My Days (8 page)

“In the deep shadows of the rainy July, with secret steps, thou walkest.”

I felt I was inducted into the secrets of Nature's Glory. So did much of Palgrave, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Browning. They spoke of an experience that was real and immediate in my surroundings, and stirred in me a deep response. Perhaps I was in an extremely raw state of mind. My failure at the examination, and seeing my classmates marching ahead, induced a mood of pessimism and martyrdom which, in some strange manner, seemed to have deepened my sensibilities.

I enjoyed every moment of living in Mysore. Sometimes I loitered through the parks and the illuminated vicinities of the Maharaja's Palace. Some days I climbed the thousand steps of the hill and prayed at the shrine of Chamundi, made coconut offerings, and ate them with great relish on the way back. Some days I would notice the gathering storm and flee before it, running down the thousand steps and a couple of miles from the foot of the hill, to reach home drenched, dripping, and panting, but feeling victorious at having survived the blinding lightning and thunder. In some of these enterprises I would have the company of my younger brother Seenu and a few friends. Chamundi Hill offered not only a temple to visit, but also uncharted slopes, boulders, creeks, and unsuspected retreats. Our exploration once brought us to a cave-temple with pillared platforms, secret chambers, and underground cellars, the entire structure roofed over by a huge rock, now deserted and concealed under wild, thorny vegetation, at the southern base of Chamundi Hill. I took to visiting this cave regularly, not caring for the rumour that the place might be harbouring reptiles and cheetahs in its cellars. We went down, tempting providence, to the bottom-most levels, and inscribed our names and addresses on the stone walls with fragments of charcoal which we found strewn about. We braved it, feeling all the while that we were walking into the jaws of death just to inscribe our names on the walls. At the other extreme, my name could also be found at the highest point of Mysore—the topmost chamber of the tower of the Chamundi Temple, which I once reached by a series of ladders to find myself standing on the gigantic lolling tongue of a gargoyle decorating the tower. The view of Mysore City from this height was breath-taking, and I retraced the steps after inscribing my name and address on the wall with the message “Past is gone, present is fleeting, future is vague.” I think my name with the message must still be there, if the renovators have not reached that height or the depth of the cave-cellars in Chamundi Hill. I am not so sure of the latter. A couple of years ago, I tried to revisit the cave and found the place tidied up and occupied. A barbed-wire fence encircled it, the ground around cemented, potted plants kept in rows, electric lights and waterpumps for the garden; the entire cave structure was lime-washed, cleared up, and made fit for a royal residence. A member of the royal family seemed to have taken a fancy to this spot, unfortunately, and cleared it and kept off the public with an armed guard at the gate, not realizing that it's a sacred duty of every enlightened citizen to leave a perfect ruin alone. A ruin is not achieved in a day; it's a result of a long maturing process; unhampered vegetation, thorns, brambles, reptiles, wild beasts, fauna, flora, weather, mud, and all the elements have to combine to create a perfect ruin. I would view any improvement on this an act of vandalism. Royalty keep off, I'd say.

Being the headmaster's son, I had extraordinary privileges in the school library. During summer vacation the library clerk threw open the shelves at all hours, on all days, although he made it nearly impossible with his rules and his form-filling for an ordinary student to take any book home. He thought, perhaps, that he would earn a word of commendation from the headmaster for the privilege shown to his son, although I doubt if my father would have approved of any special treatment for us (my elder brother also obtained these facilities). On holidays, I spent the afternoons at the library, read all the magazines on the table, and had all the shelves opened. I took out four books at a time and read them through at a stretch. A passage in one of our textbooks from Scott's
The Bride of Lammermoor
had whetted my taste for the mists of the Highlands and the drama and romance occurring in that haze. I read
The Bride of Lammermoor
and six other novels by Sir Walter, and relished the strong doses of love and hate that agitated the Highland clans. I admired Scott so much that I searched for his portrait and found one in a second-hand bookshop—a copper engraving as a frontispiece to a double-column edition in microscopic type, containing three novels in one volume, with many illustrations that brought to life all those strong-willed men and forlorn women in their castle homes. After Scott I picked up a whole row of Dickens and loved his London and the queer personalities therein. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Molière and Pope and Marlowe, Tolstoi, Thomas Hardy—an indiscriminate jumble; I read everything with the utmost enjoyment.

I and my elder brother shared a room outside the main house but in the same compound, and there we competed with each other in reading. He read fast, noted in a diary his impressions of a book, and copied down passages that appealed to him. Sometimes, he read aloud a play—Shakespeare or Molière—and compelled me to set aside my own book and listen to his reading. For days on end we stayed at home and read, hardly aware of the seasons or the time passing. At eating time we would make a dash into the main house in which my parents and brothers lived, and return by the back door to our room to resume our reading. We were in a world of our own. In addition to fiction, part of the time I enjoyed reading the history of English literature. A minor work on this, Long's
English Literature
, fell into my hands and I found it interesting right from the facsimile of Magna Carta in the frontispiece. It became my ambition in life to read at least two books from each literary period, starting with the Anglo-Normans. But it didn't work. Although Long's summaries of early literature were fascinating, I realized that the actual work in each case was unreadable.
Beowulf
I found baffling. Spenser confounded me. I could only begin from Ben Jonson, and allotted an hour a day for a methodical study of English literature. I imposed on myself a profound discipline and went through it heroically. At the end of sixty minutes, I returned to fiction with relief.

I loved tragic endings in novels. I looked for books that would leave me crushed at the end. Thus Mrs. Henry Wood's
East Lynne
left me shedding bitter tears, and I read it again and again. The heroine, the lady of a well-to-do family, committed adultery, ran away, was deserted by the seducer, was left for dead in a railway accident, but surviving it came to work as a menial in her own home, and looked after the children. Of course, she was not recognizable, her chief means of disguise being a pair of blue spectacles, so that her children and husband treated her as a servant throughout; when she was dying of “consumption” and coughing her misguided life out, she revealed herself in a harrowing manner. Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that was the most luxurious sadness you could think of. I deliberately looked for stories in which the heroine wasted away in consumption (unless it was the sort of end that befell a lovely woman stooping to folly and finding too late that men betray). I found a lot of it in Dickens, but the most satisfying book in this category was
Passionate Friends
by H. G. Wells (though I cannot recollect if “consumption” ended the heroine's career, or strychnine). One book which I discovered with a whoop of joy was by Victoria Cross (Who was this? Never came across a second book by this author), in which the good lady dies of plague or cholera, leaving the man who loved her shattered and benumbed with grief for the rest of his life. Marie Corelli appealed to me most. I have recently tried to reread some of her books without much success, although one could still accept the synthetic atmosphere she could create of Norway, Egypt, or the English countryside. In a state of juvenile innocence, the mind absorbs the essence through all the dross. But at that stage of my literary searching I read about a dozen of her novels, and felt a regret at the end of each book that it was not longer than five hundred pages! Her overcharged romanticism and her pungent asides about English society and literary critics filled me with admiration. I cut out a portrait of her from
Bookman
and mounted it on my bookshelf.

My father utilized to the utmost all the library budget and any balance left over from other departments such as sports; the result was that the high-school reading-room had on its table magazines from every part of the world. Week-ends, when foreign mail arrived, were an exciting time. Magazines in brown wrappers were brought home straight from the post office in a mail-bag by a servant. They were opened and heaped up on my father's desk—every magazine from
Little Folks
to
Nineteenth Century and After
and
Cornhill
, published in London was there. My father did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read—provided we put them back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school's reading-room table on Monday morning. So our week-end reading was full and varied. We could dream over the advertisement pages in the
Boys
'
Own Paper
or the
Strand Magazine
. Through the
Strand
we made the acquaintance of all English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W. W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English fiction-writer worth the name. The
Bookman
gave us glimpses of the doings of the literary figures of those days, the scene dominated by Shaw, Wells, and Hardy. I knew precisely what they said or thought of each other, how much they earned in royalties, and what they were working on at any given moment. Obiter dicta, personal tit-bits about the writers and their world, the Chesterton-Belloc alliance against Shaw or someone else, the scintillating literary world of London was absorbing to watch. From our room, leaning on our pillows in obscure Bojjanna Lines of Mysore, we watched the literary personalities strutting about in London. Through
Harper's
, the
Atlantic
, and
American Mercury
, we attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.

The London
Mercury
, with its orange cover and uncut pages, was especially welcome. I viewed J. C. Squire as if he were my neighbour.
John o' London
and
T. P.'s Weekly
afforded us plenty of literary gossip about publishers and writers.
The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement
, and the Manchester
Guardian
in a thin yellow cover. Twenty-four hours were inadequate for all that one got in hand to read. Slowly, I became familiar with critics who mattered and their judgement. Gradually I began not only to read all the novels in the library but also to acquire through the book reviews a critical sense, so that a certain degree of tempering occurred in my early enthusiasms for some writers—such as Marie Corelli, for instance.

I had started writing, mostly under the influence of events occurring around me and in the style of any writer who was uppermost in my mind at the time. My father had lost a dear friend, which affected him deeply. Moved by his sorrow, I wrote ten pages of an outpouring entitled “Friendship,” very nearly echoing the lamentations of “Adonais” but in a flamboyant poetic prose. I read this aloud to my younger brother Seenu, who could always be counted upon to utter encouraging words, but I hid it from my elder brother, whose critical sense I feared; and I read my piece also to a few close select friends, who were prepared to walk with me to Kukanahalli Tank, since I always carried my composition in my pocket. Whenever I could afford it, I gave them a cup of coffee at a restaurant on Hundred Feet Road. The cup of coffee blunted the listeners' critical faculties and made them declare my work a masterpiece. When I read it aloud, seated in the shade of the lone tree on Kukanahalli meadow, and heard my words falling on my ears I felt a new thrill each time. At the end of the last line a pregnant silence, while I awaited the good word from my select public.