I have spent some time wondering why R K Narayan missed the Nobel Prize for Literature. Which writer inspired a celebrated atlas of India with a town called Malgudi in it? In his speech at the University of Chicago, the author said: “When I started on my first novel Swamy and Friends in September 1930, I invented this little town so that it would leave me free to meddle with its geography and other details without incurring the wrath of the city fathers...!”
He created Ellaman Street, Kabir Lane, Market Square, Lawley Extension, Nallappa’s Grove and the Trunk Road with the River Sarayu winding its way to the Memphi Hills. Landmarks like the Albert Mission School, Banner Printing Press, Modern Indian Lodge and Gaffur’s Taxi Service made this mythical town come alive.
The people inhabiting it were no less real. Sampath, the printer who never delivered in time; Margayya, the financial expert who ran a parallel banking system; Vasu, the fake taxidermist, who plundered the Memphi forests; Raju, the guide who accidentally became a godman. These timeless tricksters, along with their innocent victims, made Malgudi unforgettable.
M V Krishnaswamy, the documentary filmmaker, who knew R K Narayan in his early days, used to laugh: “We were all grist to his mill.” He could recognise familiar acquaintances among Malgudi’s delightful inhabitants. He would also see RKN, clad in a faded coat, dhoti and umbrella, walking in the marketplace, observing people around him. Sometimes, he allowed himself the luxury of an areca nut and cloves which he chewed to hide the pangs of hunger. When the struggling writer got a column in a newspaper called The Justice he spent a few annas on coffee and tiffin. “What a sad irony that a person of such intellectual aristocracy was dogged by poverty,” sighed MVK. Years later, when a famous R K Narayan was presented with a Mercedes Benz, he returned it saying he preferred to walk!
I had the privilege of meeting him in 1996 and whenever I went to Madras afterwards.
He was a fantastic raconteur of stories and spoke about his college days, his teachers, and his early life of poverty and denial.
“I had to borrow money to send my manuscripts to England,” he would recall, adding: “The stories were all written on the clean side of used sheets of paper.”
There was no bitterness as he remembered those hard days. There was only joy that he found a true friend in Graham Greene to whom he sent a copy of Swamy and Friends with a note to read and throw into the Thames. That one novel — the work of a genius — would have done the Nobel Prize
proud.