way. A touch of desperation to catch the deadline seemed to be an important element in the final shaping of a story. Invariably I was engaged till the last possible minute in working on it, and then I had to carry the packet, to the railway station almost at a run, and shove it into the mail van. It had to reach the editor's table on Thursday morning, when the Sunday page was to be made up.

My working programme was disrupted on any day I realized that my wife had not written a letter on the due date. She always gave me her solemn word that she would drop me a note at least once a week to say that she and the child were keeping well, but she could never keep this promise. I generally expected her letter on Monday afternoon, allowed a couple of days' margin, and felt anxious if there was still no letter on Wednesday. No reason for this state, as I was fully aware that she was not a letter-writing sort. At the beginning of our married life, when we were occasionally separated, a few blue note-papers passed between us, and if I delayed an acknowledgement, she would again write to me in a tone of grave anxiety; but nowadays she had become too casual, and kept me on tenterhooks. I would constantly be on the point of sending off a telegram to say, “How are you? Why no letter?” But she was opposed to the extravagance of a telegram. Once or twice when I did send one she resented it as being too dramatic, and embarrassing before her brothers and sisters. I had to content myself with urgent importuning letters, also threatening to send a telegram if she defaulted. Ultimately she would write and lighten my mind for at least another week, but no longer than a week. On another Wednesday the problem would start all over again, somehow exactly on the day when my story should be in the mail. I have always found story-writing and letter-writing incompatible. I don't know how other writers feel about it, but I find it easier to write a story than a letter, and if I am bogged down in letters, I become desperate for fear that I may miss my day's schedule. On Wednesdays, I also attempted to draft a brief note or telegram, and as a consequence floundered in my composition for
The Hindu
. If the editor of
The Hindu
sometimes found my story difficult to pass, the responsibility must be traced to the missing letter from Coimbatore. Now, looking back, it seems absurd to have placed so much value on exchange of letters. We were not newly-weds to need constant reiteration of mutual love, nor was there any occasion for letters, as the absence of any news must be construed as the best news. This would be a healthy, robust, and commonsense attitude, and it came naturally to my wife, but was beyond me. I was prone to anxious speculations—whether the child might be down with sickness, leaving the mother no time to write, or whether the mother herself might be laid up and feeling too weak to lift a pen. I would be on the verge of sending a wire to ask if she needed my presence and help. In retrospect, it seems to have been such a futile preoccupation, especially in view of what was coming in the next few months. I hardly realized that the present state of loneliness was only a foretaste.

Unable to stand it any longer, I finally wrote to my wife urging her to come back immediately. She wrote back to say that she would return at the end of the month, after meeting her sister, who was expected from Rangoon, on February 20. She was very fond of that sister, and planned to spend a few days in her company before coming back to Mysore. I felt disappointed and wrote an immediate letter advising her not to extend her stay. She replied rather tersely, “It is important that I see my sister, as it may not be possible to spend any time with her again.” I tossed the letter on my desk, commenting, “These sisters, and their endless arrangements!” My mother, who was in the verandah, as was her practice, reading a weekly magazine, saw me start out in a rage. I wished to escape the lonely shell of my room and went out to meet some friends, my intimates, who would say comforting things whenever they learnt of my miseries. My mother looked up from her magazine and asked, “Has your wife written? When is she coming?”

“God knows,” I said and passed on.

“Let her be with her parents a little longer, if she wishes—no harm in it, although to see you stick to home, I would wish she were here.”

Two weeks later Rajam came back from Coimbatore. I received her at the railway station and immediately my daughter ran forward and clung to my arms. I took them home in a tonga. All the way, in the carriage as we drove along, Rajam narrated the events that had taken place at Coimbatore on the eve of her departure. “My father was not too happy to let me go even last evening.”

“Oh—impossible man!” I cried.

“Just as we were leaving, our house-owner, you know that fat man, came in with some demand. My father lost his temper, and then the man shouted wildly, ‘Vacate my house immediately.' Just as they were arguing, a black scorpion fell from the roof-tile where I stood, and I narrowly escaped being bitten. My father felt that these were inauspicious signs and wanted me to postpone my journey.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That would have been impossible. Your father seems to be quarrelsome!”

“But you see me here, why blame him at all? I'd not have delayed my return. You seem to fret so much. I only stayed back for my sister's sake. I am happy I could see her—that was all.”

Within a hundred days of her arrival, Rajam had departed from this world. She caught typhoid in early May and collapsed in the first week of June 1939. Looking back it seems as if she had had a premonition of her end, and had wanted to stay back with her parents and sister. I have described this part of my experience of her sickness and death in
The English Teacher
so fully that I do not, and perhaps cannot, go over it again. More than any other book,
The English Teacher
is autobiographical in content, very little part of it being fiction. The “English teacher” of the novel, Krishna, is a fictional character in the fictional city of Malgudi; but he goes through the same experience I had gone through, and he calls his wife Susila, and the child is Leela instead of Hema. The toll that typhoid took and all the desolation that followed, with a child to look after, and the psychic adjustments, are based on my own experience. That book falls in two parts—one is domestic life and the other half is “spiritual.” Many readers have gone through the first half with interest and the second half with bewilderment and even resentment, perhaps feeling that they have been baited with the domestic picture into tragedy, death, and nebulous, impossible speculations. The dedication of the book to the memory of my wife should to some extent give the reader a clue that the book may not be all fiction; still, most readers resist, naturally, as one always does, the transition from life to death and beyond.

The loss of my wife was sudden and not even remotely anticipated by me—although my father-in-law had had his doubts while looking into my horoscope earlier. But now I had to accept her death as a fact. One had to get used to the idea of death, even while living. If you have to accept life, you are inevitably committed to the notion of death also. And yet one cannot stop living, acting, working, planning—some instinct drives one on. Perhaps death may not be the end of everything as it seems—personality may have other structures and other planes of existence, and the decay of the physical body through disease or senility may mean nothing more than a change of vehicle. This outlook may be unscientific, but it helped me survive the death of my wife—though I had missed her so badly while she was away at Coimbatore. I could somehow manage to live after her death and, eventually, also attain a philosophical understanding.

But it was not easily attained. The course was full of hardship, doubts, and despair against a perpetual, unrelenting climate of loneliness. I never hoped that I could ever take any more interest in the business of living, much less in writing. But it was Graham Greene who said in his letter of condolence, “. . . I don't suppose you will write for months, but eventually you will.” A hope corroborated by another friend, a mystic, Dr. Paul Brunton (to whom I shall refer again), who said one night at the end of an after-dinner walk, “You will write a book which is within you, all ready now, and it is bound to come out sooner or later, when you give yourself a chance to write.” These remarks I accepted without contradiction, but I felt clearly within my mind that I would never write a word again in my life. I had lost my anchorage. There was no meaning in existence. Dismal emptiness stretched before me. There were a hundred mementoes and reminders each day that were deeply tormenting. I could not bear to stay in the room I had once shared with my wife. I slept in the hall. I tried to cut away from every little reminder, but the scent of Dettol and of burnt margosa leaf permeated the walls and haunted me night and day. (The fumes of margosa, in addition to Dettol, were supposed to destroy all infection.) I found it impossible to wake up in the morning and get through the daily routine of washing, eating, clothing, and so on. I suffered from a horrible numbness. My mother and brothers felt distressed at the manner in which I was slipping down. I avoided company. Late in the evening I sallied out for a walk, smoked a few cigarettes, avoided all friends, and came back in time to put my daughter to sleep. I had to give her a great deal of my company in order to make up for her mother's absence. She slept in a bed next to mine in the hall, and had adapted herself to the change in a most handsome manner. She never asked questions. Her uncles and grandmother at home were devoted to her, looked after her, and diverted her mind with visits to the zoo, shops, and movies; plenty of toys came to her by every mail. We kept the door of her mother's room permanently closed. On the actual day of the funeral, the child had been sent away to the zoo early, before she could notice anything.

She had been trained to keep away from her mother's room since the day the fever had been diagnosed as typhoid. And now, more than ever, she was not supposed to go near that door. Yet two weeks later, the child gleefully confided to me, “I know she is not there. I pushed the door, it opened, and I peeped in.”

“They have taken her to the hospital,” I explained lamely.

She was just three years old, but displayed a considerateness which was precocious. She never questioned me or anyone about her mother again.

More painful than the bereavement was the suggestion from well-meaning but foolish men that I should remarry sooner or later. When someone spoke thus, I spat fire at them. I had had a Tamil pandit at college who met me at the market-place and said, “Lost your wife? How dreadful! You must remarry soon. When old clothes are gone, you have to buy new ones. When she has left you without a thought, why should you care?” He spoke as if my wife had deserted me. Many searing retorts welled up within me, but I suppressed them. A lawyer in our street peeped over our gate to say, “Sorry, mister. I have also suffered the same fate. You must and will get over it.” He had lost four wives in his matrimonial career and remarried each time, but at the moment was again a widower. “Your solution does not seem to have worked in your case,” I wanted to say, but again swallowed my remarks.