The Guide - first edition cover 1958
Seven readers and a guest, Devika Achuthan, came to read The Guide by R.K. Narayan, a deceptively simple book with much insight into the life a small town in South India, Malgudi. A quicksilver character called Raju takes shape before the reader’s eyes, growing from boyhood to self-sufficiency under the tutelage of his strict parents.
Saras, Kavita, Hemjit
What has prepared him in his modest upbringing to make sense of the great art of Bharata Natyam? How did romance enter his life through his fascination for a neglected devadasi, wife to an asexual man who is absorbed in rock inscriptions and cave paintings?
Saras, Hemjit, Devika
How did Raju counter the prejudices of his mother toward entertaining Rosie in their one-room house? And then stand up to to his formidable uncle who threatened to castrate him if he misbehaved?
Devika, Saras, Kavita
How did Raju become an impresario to the magnificent dancer, Rosie now Nalini, booking her in all the major cities of India, supervising travel arrangements, hiring accompanists and halls, and presiding over her performances?
Devika, Saras, Kavita, Hemjit having parippu vada
And how did he fall from grace by an error of judgement that results in a case of forgery and has him thrown into prison? Raju survives all and comes out a chastened man who would feign live out his life in peace except for a terrible drought that descends on the countryside. The people look upon him as a saint who by fasting will bring on the rains. But the enforced saint is thinking of bondas to eat.
Shoba, Geetha
Here we are at the end, having thoroughly enjoyed the humour and rich humanity of R.K. Narayan’s novel.
Joe, Geetha, Kavita, Saras, Devika, Shoba, KumKum, Hemjit (seated)
The Guide by R.K. Narayan
Full Account and Record of the Reading on May 18, 2018
Present: KumKum, Shoba, Hemjit, Kavita, Saras, Joe, Geetha, Pamela (virtual)
Absent: Thommo, Sunil, Preeti, Priya, Ankush, Zakia
New member: Devika Achuthan (introduced by Saras)
KumKum took up the subscriptions of Rs 300 per person and handed it to Geetha in an envelope for Thommo to deposit in the bank and give us an account next time. Those who have not paid may do so at the next gathering on June 19, Tuesday. Parippu Vada (KumKum) and Cake (Shoba) were served for refreshments.
R.K.Narayan (1906 - 2001)
R.K. Narayan - photo by Raghubir Singh
Born as Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami in Oct 1906 to a teacher in Mysore, he grew up in his early life in Madras. He was one of six children, and his equally famous younger brother was R.K. Laxman the cartoonist of Times of India. He was one of the first Indian authors in English to dedicate himself to literary writing as a career and earn his living thereby. Graham Greene who was shown an early novel, Swami and Friends, introduced his book to his own publisher and the two authors became life-long friends. Greene persuaded him to shorten his name to R.K. Narayan. Greene alerted RK to the brevity of his first novel (about 50K words) but he stuck with it and The Guide is only a little longer at 77K words.
Narayan in his childhood had access to the library of the school where his father was headmaster and read Dickens, Wodehouse, Hardy, Conan Doyle, etc. He was at first a schoolteacher himself but gave it up and in 1930 wrote Swami and Friends, with little encouragement, and it was rejected by all the publishers he submitted it to.
The Guide was inspired by RK’s experience of a New York guide when he was visiting USA. He wrote the novel in Berkeley, CA in a hired hotel room in three months straight. He brought it to New York thereafter and it became a success on publication. Dev Anand wooed him when RK was back in India and convinced him about a film. It was transposed to Rajasthan and RK had little or no role in the film production. To dilute the adultery theme (at the time still risqué on the Indian screen) Marco’s character was turned into that of a womaniser. RK thought the film lost its values. The film ends in pouring rain and a big funeral to satisfy the cash outlay by the financiers.
RK wrote without any difficulty, being dedicated to the motto of a thousand or so words per day. Malgudi was a fictitious town which he arrived at gradually without planing. There is a Lalgudi and a Mangudi, but no real Malgudi in India.
R.K. Narayan and his wife Rajam in 1935
RKN met his wife-to-be, Rajam in 1933 at a relative’s house and fell in love. She was only 15 at the time, he 27. He got married but tragically she fell ill from typhoid and died soon after marrying in 1939, leaving RKN to bring up his daughter, Hema. A period of depression followed. In 1935 his first novel, Swami and Friends, was published in England with the help of Graham Greene. Other novels followed in the setting of mythical Malgudi. Besides 15 novels he has written accounts of his writing life, My Dateless Diary, My Days, The Writerly Life, and so on. He has authored abridged versions of the The Ramayana and the The Mahabharata.
Four collections of short stories round out his literary output. RKN was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide in 1958. He also won the Padma Bhushan (1964) and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001, a year before he died. He had several honorary degrees, got the Benson medal of the Royal Society of Literature, and was admitted as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
RKN started his own publishing house Indian Thought Publications which continues to publish his works in India.
R.K. Narayan's house in Mysuru has been turned into a Museum
In the current novel there are two narratives, one of Raju and Velan after Raju is released from jail; the other is the adventures of Railway Raju who becomes Impresario Raju when he takes charge of Rosie, and transmutes her into the national Bharata Natyam dancer, Nalini.
Raju’s case may be seen as a tourism guide becoming a spiritual guide, with a stint in between as manager of a top-notch dancer.
1. Pamela
Although away visiting her daughter who has just given birth in Rochester, NY, Pamela was keen to participate and did so by recording her reading in voice files and placing it in the KRG Dropbox. Joe downloaded it to his Macbook at home and played it at the session, taking a tumble in the process when he sat into empty space (nothing bad happened) while moving back from the computer.
Her reading was about the manner in which Raju quickly ascertains the precise touring needs of his clients with a set of simple questions. He is nothing if not adaptable to their needs and quickly tailors a journey in Gaffur's taxi or a jutka according to the budget. No two clients had the same needs.
Joe related how RKN arrived at the seeds of Raju's character while traveling in America in 1957 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He wrote a travel narrative in America entitled My Dateless Diary, An American Journey. In the chapter ‘New York Days’ he tells about a very efficient guide — witty, smart, and blessed with easy familiarity, “who took the author and his group around the National Broadcasting Corporation Studios at the Rockefeller Center. The young man's ‘smooth talk’ was more vivid and picturesque than the actual exhibits on display— he seemed to conjure up history and archaeology out of thin air.” So this encounter with an American and not the example of an Indian tourist guide gave birth to Raju's character, after the necessary transposition of locale. RKN then moved from New York to Berkeley in California, hired a hotel room there for three months, and wrote the novel in just three months.
Dev Anand & Waheeda Rehman in the Hindi film, The Guide
For those interested in the 1965 film of The Guide starring Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman, the full length film is available on Youtube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfA9jjIjJu0&t=806s
Poster of the film
For a background on the making of film and how Dev Anand samjhaoed R.K. Narayan into granting the film rights, see Maddy's Ramblings at
http://maddy06.blogspot.in/2013/02/the-writer-showman-and-guide.html
RKN was barely involved in the making of the film. Transposing from South India to Rajasthan had a drastic effect on the film, as the author says: “By abolishing Malgudi, they had discarded my own values in milieu and human characterising.”
2. Geetha
Geetha was reading the next novel, Mill on the Floss, when she had to interrupt in order to finish The Guide. Initially it was a come down. Archaic English English versus modern straightforward Indian English. But reading a bit into the novel she was captivated. Hemjit said it was a 'friendly’ novel. It develops the characters well. When he was a boy Raju’s parents looked after him with benevolent strictness. The coming of the Railway to the town was an exciting event.
The passage Geetha chose illuminates the character of the mother after Rosie, the devadasi, enters their home to stay. RKN never uses the term devadasi, but refers to ‘dancer’ or ‘dancing women’ which does not yield the tainted connotation. The mother tolerates her, but cannot distance herself from the customary ill-repute attaching to such women. Although she was tender on the surface to Rosie she was slowly poisoned by what others said. She wanted Rosie to return to her husband and make up, and gave her lectures about the different kinds of husbands:
she spoke to Rosie, and filled the time with anecdotes about husbands: good husbands, mad husbands, reasonable husbands, unreasonable ones, savage ones, slightly deranged ones, moody ones, and so on and so forth; but it was always the wife, by her doggedness, perseverance, and patience, that brought him round.
KumKum liked this tabulation of types, and wondered which epithet best fit her spouse — slightly deranged perhaps, she answered, when Kavita wanted to know!
3. Shoba
Although Raju’s uncle appears in the middle of the novel for just two pages his characterisation is so vivid that you instantly understand Raju’s reaction to him and how difficult it must have been to attain to manhood under the eye of such a domineering person, who threatens:
Do you know what we do when we get an intractable bull calf? We castrate it. We will do that to you, if you don’t behave.
This has such force in the rustic language that it made everyone laugh. In Tamil the first part would be:
Nām oru muṭṭāḷ kāḷai kaṉṟu kiṭaittāl eṉṉa ceyvatu teriyumā? Nām adhai cērppōm.
4. KumKum
She said the carefree life of Raju as a village boy reminded her of Apu in the Satyajit Ray film, Pather Panchali. How little the children needed to keep themselves amused:
I had marbles, an iron hoop to roll, and a rubber ball, with which I occupied myself.
No need of TV or Internet games! And no need to look after the children — they took care of themselves, and played imaginary games. Saras was reminded of Swami and Friends where Swami is set a mango arithmetic sum by his father:
Rama wants to earn fifteen annas from ten mangoes, which he has with him. Krishna wants to buy only four mangoes. How much will Rama demand from Krishna for four mangoes?
Swami’s thinking goes off at a tangent and he asks:
Are the mangoes ripe or not? His father laughs at him and again demands a solution. Swami becomes helpless and cannot utter even a single word. He thinks if his father told him whether the mangoes were ripe or not, he might have solved the sum.
Everyone had a laugh at the traditional wisdom of Raju’s father’s saying:
The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned, or in Tamil
Adikkāta iḷa paiyaṉ aṟiyātavaṉāka iruppāṉ
5. Hemjit
Raju hires an expensive lawyer who charges Rs 700 a day (recall it is the rupee of early 1950s). He is labelled an ‘adjournment lawyer’ who specialises in seeing to it a case is postponed indefinitely. He presented Raju’s case as a Comedy in Three Acts:
The first part of the comedy was that the villain wanted to drive his wife mad; the second part of the comedy was that the wife survived this onslaught, and on the point of privation and death was saved by a humble humanitarian called Raju, who sacrificed his time and profession for the protection of the lady and enabled her to rise so high in the world of the arts.
6. Kavita
Kavita’s piece concerns the transformation of Raju the Railway Guide into Raju the Impresario, who organises dance performances for Nalini around the country. He does the publicity and books her engagements all over the country; from a know-nothing in dance he becomes an expert, picking up all the key elements. He knows when a performance has to taper off, and when the hall is filled to begin the performance. He hires the accompanists and takes care of their travel. At the performance he is full of self-importance reflecting Nalini’s glory onto himself.
I liked the way the president of the occasion sat next to me, and leaned over to say something. They all liked to be seen talking to me. They felt almost as gratified as if they spoke to Nalini herself. I shook my head, laughed with restraint, and said something in reply; leaving the watching audience at our back to guess the import of our exchanges, although actually it was never anything more than, “The hall seems to have filled.”
This acute observation of RKN of what transpires in the first row at stage performances filled the readers with gentle laughter. Devika noted that all this went to Raju’s head and he took to a lavish lifestyle. When Marco’s court case and Raju’s arrest puts a sudden end to the performances, they find there are no savings to fall back on. Where did all the money go?
7. Saras
The passage describes how Raju adapts to life within the prison and lands at the top of the prison heap by adjusting to the circumstances. Saras emphasised that Raju turns any situation to his advantage and is the original 420. Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code deals with Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property. Is that what Raju was guilty of when he fraudulently affixed his signature to the document conveying a box to Rosie from Marco? About prison Raju says:
No place could be more agreeable; if you observed the rules you earned greater appreciation here than beyond the high walls. I got my food, I had my social life with the other inmates and the staff, I moved about freely within an area of fifty acres. Well, that's a great deal of space when you come to think of it; man generally manages with much less. "Forget the walls, and you will be happy," I told some of the newcomers.
Joe agreed fifty acres is far more than what most people get the free run of in their lives! Kavita said he got along with others in prison, inmates, warders, the jail superintendent, and so on. Geetha said Raju had a basic winsomeness to his character. Hemjit mentioned that in the film Nalini (Waheeda Rehman) comes to visit him in prison. Devika thought of all the little details that enable one to get a good idea of the pleasant prison life of Raju — it is all so artlessly narrated. Saras agreed. In a similar way the description of Raju’s one-room dwelling in Malgudi is so graphic you can hold it in the mind’s eye immediately, but it is conveyed in a just a few strokes of RKN’s pen.
Joe mentioned the long-term friendship between Graham Greene and RKN and in interviews of RKN over several years by Susan Ram and N. Ram published in 1996, we learn how Greene copy-edited RKN’s work:
Greene would make some corrections to my writing. He told me (when they met in 1956), “You are a careless writer. Sometimes you don’t take the trouble to find the right word – you don’t take the trouble to conclude a sentence.” He would always take care of the proofs; I never had to read a proof (of the U.K. editions of Narayan’s books). I never changed anything done by Greene.
Saras again adverted to Raju’s adaptability and his always being able to land on his feet. In Critical Essays on R.K. Narayan's The Guide we find this assessment:
Raju's is a quicksilver personality—capricious, mercurial, even somewhat fickle. Because of his swift change of moods and desires, he is a bundle of contradictions. Raju is simultaneously duplicitous and sincere, self-serving and unselfish, rogue and redeemer, sinner and saint. It is this co-existence of complexity and venality in Raju's character that enables him to alter his persona and improvise just as the situation demands.
Joe found a lacuna in this novel: the love between Rosie and Raju is not explored in any depth. At the end of Chapter Five the romance is set in motion by a simple foot in the door:
"No, no. Go away," she said. But on an impulse I gently pushed her out of the way, and stepped in and locked the door on the world.
It looks as if RKN shrank from bedroom scenes and avoided romantic outpourings by his characters. But isn’t there a great love story at the heart of this novel, Joe asked?
KumKum rather pointed to Rosie’s MA in Economics as though that were an inoculation against the frivolities of love. But as Saras pointed out her education did give her a fundamental confidence and soon she becomes independent of Raju, and takes care of her own affairs and continues with her dancing career.
At the end there are loads of tourists who come to see Raju, the saint and spiritual guide fasting for rains. In the book it is not clear that he dies, it just says: “He sagged down,” but that could be from the exhaustion of fasting. In real life, RKN had a discussion on the subject with Graham Greene whose verdict was Raju had to die in the end.
RKN writes in My Dateless Diary:
Graham Greene liked the story when I narrated it to him in London. While I was hesitating whether to leave my hero alive or dead at the end of the story, Graham was definite that he should die. So I have on my hands the life of a man condemned to death before he is born, and I have to plan my narrative to lead to it.
The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned, or in Tamil
Adikkāta iḷa paiyaṉ aṟiyātavaṉāka iruppāṉ
5. Hemjit
Raju hires an expensive lawyer who charges Rs 700 a day (recall it is the rupee of early 1950s). He is labelled an ‘adjournment lawyer’ who specialises in seeing to it a case is postponed indefinitely. He presented Raju’s case as a Comedy in Three Acts:
The first part of the comedy was that the villain wanted to drive his wife mad; the second part of the comedy was that the wife survived this onslaught, and on the point of privation and death was saved by a humble humanitarian called Raju, who sacrificed his time and profession for the protection of the lady and enabled her to rise so high in the world of the arts.
6. Kavita
Kavita’s piece concerns the transformation of Raju the Railway Guide into Raju the Impresario, who organises dance performances for Nalini around the country. He does the publicity and books her engagements all over the country; from a know-nothing in dance he becomes an expert, picking up all the key elements. He knows when a performance has to taper off, and when the hall is filled to begin the performance. He hires the accompanists and takes care of their travel. At the performance he is full of self-importance reflecting Nalini’s glory onto himself.
I liked the way the president of the occasion sat next to me, and leaned over to say something. They all liked to be seen talking to me. They felt almost as gratified as if they spoke to Nalini herself. I shook my head, laughed with restraint, and said something in reply; leaving the watching audience at our back to guess the import of our exchanges, although actually it was never anything more than, “The hall seems to have filled.”
This acute observation of RKN of what transpires in the first row at stage performances filled the readers with gentle laughter. Devika noted that all this went to Raju’s head and he took to a lavish lifestyle. When Marco’s court case and Raju’s arrest puts a sudden end to the performances, they find there are no savings to fall back on. Where did all the money go?
7. Saras
The passage describes how Raju adapts to life within the prison and lands at the top of the prison heap by adjusting to the circumstances. Saras emphasised that Raju turns any situation to his advantage and is the original 420. Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code deals with Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property. Is that what Raju was guilty of when he fraudulently affixed his signature to the document conveying a box to Rosie from Marco? About prison Raju says:
No place could be more agreeable; if you observed the rules you earned greater appreciation here than beyond the high walls. I got my food, I had my social life with the other inmates and the staff, I moved about freely within an area of fifty acres. Well, that's a great deal of space when you come to think of it; man generally manages with much less. "Forget the walls, and you will be happy," I told some of the newcomers.
Joe agreed fifty acres is far more than what most people get the free run of in their lives! Kavita said he got along with others in prison, inmates, warders, the jail superintendent, and so on. Geetha said Raju had a basic winsomeness to his character. Hemjit mentioned that in the film Nalini (Waheeda Rehman) comes to visit him in prison. Devika thought of all the little details that enable one to get a good idea of the pleasant prison life of Raju — it is all so artlessly narrated. Saras agreed. In a similar way the description of Raju’s one-room dwelling in Malgudi is so graphic you can hold it in the mind’s eye immediately, but it is conveyed in a just a few strokes of RKN’s pen.
Joe mentioned the long-term friendship between Graham Greene and RKN and in interviews of RKN over several years by Susan Ram and N. Ram published in 1996, we learn how Greene copy-edited RKN’s work:
Greene would make some corrections to my writing. He told me (when they met in 1956), “You are a careless writer. Sometimes you don’t take the trouble to find the right word – you don’t take the trouble to conclude a sentence.” He would always take care of the proofs; I never had to read a proof (of the U.K. editions of Narayan’s books). I never changed anything done by Greene.
Saras again adverted to Raju’s adaptability and his always being able to land on his feet. In Critical Essays on R.K. Narayan's The Guide we find this assessment:
Raju's is a quicksilver personality—capricious, mercurial, even somewhat fickle. Because of his swift change of moods and desires, he is a bundle of contradictions. Raju is simultaneously duplicitous and sincere, self-serving and unselfish, rogue and redeemer, sinner and saint. It is this co-existence of complexity and venality in Raju's character that enables him to alter his persona and improvise just as the situation demands.
Joe found a lacuna in this novel: the love between Rosie and Raju is not explored in any depth. At the end of Chapter Five the romance is set in motion by a simple foot in the door:
"No, no. Go away," she said. But on an impulse I gently pushed her out of the way, and stepped in and locked the door on the world.
It looks as if RKN shrank from bedroom scenes and avoided romantic outpourings by his characters. But isn’t there a great love story at the heart of this novel, Joe asked?
KumKum rather pointed to Rosie’s MA in Economics as though that were an inoculation against the frivolities of love. But as Saras pointed out her education did give her a fundamental confidence and soon she becomes independent of Raju, and takes care of her own affairs and continues with her dancing career.
At the end there are loads of tourists who come to see Raju, the saint and spiritual guide fasting for rains. In the book it is not clear that he dies, it just says: “He sagged down,” but that could be from the exhaustion of fasting. In real life, RKN had a discussion on the subject with Graham Greene whose verdict was Raju had to die in the end.
RKN writes in My Dateless Diary:
Graham Greene liked the story when I narrated it to him in London. While I was hesitating whether to leave my hero alive or dead at the end of the story, Graham was definite that he should die. So I have on my hands the life of a man condemned to death before he is born, and I have to plan my narrative to lead to it.
A touching sentence from the reading was the ending:
I’d have been happy to stay in this prison permanently.
8. Joe
In the passage Joe read, Raju makes the transformation from reformed prisoner to spiritual guide of the village. He pronounces mystifying edicts such as this to the villagers:
“Recollect and reflect upon every word you have uttered since daybreak—”
When they proclaim their inability to engage in this mindfulness exercise, he again makes an authoritative-sounding remark of the wise one:
Until you try, how can you know what you can or cannot do?
In the end he relents and asks for the recall of just six words. RKN is obviously writing a satire on the vacuous profundities that pass for primeval wisdom. Joe accentuated the orotund voice used to clothe this type of spirituality by putting on a slow solemn tone for Raju’s pronouncements, which Geetha noted. In the final chapter Raju becomes the unwilling saint, a victim of his own success in duping the people. All he wanted was a bonda and instead he is put up to a heroic fast for rains, and enforced sainthood. We read in the above reference, Critical Essays on R.K. Narayan's The Guide:
As a “reluctant guru” (RKN too was such a one when faced with eager questions about Hindu spirituality in America), Raju resists the role of wise man only to succumb to it. But the progression is fraught with irony. Raju’s career is a parodic re-enactment of the dedicated lives of the sages of yore. As is the duty of the adept, he answers his ‘inquirer’ Velan, but with a masquerade. As regards his inner being, Raju himself is aware that he has shown lack of judgment of ordinary character, till circumstances compel him to discover a reservoir of strength which he did not know he possessed; and he may indeed have ultimately attained ‘godhood’, but that matter remains open to question. Raju is a type of the ‘godman’, who is a familiar figure in contemporary India. Through Raju, Narayan problematises the ancient yogic paradigm of the sant or sadhu by transposing it on to a modern setting, and then probing the way in which it negotiates the many venalities of modern life.
1. Pamela
p.63 Raju the railway tourist guide sizes up his clients
As soon as a tourist arrived, I observed how he dealt with his baggage, whether he engaged a porter at all or preferred to hook a finger to each piece. I had to note all this within a split second, and then, outside, whether he walked to the hotel or called a taxi or haggled with the one-horse jutka. Of course, I undertook all this on his behalf, but always with detachment. I did all this for him simply for the reason that he asked for Railway Raju the moment he stepped down on the platform and I knew he came with good references, whether he came from north or south or far or near. And at the hotel it was my business to provide him with the best room or the worst room, just as he might prefer. Those who took the cheapest dormitory said, "After all, it's only for sleeping, I am going to be out the whole day. Why waste money on a room which is anyway going to be locked up all day? Don't you agree?" "Surely, yes, yes." I nodded, still without giving an answer to "Where are you going to take me first?" I might still be said to be keeping the man under probation, under careful scrutiny. I never made any suggestion yet. No use expecting a man to be clear-headed who is fresh from a train journey. He must wash, change his clothes, refresh himself with idli and coffee, and only then can we expect anyone in South India to think clearly on all matters of this world and the next. If he offered me any refreshment, I understood that he was a comparatively liberal sort, but did not accept it until we were a little further gone in friendship. In due course, I asked him point-blank, "How much time do you hope to spend in this town?" "Three days at the most. Could we manage everything within the time?" "Certainly, although it all depends upon what you most wish to see." And then I put him in the confessional, so to speak. I tried to draw out his interests. Malgudi, I said, had many things to offer, historically, scenically, from the point of view of modem developments, and so on and so forth; or if one came as a pilgrim I could take him to a dozen temples all over the district within a radius of fifty miles; I could find holy waters for him to bathe in all along the course of the Sarayu, starting, of course, with its source on Mempi Peaks. One thing I learned in my career as a tourist guide was that no two persons were interested in the same thing. Tastes, as in food, differ also in sightseeing. Some people want to be seeing a waterfall, some want a ruin (oh, they grow ecstatic when they see cracked plaster, broken idols, and crumbling bricks), some want a god to worship, some look for a hydroelectric plant, and some want just a nice place, such as the bungalow on top of Mempi with all-glass sides, from where you could see a hundred miles and observe wild game prowling around. Of those again there were two types, one the poet who was content to watch and return, and the other who wanted to admire nature and also get drunk there. I don't know why it is so: a fine poetic spot like the Mempi Peak House excites in certain natures unexpected reactions. I know some who brought women there; a quiet, wooded spot looking over a valley one would think fit for contemplation or poetry, but it only acted as an aphrodisiac. Well, it was not my business to comment. My business stopped with taking them there, and to see that Gaffur went back to pick them up at the right time. I was sort of scared of the man who acted as my examiner, who had a complete list of all the sights and insisted on his money's worth. "What is the population of this town?" "What is the area?" "Don't bluff. I know when exactly that was built —it is not second-century but the twelfth." Or he told me the correct pronunciation of words. "R-o-u-t is not ..." I was meek, self-effacing in his presence and accepted his corrections with gratitude, and he always ended up by asking, "What is the use of your calling yourself a guide if you do not know . . . ?" et cetera, et cetera. You may well ask what I made out of all this? Well, there is no fixed answer to it. It depended upon the circumstances and the types of people I was escorting. I generally specified ten rupees as the minimum for the pleasure of my company, and a little more if I had to escort them far; over all this Gaffur, the photo stores, the hotel manager, and whoever I introduced a customer to expressed their appreciation, according to a certain schedule. I learned while I taught and earned while I learned, and the whole thing was most enjoyable.
2. Geetha
p.158 Raju's mother cannot accept the idea of living with a tainted woman
Within a short time my mother understood everything. When Rosie had gone in for a bath, she said, cornering me, "This cannot go on long, Raju—you must put an end to it."
"Don't interfere, Mother. I am an adult. I know what I am doing." "You can't have a dancing girl in your house. Every morning with all that dancing and everything going on! What is the home coming to?" Encouraged by me, Rosie had begun to practice. She got up at five in the morning, bathed, and prayed before the picture of a god in my mother's niche, and began a practice session which went on for nearly three hours. The house rang with the jingling of her anklets. She ignored her surroundings completely, her attention being concentrated upon her movements and steps. After that she helped my mother, scrubbed, washed, swept, and tidied up everything in the house. My mother was pleased with her and seemed kind to her. I never thought that my mother would create a problem for me now, but here she was. I said, "What has come over you all of a sudden?' My mother paused. "I was hoping you would have the sense to do something about it. It can't go on like this forever. What will people say?"
"Who are 'people?' " I asked. "Well, my brother and your cousins and others known to us."
"I don't care for their opinion. Just don't bother about such things."
"Oh! That's a strange order you are giving me, my boy. I can't accept it."
The gentle singing in the bathroom ceased; my mother dropped the subject and went away as Rosie emerged from her bath fresh and blooming. Looking at her, one would have thought that she had not a care in the world. She was quite happy to be doing what she was doing at the moment, was not in the least bothered about the past, and looked forward tremendously to the future. She was completely devoted to my mother. But unfortunately my mother, for all her show of tenderness, was beginning to stiffen inside. She had been hastening to gossip, and she could not accommodate the idea of living with a tainted woman. I was afraid to be cornered by her, and took care not to face her alone. But whenever she could get at me, she hissed a whisper into my ear. "She is a real snake woman, I tell you. I never liked her from the first day you mentioned her." I was getting annoyed with my mother's judgment and duplicity. The girl, in all innocence, looked happy and carefree and felt completely devoted to my mother. I grew anxious lest my mother should suddenly turn round and openly tell her to quit. I changed my tactics and said, "You are right. Mother. But you see, she is a refugee, and we can't do anything. We have to be hospitable." "Why can't she go to her husband and fall at his feet? You know, living with a husband is no joke, as these modem girls imagine. No husband worth the name was ever conquered by powder and lipstick alone. You know, your father more than once . . ." She narrated an anecdote about the trouble created by my father's unreasonable, obstinate attitude in some family matter and how she met it. I listened to her anecdote patiently and with admiration, and that diverted her for a while. After a few days she began to allude to the problems of husband and wife whenever she spoke to Rosie, and filled the time with anecdotes about husbands: good husbands, mad husbands, reasonable husbands, unreasonable ones, savage ones, slightly deranged ones, moody ones, and so on and so forth; but it was always the wife, by her doggedness, perseverance, and patience, that brought him round. She quoted numerous mythological stories of Savitri Seetha, and all the well-known heroines. Apparently it was a general talk, apropos of nothing, but my mother's motives were naively clear. She was so clumsily roundabout that anyone could see what she was driving at. She was still supposed to be ignorant of Rosie's affairs, but she talked pointedly. I knew how Rosie smarted under these lessons, but I was helpless. I was afraid of my mother. I could have kept Rosie in a hotel, perhaps, but I was forced to take a more realistic view of my finances now. I was helpless as I saw Rosie suffer, and my only solace was that I suffered with her. ... The new shopman watched the scene with detachment. A whiskered fellow—I did not like his leering look. I turned on him fiercely, leaving the porter, and cried, "Well, you'll also face the same situation, remember, some day. Don't be too sure." He twirled his whiskers and said, "How can everyone hope for the same luck as yours?" He winked mischievously, at which I completely lost my temper and flew at him. He repelled me with a back-stroke of his left hand as if swatting a fly, and I fell back, and knocked against my mother—who had come running onto the platform, a thing she had never done in her life. Luckily, I didn't knock her down.
She clung to my arm and screamed, "Come away. Are you coming or not?" And the porter, the whiskered man, and everyone swore, "You are saved today, because of that venerable old lady." She dragged me back to the house; a few batches of paper, a register, and one or two odd personal belongings which I had kept in the shop were under my arm; with these I entered my house, and I knew my railway association was now definitely ended. It made my heart heavy. I felt so gloomy that I did not turn to see Rosie standing aside, staring at me. I flung myself in a corner of the hall and shut my eyes.
3. Shoba
p.171 Raju's domineering uncle visits and threatens to castrate Raju
My mother had adjusted herself to my ways as an unmitigated loafer, and I thought she had resigned herself to them. But she had her own scheme of tackling me. One morning as I was watching Rosie's footwork with the greatest concentration, my uncle dropped in like a bolt from the blue. He was my mother's elder brother, an energetic landowner in my mother's village who had inherited her parents' home and was a sort of general adviser and director of all our family matters. Marriages, finances, funerals, litigation, for everything he was consulted by all the members of the family—my mother and her three sisters, scattered in various parts of the district. He seldom left his village, as he conducted most of his leadership by correspondence. I knew my mother was in touch with him —a postcard a month, closely written, from him would fill her with peace and happiness for weeks and she would ceaselessly talk about it. It was his daughter that she wanted me to marry —a proposal which she fortunately pushed into the background, in view of recent developments.
Here entered the man himself, standing at the door and calling in his booming voice, "Sister!" I scrambled to my feet and ran to the door. My mother came hurrying from the kitchen. Rosie stopped her practice. The man was six feet, darkened by the sun from working in the fields, and had a small knotted tuft on his skull; he wore a shirt with an upper cloth, his dhoti was brown, not white like a townsman's. He carried a bag of jute material in his hand (with a green print of Mahatma Gandhi on it), and a small trunk. He went straight to the kitchen, took out of the bag a cucumber, a few limes, and plantains and greens, saying, "These are for my sister, grown in our gardens." He placed them on the floor of the kitchen for his sister. He gave a few instructions as to how to cook them.
My mother became very happy at the sight of him. She said, "Wait, I'll give you coffee."
He stood there explaining how he came by a bus, what he had been doing when he received my mother's letter, and so on and so forth. It was a surprise to me to know that she had written to him to come. She had not told me. "You never told me you wrote to Uncle!" I said. "Why should she tell you?" snapped my uncle. "As if you were her master!" I knew he was trying to pick a quarrel with me. He lowered his voice to a whisper, pulled me down by the collar of my shirt, and asked, "What is all this one hears about you? Very creditable development you are showing, my boy. Anybody would be proud of you!" I wriggled myself free and frowned. He said, "What has come over you? You think yourself a big man? I can't be frightened of scapegraces like you. Do you know what we do when we get an intractable bull calf? We castrate it. We will do that to you, if you don't behave."
My mother went on minding the boiling water as if she didn't notice what went on between us. I had thought she would come to my support, but she seemed to enjoy my predicament, having designed it herself. I felt confused and angry. I walked out of the place. This man attacking me in my own house, within five minutes of arrival! I felt too angry. As I moved out I could overhear my mother speaking to him in whispers. I could guess what she was saying. I went back to my mat, rather shaken.
4. KumKum
p.12 Raju's primary education by his father is interspersed with rustic games using home-made toys
When the sky lightened, my father was ready for me on the pyol. There he sat with a thin broken twig at his side. The modern notions of child psychology were unknown then; the stick was an educator's indispensable equipment. "The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned," said my father, quoting an old proverb. He taught me the Tamil alphabet. He wrote the first two letters on each side of my slate at a time. I had to go over the contours of the letters with my pencil endlessly until they became bloated and distorted beyond recognition. From time to time my father snatched the slate from my hand, looked at it, glared at me, and said, "What a mess! You will never prosper in life if you disfigure the sacred letters of the alphabet." Then he cleaned the slate with his damp towel, wrote the letters again, and gave it to me with the injunction, "If you spoil this, you will make me wild. Trace them exactly as I have written. Don't try any of your tricks on them," and he flourished his twig menacingly.
I said meekly, "Yes, father," and started to write again. I can well picture myself, sticking my tongue out, screwing my head to one side, and putting my entire body-weight on the pencil —the slate pencil screeched as I tried to drive it through and my father ordered, "Don't make all that noise with that horrible pencil of yours. What has come over you?"
Then followed arithmetic. Two and two, four; four and three, something else. Something into something, more; some more into less. Oh, God, numbers did give me a headache. While the birds were out chirping and flying in the cool air, I cursed the fate that confined me to my father's company. His temper was rising every second. As if in answer to my silent prayer, an early customer was noticed at the door of the hut shop and my lessons came to an abrupt end. My father left me with the remark, "I have better things to do of a morning than make a genius out of a clay-head."
Although the lessons had seemed interminable to me, my mother said the moment she saw me, "So you have been let off! I wonder what you can learn in half an hour!"
I told her, "I'll go out and play and won't trouble you. But no more lessons for the day, please." With that I was off to the shade of a tamarind tree across the road. It was an ancient, spreading tree, dense with leaves, amidst which monkeys and birds lived, bred, and chattered incessantly, feeding on the tender leaves and fruits. Pigs and piglets came from somewhere and nosed about the ground thick with fallen leaves, and I played there all day. I think I involved the pigs in some imaginary game and even fancied myself carried on their backs. My father's customers greeted me as they passed that way. I had marbles, an iron hoop to roll, and a rubber ball, with which I occupied myself. I hardly knew what time of the day it was or what was happening around me.
Sometimes my father took me along to the town when he went shopping. He stopped a passing bullock cart for the trip. I hung about anxiously with an appealing look in my eyes (I had been taught not to ask to be taken along) until my father said, "Climb in, little man." I clambered in before his sentence was completed. The bells around the bull's neck jingled, the wooden wheels grated and ground the dust off the rough road; I clung to the staves on the sides and felt my bones shaken. Still, I enjoyed the smell of the straw in the cart and all the scenes we passed. Men and vehicles, hogs and boys—the panorama of life enchanted me.
At the market my father made me sit on a wooden platform within sight of a shopman known to him, and went about to do his shopping. My pockets would be filled with fried nuts and sweets; munching, I watched the activities of the market — people buying and selling, arguing and laughing, swearing and shouting. While my father was gone on his shopping expedition, I remember, a question kept drumming in my head: "Father, you are a shopkeeper yourself. Why do you go about buying in other shops?" I never got an answer. As I sat gazing on the afternoon haze, the continuous din of the marketplace lulled my senses, the dusty glare suddenly made me drowsy, and I fell asleep, leaning on the wall of that unknown place where my father had chosen to put me.
5. Hemjit
p.230 The lawyer defending Raju in the case by Marco was an expensive ‘adjournment’ lawyer who presented his case as a comedy in three acts.
Our lawyer had his own star value. His nam6 spelled magic in all the court-halls of this part of the country. He had saved many a neck (sometimes more than once) from the noose, he had absolved many a public swindler in the public eye and in the eye of the law, he could prove a whole gang of lawless hooligans to be innocent victims of a police conspiracy. He set at nought all the laboriously built-up case of the prosecution, he made their story laughable, he picked the most carefully packed evidence between his thumb and forefinger and with a squeeze reduced it to thin air; he was old-fashioned in appearance, with his long coat and an orthodox-style dhoti and turban and over it all his black gown. His eyes scintillated with mirth and confidence when he stood at the bar and addressed the court. When the judge's eyes were lowered over the papers on his desk, he inhaled a deep pinch of snuff with the utmost elegance. We feared at one stage that he might refuse to take our case, considering it too slight for his attention; but fortunately he undertook it as a concession from one star to another —for Nalini's sake. When the news came that he had accepted the brief (a thousand rupees it cost us to get this out of him), we felt as if the whole case against me had been dropped by the police with apologies for the inconvenience caused. But he was expensive—each consultation had to be bought for cash at the counter. He was in his own way an "adjournment lawyer." A case in his hands was like dough; he could knead and draw it up and down. He split a case into minute bits and demanded as many days for microscopic examination. He would keep the court fidgeting without being able to rise for lunch, because he could talk without completing a sentence; he had a knack of telescoping sentence into sentence without pausing for breath.
He arrived by the morning train and left by the evening one, and until that time he neither moved off the court floor nor let the case progress even an inch for the day—so that a judge had to wonder how the day had spent itself. Thus he prolonged the lease of freedom for a criminal within the available time, whatever might be the final outcome. But this meant also for the poor case-stricken man more expense, as his charges per day were seven hundred and fifty rupees, and he had to be paid railway and other expenses as well, and he never came without juniors to assist him.
He presented my case as a sort of comedy in three acts, in which the chief villain was Marco, an enemy of civilized existence. Marco was the first prosecution witness for the day, and I could see him across the hall wincing at every assault mounted against him by my star lawyer. He must have wished that he had not been foolhardy enough to press charges. He had his own lawyer, of course, but he looked puny and frightened.
6. Kavita
p.230 Raju the railway guide transmutes smoothly into Raju the Impresario, organising Nalini’s dance performances around the country
My activities suddenly multiplied. The Union function was the start. Rocket-like, she soared. Her name became public property. It was not necessary for me to elaborate or introduce her to the public now. The very idea would be laughed at. I became known because I went about with her, not the other way round. She became known because she had the genius in her, and the public had to take notice of it. I am able to speak soberly about it now—only now. At that time I was puffed up with the thought of how I had made her. I am now disposed to think that even Marco could not have suppressed her permanently; sometime she was bound to break out and make her way. Don't be misled by my present show of humility; at the time there was no limit to my self-congratulation. When I watched her in a large hall with a thousand eyes focused on her, I had no doubt that people were telling themselves and each other, "There he is, the man but for whom—" And I imagined all this adulation lapping around my ears like wavelets. In every show I took, as a matter of right, the middle sofa in the first row. I gave it out that that was my seat wherever I might go, and unless I sat there Nalini would be unable to perform. She needed my inspiring presence. I shook my head discreetly; sometimes I lightly tapped my fingers together in timing. When I met her eyes, I smiled familiarly at her on the stage. Sometimes I signalled her a message with my eyes and fingers, suggesting a modification or a criticism of her performance. I liked the way the president of the occasion sat next to me, and leaned over to say something to me. They all liked to be seen talking to me. They felt almost as gratified as if they spoke to Nalini herself. I shook my head, laughed with restraint, and said something in reply; leaving the watching audience at our back to guess the import of our exchanges, although actually it was never anything more than, "The hall seems to have filled."
I threw a glance back to the farthest corner of the hall, as if to judge the crowd, and said, "Yes, it's full," and swiftly turned round, since dignity required that I look ahead. No show started until I nodded to the man peeping from the wings, and then the curtain went up. I never gave the signal until I satisfied myself that everything was set. I inquired about the lighting, microphone arrangements, and looked about as if I were calculating the velocity of the air, the strength of the ceiling, and as if I wondered if the pillars would support the roof under the circumstances. By all this I created a tenseness which helped Nalini's career. When they satisfied all the conditions a performance began, the organisers felt they had achieved a difficult object. Of course, they paid for the dance, and the public was there, after paying for their seats, but all the same I gave the inescapable impression that I was conferring on them a favour by permitting the dance. I was a strict man. When I thought that the program had gone on long enough I looked at the watch on my wrist and gave a slight nod of the head, and Nalini would understand that she must end the show with the next item. If anyone made further suggestions, I simply laughed them off. Sometimes slips of paper traveled down from the back of the hall, with requests for this item or that, but I frowned so much when a slip was brought near me that people became nervous to pass on such things. They generally apologised. "I don't know. Someone from the back bench—it just came to me—" I took it with a frown, read it with bored tolerance, and pushed it away over the arm of the sofa; it fell on the carpet, into oblivion. I made it look as if such tricks should be addressed to lesser beings and that they would not work here.
One minute before the curtain came down, I looked for the Secretary and nodded to him to come over. I asked him, "Is the car ready? Please have it at the other door, away from the crowd. I'd like to take her out quietly." It was a false statement. I really liked to parade her through the gaping crowds. After the show, there were still people hanging around to catch a glimpse of the star. I walked ahead of her or beside her without much concern. At the end of the performance they presented her with a large garland of flowers, and they gave me one too. I accepted mine with protest. "There is really no reason why you should waste money on a garland for me," I said; I slung it carelessly on my arm or in the thick of the crowd dramatically handed it over to Nalini with "Well, you really deserve two," and made her carry it for me.
7. Saras
p.233 Raju makes himself indispensable in the prison and grows to like his confinement.
I was considered a model prisoner. Now I realised that people generally thought of me as being unsound and worthless, not because I deserved the label, but because they had been seeing me in the wrong place all along. To appreciate me, they should really have come to the Central Jail and watched me. No doubt my movements were somewhat restricted: I had to get out of bed at an hour when I'd rather stay in, and turn in when I'd rather stay out—that was morning five and evening five. But in between these hours I was the master of the show. I visited all departments of the prison as a sort of benevolent supervisor. I got on well with all the warders: I relieved them in their jobs when other prisoners had to be watched. I watched the weaving section and the carpentry sheds. Whether they were homicides or cutthroats or highwaymen, they all listened to me, and I could talk them out of their blackest moods. When there was a respite, I told them stories and philosophies and what not. They came to refer to me as Vadhyar—that is, Teacher. There were five hundred prisoners in that building and I could claim to have established a fairly widespread intimacy with most of them. I got on well with the officials too. When the jail superintendent went about his inspections, I was one of those privileged to walk behind him and listen to his remarks; and I ran little errands for him, which endeared me to him. He had only to look ever so slightly to his left, and I knew what he wanted. I dashed up and called the warder he was thinking of calling; he had only to hesitate for a second, and I knew he wanted that pebble on the road to be picked up and thrown away. It pleased him tremendously. In addition, I was in a position to run ahead and warn warders and other subordinates of his arrival— and that gave them time to rouse themselves from brief naps and straighten out their turbans.
I worked incessantly on a vegetable patch in the back yard of the superintendent's home. I dug the earth and drew water from the well and tended it carefully. I put fences round, with brambles and thorns so that cattle did not destroy the plants. I grew huge brinjals and beans, and cabbages. When they appeared on their stalks as tiny buds, I was filled with excitement. I watched them develop, acquire shape, change colour, shed the early parts. When the harvest was ready, I plucked them off their stalks tenderly, washed them, wiped them clean to a polish with the end of my jail jacket, arranged them artistically on a tray of woven bamboo (I'd arranged to get one from the weaving shed), and carried them in ceremoniously. When he saw the highly polished brinjals, greens, and cabbage, the superintendent nearly hugged me for joy. He was a lover of vegetables. He was a lover of good food, wherever it came from. I loved every piece of this work, the blue sky and sunshine, and the shade of the house in which I sat and worked, the feel of cold water; it produced in me a luxurious sensation. Oh, it seemed to be so good to be alive and feeling all this—the smell of freshly turned earth filled me with the greatest delight. If this was prison life, why didn't more people take to it? They thought of it with a shudder, as if it were a place where a man was branded, chained, and lashed from morning to night! Medieval notions! No place could be more agreeable; if you observed the rules you earned greater appreciation here than beyond the high walls. I got my food, I had my social life with the other inmates and the staff, I moved about freely within an area of fifty acres. Well, that's a great deal of space when you come to think of it; man generally manages with much less. "Forget the walls, and you will be happy," I told some of the newcomers, who became moody and sullen the first few days. I felt amused at the thought of the ignorant folk who were horrified at the idea of a jail. Maybe a man about to be hanged might not have the same view; nor one who had been insubordinate, or violent; but short of these, all others could be happy here. I felt choked with tears when I had to go out after two years, and I wished that we had not wasted all that money on our lawyer. I'd have been happy to stay in this prison permanently.
8. Joe
p.52 Raju makes the transformation from from tourism guide to reformed prisoner, to spiritual guide of the village
Velan ventured to suggest, "Give us a discourse, sir." And as Raju listened without showing any emotion, but looking as if he were in deep contemplation, Velan added, "So that we may have the benefit of your wisdom." The others murmured a general approval.
Raju felt cornered. "I have to play the part expected of me; there is no escape." He racked his head secretly, wondering where to start. Could he speak about tourists* attractions in Malgudi, or should it be moral lessons? How once upon a time there was a so and so, so good or bad that when he came to do such and such a thing he felt so utterly lost that he prayed, and so on and so forth? He felt bored. The only subject on which he could speak with any authority now seemed to be jail life and its benefits, especially for one mistaken for a saint. They waited respectfully for his inspiration. "Oh, fools," he felt like crying out. "Why don't you leave me alone? If you bring me food, leave it there and leave me in peace, thank you."
After a long, brooding silence, he brought out the following words: "All things have to wait their hour." Velan and his friends who were in the front row looked worried for a moment; they were deferential, no doubt, but they did not quite realise what he was driving at. After a further pause, he added grandiosely, "I will speak to you when another day comes."
Someone asked, "Why another day, sir?"
"Because it is so," said Raju mysteriously. "While you wait for the children to finish their lessons, I'd advise you to pass the hour brooding over all your speech and actions from morning till now."
"What speech and actions?" someone asked, genuinely puzzled by the advice.
"Your own," said Raju. "Recollect and reflect upon every word you have uttered since daybreak— "
"I don't remember exactly. . . ."
"Well, that is why I say reflect, recollect. When you don't remember your own words properly, how are you going to remember other people's words?" This quip amused his audience. There were bursts of subdued laughter. When the laughter subsided Raju said, "I want you all to think independently, of your own accord, and not allow yourselves to be led about by the nose as if you were cattle."
There were murmurs of polite disagreement over this advice. Velan asked, "How can we do that, sir? We dig the land and mind the cattle—so far so good, but how can we think philosophies? Not our line, master. It is not possible. It is wise persons like your good self who should think for us."
"And why do you ask us to recollect all that we have said since daybreak?"
Raju himself was not certain why he had advised that, and so he added, "If you do it you will know why." The essence of sainthood seemed to lie in one's ability to utter mystifying statements. "Until you try, how can you know what you can or cannot do?" he asked. He was dragging those innocent men deeper and deeper into the bog of unclear thoughts.
"I can't remember what I said a few moments ago; so many other things come into one's head," wailed one of his victims.
"Precisely. That is what I wish to see you get over," said Raju. "Until you do it, you will not know the pleasure of it." He picked out three men from the gathering. "When you come to me tomorrow or another day, you must each repeat to me at least six words that you have been speaking since the morning. I am asking you to remember only six words," he said pleadingly as a man who was making a great concession, not six hundred."
"Six hundred! Is there anyone who can remember six hundred, sir?" asked someone with wonder.
"Well, I can," said Raju. And he got the appreciative clicking of tongues which he expected as his legitimate due. Soon the children were there, a great boon to Raju, who rose from his seat as if to say, "That is all for the day," and walked toward the river, the others following. "These children must be feeling sleepy. Take them safely home, and come again."
I’d have been happy to stay in this prison permanently.
8. Joe
In the passage Joe read, Raju makes the transformation from reformed prisoner to spiritual guide of the village. He pronounces mystifying edicts such as this to the villagers:
“Recollect and reflect upon every word you have uttered since daybreak—”
When they proclaim their inability to engage in this mindfulness exercise, he again makes an authoritative-sounding remark of the wise one:
Until you try, how can you know what you can or cannot do?
In the end he relents and asks for the recall of just six words. RKN is obviously writing a satire on the vacuous profundities that pass for primeval wisdom. Joe accentuated the orotund voice used to clothe this type of spirituality by putting on a slow solemn tone for Raju’s pronouncements, which Geetha noted. In the final chapter Raju becomes the unwilling saint, a victim of his own success in duping the people. All he wanted was a bonda and instead he is put up to a heroic fast for rains, and enforced sainthood. We read in the above reference, Critical Essays on R.K. Narayan's The Guide:
As a “reluctant guru” (RKN too was such a one when faced with eager questions about Hindu spirituality in America), Raju resists the role of wise man only to succumb to it. But the progression is fraught with irony. Raju’s career is a parodic re-enactment of the dedicated lives of the sages of yore. As is the duty of the adept, he answers his ‘inquirer’ Velan, but with a masquerade. As regards his inner being, Raju himself is aware that he has shown lack of judgment of ordinary character, till circumstances compel him to discover a reservoir of strength which he did not know he possessed; and he may indeed have ultimately attained ‘godhood’, but that matter remains open to question. Raju is a type of the ‘godman’, who is a familiar figure in contemporary India. Through Raju, Narayan problematises the ancient yogic paradigm of the sant or sadhu by transposing it on to a modern setting, and then probing the way in which it negotiates the many venalities of modern life.
READINGS
1. Pamela
p.63 Raju the railway tourist guide sizes up his clients
As soon as a tourist arrived, I observed how he dealt with his baggage, whether he engaged a porter at all or preferred to hook a finger to each piece. I had to note all this within a split second, and then, outside, whether he walked to the hotel or called a taxi or haggled with the one-horse jutka. Of course, I undertook all this on his behalf, but always with detachment. I did all this for him simply for the reason that he asked for Railway Raju the moment he stepped down on the platform and I knew he came with good references, whether he came from north or south or far or near. And at the hotel it was my business to provide him with the best room or the worst room, just as he might prefer. Those who took the cheapest dormitory said, "After all, it's only for sleeping, I am going to be out the whole day. Why waste money on a room which is anyway going to be locked up all day? Don't you agree?" "Surely, yes, yes." I nodded, still without giving an answer to "Where are you going to take me first?" I might still be said to be keeping the man under probation, under careful scrutiny. I never made any suggestion yet. No use expecting a man to be clear-headed who is fresh from a train journey. He must wash, change his clothes, refresh himself with idli and coffee, and only then can we expect anyone in South India to think clearly on all matters of this world and the next. If he offered me any refreshment, I understood that he was a comparatively liberal sort, but did not accept it until we were a little further gone in friendship. In due course, I asked him point-blank, "How much time do you hope to spend in this town?" "Three days at the most. Could we manage everything within the time?" "Certainly, although it all depends upon what you most wish to see." And then I put him in the confessional, so to speak. I tried to draw out his interests. Malgudi, I said, had many things to offer, historically, scenically, from the point of view of modem developments, and so on and so forth; or if one came as a pilgrim I could take him to a dozen temples all over the district within a radius of fifty miles; I could find holy waters for him to bathe in all along the course of the Sarayu, starting, of course, with its source on Mempi Peaks. One thing I learned in my career as a tourist guide was that no two persons were interested in the same thing. Tastes, as in food, differ also in sightseeing. Some people want to be seeing a waterfall, some want a ruin (oh, they grow ecstatic when they see cracked plaster, broken idols, and crumbling bricks), some want a god to worship, some look for a hydroelectric plant, and some want just a nice place, such as the bungalow on top of Mempi with all-glass sides, from where you could see a hundred miles and observe wild game prowling around. Of those again there were two types, one the poet who was content to watch and return, and the other who wanted to admire nature and also get drunk there. I don't know why it is so: a fine poetic spot like the Mempi Peak House excites in certain natures unexpected reactions. I know some who brought women there; a quiet, wooded spot looking over a valley one would think fit for contemplation or poetry, but it only acted as an aphrodisiac. Well, it was not my business to comment. My business stopped with taking them there, and to see that Gaffur went back to pick them up at the right time. I was sort of scared of the man who acted as my examiner, who had a complete list of all the sights and insisted on his money's worth. "What is the population of this town?" "What is the area?" "Don't bluff. I know when exactly that was built —it is not second-century but the twelfth." Or he told me the correct pronunciation of words. "R-o-u-t is not ..." I was meek, self-effacing in his presence and accepted his corrections with gratitude, and he always ended up by asking, "What is the use of your calling yourself a guide if you do not know . . . ?" et cetera, et cetera. You may well ask what I made out of all this? Well, there is no fixed answer to it. It depended upon the circumstances and the types of people I was escorting. I generally specified ten rupees as the minimum for the pleasure of my company, and a little more if I had to escort them far; over all this Gaffur, the photo stores, the hotel manager, and whoever I introduced a customer to expressed their appreciation, according to a certain schedule. I learned while I taught and earned while I learned, and the whole thing was most enjoyable.
2. Geetha
p.158 Raju's mother cannot accept the idea of living with a tainted woman
Within a short time my mother understood everything. When Rosie had gone in for a bath, she said, cornering me, "This cannot go on long, Raju—you must put an end to it."
"Don't interfere, Mother. I am an adult. I know what I am doing." "You can't have a dancing girl in your house. Every morning with all that dancing and everything going on! What is the home coming to?" Encouraged by me, Rosie had begun to practice. She got up at five in the morning, bathed, and prayed before the picture of a god in my mother's niche, and began a practice session which went on for nearly three hours. The house rang with the jingling of her anklets. She ignored her surroundings completely, her attention being concentrated upon her movements and steps. After that she helped my mother, scrubbed, washed, swept, and tidied up everything in the house. My mother was pleased with her and seemed kind to her. I never thought that my mother would create a problem for me now, but here she was. I said, "What has come over you all of a sudden?' My mother paused. "I was hoping you would have the sense to do something about it. It can't go on like this forever. What will people say?"
"Who are 'people?' " I asked. "Well, my brother and your cousins and others known to us."
"I don't care for their opinion. Just don't bother about such things."
"Oh! That's a strange order you are giving me, my boy. I can't accept it."
The gentle singing in the bathroom ceased; my mother dropped the subject and went away as Rosie emerged from her bath fresh and blooming. Looking at her, one would have thought that she had not a care in the world. She was quite happy to be doing what she was doing at the moment, was not in the least bothered about the past, and looked forward tremendously to the future. She was completely devoted to my mother. But unfortunately my mother, for all her show of tenderness, was beginning to stiffen inside. She had been hastening to gossip, and she could not accommodate the idea of living with a tainted woman. I was afraid to be cornered by her, and took care not to face her alone. But whenever she could get at me, she hissed a whisper into my ear. "She is a real snake woman, I tell you. I never liked her from the first day you mentioned her." I was getting annoyed with my mother's judgment and duplicity. The girl, in all innocence, looked happy and carefree and felt completely devoted to my mother. I grew anxious lest my mother should suddenly turn round and openly tell her to quit. I changed my tactics and said, "You are right. Mother. But you see, she is a refugee, and we can't do anything. We have to be hospitable." "Why can't she go to her husband and fall at his feet? You know, living with a husband is no joke, as these modem girls imagine. No husband worth the name was ever conquered by powder and lipstick alone. You know, your father more than once . . ." She narrated an anecdote about the trouble created by my father's unreasonable, obstinate attitude in some family matter and how she met it. I listened to her anecdote patiently and with admiration, and that diverted her for a while. After a few days she began to allude to the problems of husband and wife whenever she spoke to Rosie, and filled the time with anecdotes about husbands: good husbands, mad husbands, reasonable husbands, unreasonable ones, savage ones, slightly deranged ones, moody ones, and so on and so forth; but it was always the wife, by her doggedness, perseverance, and patience, that brought him round. She quoted numerous mythological stories of Savitri Seetha, and all the well-known heroines. Apparently it was a general talk, apropos of nothing, but my mother's motives were naively clear. She was so clumsily roundabout that anyone could see what she was driving at. She was still supposed to be ignorant of Rosie's affairs, but she talked pointedly. I knew how Rosie smarted under these lessons, but I was helpless. I was afraid of my mother. I could have kept Rosie in a hotel, perhaps, but I was forced to take a more realistic view of my finances now. I was helpless as I saw Rosie suffer, and my only solace was that I suffered with her. ... The new shopman watched the scene with detachment. A whiskered fellow—I did not like his leering look. I turned on him fiercely, leaving the porter, and cried, "Well, you'll also face the same situation, remember, some day. Don't be too sure." He twirled his whiskers and said, "How can everyone hope for the same luck as yours?" He winked mischievously, at which I completely lost my temper and flew at him. He repelled me with a back-stroke of his left hand as if swatting a fly, and I fell back, and knocked against my mother—who had come running onto the platform, a thing she had never done in her life. Luckily, I didn't knock her down.
She clung to my arm and screamed, "Come away. Are you coming or not?" And the porter, the whiskered man, and everyone swore, "You are saved today, because of that venerable old lady." She dragged me back to the house; a few batches of paper, a register, and one or two odd personal belongings which I had kept in the shop were under my arm; with these I entered my house, and I knew my railway association was now definitely ended. It made my heart heavy. I felt so gloomy that I did not turn to see Rosie standing aside, staring at me. I flung myself in a corner of the hall and shut my eyes.
3. Shoba
p.171 Raju's domineering uncle visits and threatens to castrate Raju
My mother had adjusted herself to my ways as an unmitigated loafer, and I thought she had resigned herself to them. But she had her own scheme of tackling me. One morning as I was watching Rosie's footwork with the greatest concentration, my uncle dropped in like a bolt from the blue. He was my mother's elder brother, an energetic landowner in my mother's village who had inherited her parents' home and was a sort of general adviser and director of all our family matters. Marriages, finances, funerals, litigation, for everything he was consulted by all the members of the family—my mother and her three sisters, scattered in various parts of the district. He seldom left his village, as he conducted most of his leadership by correspondence. I knew my mother was in touch with him —a postcard a month, closely written, from him would fill her with peace and happiness for weeks and she would ceaselessly talk about it. It was his daughter that she wanted me to marry —a proposal which she fortunately pushed into the background, in view of recent developments.
Here entered the man himself, standing at the door and calling in his booming voice, "Sister!" I scrambled to my feet and ran to the door. My mother came hurrying from the kitchen. Rosie stopped her practice. The man was six feet, darkened by the sun from working in the fields, and had a small knotted tuft on his skull; he wore a shirt with an upper cloth, his dhoti was brown, not white like a townsman's. He carried a bag of jute material in his hand (with a green print of Mahatma Gandhi on it), and a small trunk. He went straight to the kitchen, took out of the bag a cucumber, a few limes, and plantains and greens, saying, "These are for my sister, grown in our gardens." He placed them on the floor of the kitchen for his sister. He gave a few instructions as to how to cook them.
My mother became very happy at the sight of him. She said, "Wait, I'll give you coffee."
He stood there explaining how he came by a bus, what he had been doing when he received my mother's letter, and so on and so forth. It was a surprise to me to know that she had written to him to come. She had not told me. "You never told me you wrote to Uncle!" I said. "Why should she tell you?" snapped my uncle. "As if you were her master!" I knew he was trying to pick a quarrel with me. He lowered his voice to a whisper, pulled me down by the collar of my shirt, and asked, "What is all this one hears about you? Very creditable development you are showing, my boy. Anybody would be proud of you!" I wriggled myself free and frowned. He said, "What has come over you? You think yourself a big man? I can't be frightened of scapegraces like you. Do you know what we do when we get an intractable bull calf? We castrate it. We will do that to you, if you don't behave."
My mother went on minding the boiling water as if she didn't notice what went on between us. I had thought she would come to my support, but she seemed to enjoy my predicament, having designed it herself. I felt confused and angry. I walked out of the place. This man attacking me in my own house, within five minutes of arrival! I felt too angry. As I moved out I could overhear my mother speaking to him in whispers. I could guess what she was saying. I went back to my mat, rather shaken.
4. KumKum
p.12 Raju's primary education by his father is interspersed with rustic games using home-made toys
When the sky lightened, my father was ready for me on the pyol. There he sat with a thin broken twig at his side. The modern notions of child psychology were unknown then; the stick was an educator's indispensable equipment. "The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned," said my father, quoting an old proverb. He taught me the Tamil alphabet. He wrote the first two letters on each side of my slate at a time. I had to go over the contours of the letters with my pencil endlessly until they became bloated and distorted beyond recognition. From time to time my father snatched the slate from my hand, looked at it, glared at me, and said, "What a mess! You will never prosper in life if you disfigure the sacred letters of the alphabet." Then he cleaned the slate with his damp towel, wrote the letters again, and gave it to me with the injunction, "If you spoil this, you will make me wild. Trace them exactly as I have written. Don't try any of your tricks on them," and he flourished his twig menacingly.
I said meekly, "Yes, father," and started to write again. I can well picture myself, sticking my tongue out, screwing my head to one side, and putting my entire body-weight on the pencil —the slate pencil screeched as I tried to drive it through and my father ordered, "Don't make all that noise with that horrible pencil of yours. What has come over you?"
Then followed arithmetic. Two and two, four; four and three, something else. Something into something, more; some more into less. Oh, God, numbers did give me a headache. While the birds were out chirping and flying in the cool air, I cursed the fate that confined me to my father's company. His temper was rising every second. As if in answer to my silent prayer, an early customer was noticed at the door of the hut shop and my lessons came to an abrupt end. My father left me with the remark, "I have better things to do of a morning than make a genius out of a clay-head."
Although the lessons had seemed interminable to me, my mother said the moment she saw me, "So you have been let off! I wonder what you can learn in half an hour!"
I told her, "I'll go out and play and won't trouble you. But no more lessons for the day, please." With that I was off to the shade of a tamarind tree across the road. It was an ancient, spreading tree, dense with leaves, amidst which monkeys and birds lived, bred, and chattered incessantly, feeding on the tender leaves and fruits. Pigs and piglets came from somewhere and nosed about the ground thick with fallen leaves, and I played there all day. I think I involved the pigs in some imaginary game and even fancied myself carried on their backs. My father's customers greeted me as they passed that way. I had marbles, an iron hoop to roll, and a rubber ball, with which I occupied myself. I hardly knew what time of the day it was or what was happening around me.
Sometimes my father took me along to the town when he went shopping. He stopped a passing bullock cart for the trip. I hung about anxiously with an appealing look in my eyes (I had been taught not to ask to be taken along) until my father said, "Climb in, little man." I clambered in before his sentence was completed. The bells around the bull's neck jingled, the wooden wheels grated and ground the dust off the rough road; I clung to the staves on the sides and felt my bones shaken. Still, I enjoyed the smell of the straw in the cart and all the scenes we passed. Men and vehicles, hogs and boys—the panorama of life enchanted me.
At the market my father made me sit on a wooden platform within sight of a shopman known to him, and went about to do his shopping. My pockets would be filled with fried nuts and sweets; munching, I watched the activities of the market — people buying and selling, arguing and laughing, swearing and shouting. While my father was gone on his shopping expedition, I remember, a question kept drumming in my head: "Father, you are a shopkeeper yourself. Why do you go about buying in other shops?" I never got an answer. As I sat gazing on the afternoon haze, the continuous din of the marketplace lulled my senses, the dusty glare suddenly made me drowsy, and I fell asleep, leaning on the wall of that unknown place where my father had chosen to put me.
5. Hemjit
p.230 The lawyer defending Raju in the case by Marco was an expensive ‘adjournment’ lawyer who presented his case as a comedy in three acts.
Our lawyer had his own star value. His nam6 spelled magic in all the court-halls of this part of the country. He had saved many a neck (sometimes more than once) from the noose, he had absolved many a public swindler in the public eye and in the eye of the law, he could prove a whole gang of lawless hooligans to be innocent victims of a police conspiracy. He set at nought all the laboriously built-up case of the prosecution, he made their story laughable, he picked the most carefully packed evidence between his thumb and forefinger and with a squeeze reduced it to thin air; he was old-fashioned in appearance, with his long coat and an orthodox-style dhoti and turban and over it all his black gown. His eyes scintillated with mirth and confidence when he stood at the bar and addressed the court. When the judge's eyes were lowered over the papers on his desk, he inhaled a deep pinch of snuff with the utmost elegance. We feared at one stage that he might refuse to take our case, considering it too slight for his attention; but fortunately he undertook it as a concession from one star to another —for Nalini's sake. When the news came that he had accepted the brief (a thousand rupees it cost us to get this out of him), we felt as if the whole case against me had been dropped by the police with apologies for the inconvenience caused. But he was expensive—each consultation had to be bought for cash at the counter. He was in his own way an "adjournment lawyer." A case in his hands was like dough; he could knead and draw it up and down. He split a case into minute bits and demanded as many days for microscopic examination. He would keep the court fidgeting without being able to rise for lunch, because he could talk without completing a sentence; he had a knack of telescoping sentence into sentence without pausing for breath.
He arrived by the morning train and left by the evening one, and until that time he neither moved off the court floor nor let the case progress even an inch for the day—so that a judge had to wonder how the day had spent itself. Thus he prolonged the lease of freedom for a criminal within the available time, whatever might be the final outcome. But this meant also for the poor case-stricken man more expense, as his charges per day were seven hundred and fifty rupees, and he had to be paid railway and other expenses as well, and he never came without juniors to assist him.
He presented my case as a sort of comedy in three acts, in which the chief villain was Marco, an enemy of civilized existence. Marco was the first prosecution witness for the day, and I could see him across the hall wincing at every assault mounted against him by my star lawyer. He must have wished that he had not been foolhardy enough to press charges. He had his own lawyer, of course, but he looked puny and frightened.
6. Kavita
p.230 Raju the railway guide transmutes smoothly into Raju the Impresario, organising Nalini’s dance performances around the country
My activities suddenly multiplied. The Union function was the start. Rocket-like, she soared. Her name became public property. It was not necessary for me to elaborate or introduce her to the public now. The very idea would be laughed at. I became known because I went about with her, not the other way round. She became known because she had the genius in her, and the public had to take notice of it. I am able to speak soberly about it now—only now. At that time I was puffed up with the thought of how I had made her. I am now disposed to think that even Marco could not have suppressed her permanently; sometime she was bound to break out and make her way. Don't be misled by my present show of humility; at the time there was no limit to my self-congratulation. When I watched her in a large hall with a thousand eyes focused on her, I had no doubt that people were telling themselves and each other, "There he is, the man but for whom—" And I imagined all this adulation lapping around my ears like wavelets. In every show I took, as a matter of right, the middle sofa in the first row. I gave it out that that was my seat wherever I might go, and unless I sat there Nalini would be unable to perform. She needed my inspiring presence. I shook my head discreetly; sometimes I lightly tapped my fingers together in timing. When I met her eyes, I smiled familiarly at her on the stage. Sometimes I signalled her a message with my eyes and fingers, suggesting a modification or a criticism of her performance. I liked the way the president of the occasion sat next to me, and leaned over to say something to me. They all liked to be seen talking to me. They felt almost as gratified as if they spoke to Nalini herself. I shook my head, laughed with restraint, and said something in reply; leaving the watching audience at our back to guess the import of our exchanges, although actually it was never anything more than, "The hall seems to have filled."
I threw a glance back to the farthest corner of the hall, as if to judge the crowd, and said, "Yes, it's full," and swiftly turned round, since dignity required that I look ahead. No show started until I nodded to the man peeping from the wings, and then the curtain went up. I never gave the signal until I satisfied myself that everything was set. I inquired about the lighting, microphone arrangements, and looked about as if I were calculating the velocity of the air, the strength of the ceiling, and as if I wondered if the pillars would support the roof under the circumstances. By all this I created a tenseness which helped Nalini's career. When they satisfied all the conditions a performance began, the organisers felt they had achieved a difficult object. Of course, they paid for the dance, and the public was there, after paying for their seats, but all the same I gave the inescapable impression that I was conferring on them a favour by permitting the dance. I was a strict man. When I thought that the program had gone on long enough I looked at the watch on my wrist and gave a slight nod of the head, and Nalini would understand that she must end the show with the next item. If anyone made further suggestions, I simply laughed them off. Sometimes slips of paper traveled down from the back of the hall, with requests for this item or that, but I frowned so much when a slip was brought near me that people became nervous to pass on such things. They generally apologised. "I don't know. Someone from the back bench—it just came to me—" I took it with a frown, read it with bored tolerance, and pushed it away over the arm of the sofa; it fell on the carpet, into oblivion. I made it look as if such tricks should be addressed to lesser beings and that they would not work here.
One minute before the curtain came down, I looked for the Secretary and nodded to him to come over. I asked him, "Is the car ready? Please have it at the other door, away from the crowd. I'd like to take her out quietly." It was a false statement. I really liked to parade her through the gaping crowds. After the show, there were still people hanging around to catch a glimpse of the star. I walked ahead of her or beside her without much concern. At the end of the performance they presented her with a large garland of flowers, and they gave me one too. I accepted mine with protest. "There is really no reason why you should waste money on a garland for me," I said; I slung it carelessly on my arm or in the thick of the crowd dramatically handed it over to Nalini with "Well, you really deserve two," and made her carry it for me.
7. Saras
p.233 Raju makes himself indispensable in the prison and grows to like his confinement.
I was considered a model prisoner. Now I realised that people generally thought of me as being unsound and worthless, not because I deserved the label, but because they had been seeing me in the wrong place all along. To appreciate me, they should really have come to the Central Jail and watched me. No doubt my movements were somewhat restricted: I had to get out of bed at an hour when I'd rather stay in, and turn in when I'd rather stay out—that was morning five and evening five. But in between these hours I was the master of the show. I visited all departments of the prison as a sort of benevolent supervisor. I got on well with all the warders: I relieved them in their jobs when other prisoners had to be watched. I watched the weaving section and the carpentry sheds. Whether they were homicides or cutthroats or highwaymen, they all listened to me, and I could talk them out of their blackest moods. When there was a respite, I told them stories and philosophies and what not. They came to refer to me as Vadhyar—that is, Teacher. There were five hundred prisoners in that building and I could claim to have established a fairly widespread intimacy with most of them. I got on well with the officials too. When the jail superintendent went about his inspections, I was one of those privileged to walk behind him and listen to his remarks; and I ran little errands for him, which endeared me to him. He had only to look ever so slightly to his left, and I knew what he wanted. I dashed up and called the warder he was thinking of calling; he had only to hesitate for a second, and I knew he wanted that pebble on the road to be picked up and thrown away. It pleased him tremendously. In addition, I was in a position to run ahead and warn warders and other subordinates of his arrival— and that gave them time to rouse themselves from brief naps and straighten out their turbans.
I worked incessantly on a vegetable patch in the back yard of the superintendent's home. I dug the earth and drew water from the well and tended it carefully. I put fences round, with brambles and thorns so that cattle did not destroy the plants. I grew huge brinjals and beans, and cabbages. When they appeared on their stalks as tiny buds, I was filled with excitement. I watched them develop, acquire shape, change colour, shed the early parts. When the harvest was ready, I plucked them off their stalks tenderly, washed them, wiped them clean to a polish with the end of my jail jacket, arranged them artistically on a tray of woven bamboo (I'd arranged to get one from the weaving shed), and carried them in ceremoniously. When he saw the highly polished brinjals, greens, and cabbage, the superintendent nearly hugged me for joy. He was a lover of vegetables. He was a lover of good food, wherever it came from. I loved every piece of this work, the blue sky and sunshine, and the shade of the house in which I sat and worked, the feel of cold water; it produced in me a luxurious sensation. Oh, it seemed to be so good to be alive and feeling all this—the smell of freshly turned earth filled me with the greatest delight. If this was prison life, why didn't more people take to it? They thought of it with a shudder, as if it were a place where a man was branded, chained, and lashed from morning to night! Medieval notions! No place could be more agreeable; if you observed the rules you earned greater appreciation here than beyond the high walls. I got my food, I had my social life with the other inmates and the staff, I moved about freely within an area of fifty acres. Well, that's a great deal of space when you come to think of it; man generally manages with much less. "Forget the walls, and you will be happy," I told some of the newcomers, who became moody and sullen the first few days. I felt amused at the thought of the ignorant folk who were horrified at the idea of a jail. Maybe a man about to be hanged might not have the same view; nor one who had been insubordinate, or violent; but short of these, all others could be happy here. I felt choked with tears when I had to go out after two years, and I wished that we had not wasted all that money on our lawyer. I'd have been happy to stay in this prison permanently.
8. Joe
p.52 Raju makes the transformation from from tourism guide to reformed prisoner, to spiritual guide of the village
Velan ventured to suggest, "Give us a discourse, sir." And as Raju listened without showing any emotion, but looking as if he were in deep contemplation, Velan added, "So that we may have the benefit of your wisdom." The others murmured a general approval.
Raju felt cornered. "I have to play the part expected of me; there is no escape." He racked his head secretly, wondering where to start. Could he speak about tourists* attractions in Malgudi, or should it be moral lessons? How once upon a time there was a so and so, so good or bad that when he came to do such and such a thing he felt so utterly lost that he prayed, and so on and so forth? He felt bored. The only subject on which he could speak with any authority now seemed to be jail life and its benefits, especially for one mistaken for a saint. They waited respectfully for his inspiration. "Oh, fools," he felt like crying out. "Why don't you leave me alone? If you bring me food, leave it there and leave me in peace, thank you."
After a long, brooding silence, he brought out the following words: "All things have to wait their hour." Velan and his friends who were in the front row looked worried for a moment; they were deferential, no doubt, but they did not quite realise what he was driving at. After a further pause, he added grandiosely, "I will speak to you when another day comes."
Someone asked, "Why another day, sir?"
"Because it is so," said Raju mysteriously. "While you wait for the children to finish their lessons, I'd advise you to pass the hour brooding over all your speech and actions from morning till now."
"What speech and actions?" someone asked, genuinely puzzled by the advice.
"Your own," said Raju. "Recollect and reflect upon every word you have uttered since daybreak— "
"I don't remember exactly. . . ."
"Well, that is why I say reflect, recollect. When you don't remember your own words properly, how are you going to remember other people's words?" This quip amused his audience. There were bursts of subdued laughter. When the laughter subsided Raju said, "I want you all to think independently, of your own accord, and not allow yourselves to be led about by the nose as if you were cattle."
There were murmurs of polite disagreement over this advice. Velan asked, "How can we do that, sir? We dig the land and mind the cattle—so far so good, but how can we think philosophies? Not our line, master. It is not possible. It is wise persons like your good self who should think for us."
"And why do you ask us to recollect all that we have said since daybreak?"
Raju himself was not certain why he had advised that, and so he added, "If you do it you will know why." The essence of sainthood seemed to lie in one's ability to utter mystifying statements. "Until you try, how can you know what you can or cannot do?" he asked. He was dragging those innocent men deeper and deeper into the bog of unclear thoughts.
"I can't remember what I said a few moments ago; so many other things come into one's head," wailed one of his victims.
"Precisely. That is what I wish to see you get over," said Raju. "Until you do it, you will not know the pleasure of it." He picked out three men from the gathering. "When you come to me tomorrow or another day, you must each repeat to me at least six words that you have been speaking since the morning. I am asking you to remember only six words," he said pleadingly as a man who was making a great concession, not six hundred."
"Six hundred! Is there anyone who can remember six hundred, sir?" asked someone with wonder.
"Well, I can," said Raju. And he got the appreciative clicking of tongues which he expected as his legitimate due. Soon the children were there, a great boon to Raju, who rose from his seat as if to say, "That is all for the day," and walked toward the river, the others following. "These children must be feeling sleepy. Take them safely home, and come again."
A simple tale by RKNarayan transformed us to a different time. Thanks to Raju, the Guide, members of Kochi Reading Group had a great time. We got a new member, Devika, at this session.
ReplyDeleteThank you,Joe, for your faithful reporting of our May 18th, 2018 session in your blog.
I also enjoyed the behind the story, anecdotes that your research always brings forth.
I did not know that great Graham Greene edited the book.