Growing up in Malgudi

SUBASH JEYAN

It is April. The exams are just two weeks away and Swami gets this frightening feeling that his father has suddenly changed for the worse and has started harassing him. If he is loitering around, his father has a way of materialising from nowhere and reminding him that exams are just around the corner. Swami feels haunted and, as he says, it is a trying period in his life. And when the exams are finally done, the liberation is celebrated with all-round destruction of the markers of tyranny: ink-pots, pens and stationery are destroyed with abandon and even fiery- eyed teachers have soft smiles on their faces. Swami himself goes home with the ink-pot emptied over his head and frightening circles of dripping ink drawn around his eyes. He has grand plans of using his books as fuel in the kitchen and he can't wait for the holidays to begin.

Welcome to the world of Swami and Malgudi, the fictional little town that R. K. Narayan first created with the publication of Swami and Friends in 1935. We know nothing about its location except that it lies somewhere near Tiruchi. But in novel after novel, for more than five decades, R. K. Narayan continued to people it with lovable characters and charming incidents with such apparent simplicity and skill that Malgudi today has a reality of its own.

Though it is an imagined, fictional entity, it is seen as the quintessential south Indian town and along with Thomas Hardy's Wessex County and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, is one of the more famous literary landscapes known to people around the world.

But Malgudi may be a little more accessible to you and me because it is more familiar. It may not exactly be the world in which you and me live. Its pace and pressures may be a little different but there are continuities and discontinuities, that link it more intimately to our own. And there can be no better introduction to Malgudi than Swami and Friends because in that novel it is seen through the eyes of the ten-year-old Swami. Anyone who has gone through the stomach-churning feeling of having to go through the terror of exams will instantly identify with the way Swami feels about them. And the elaborate protocols and formalities through which the students of Albert Mission School acquire and maintain friendships and enmities will also strike an instant chord in you. Mani the class bully whose best arguments in any debate are his rather large fists and Sankar the genius in the class who is also suspected of getting high marks through washing the clothes of his teachers are types you may come across in your own school. The charm of Narayan's art lies in the fact that it is an unpretentious account of student life as it is lived, from the inside.

But if you were in Malgudi, studying at Albert Mission School or Board High School, I wonder if you would look forward to the annual vacations with the same anticipation as Swami . No doubt, you might envy the fact that the harassment over the exams begins only two weeks before the horror itself. No revision tests, monthly tests or mock-exams which begin months before the actual event. But you might also wonder how Swami is going to get through his vacation with nothing actually to do except roam around the town.

Because life in Malgudi has its own lethargic and unhurried pace. It has, like the seasons, its own rhythms and is in no hurry over it. Swami, for example, is perfectly content to sit on the steps to his house and watch the dirty water flow by in the gutter beneath with its microscopic life. Evenings are spent playing out the little dramas of life leisurely under the peepul trees on the banks of the river Sarayu. If you were Swami, you will have a tough time seeing the vacations through.

But you might also enjoy the fact that there are no summer camps and coaching camps to attend. You might just envy Swami his freedom from the pressures that attempt to turn children into superhumans before they have had time to be themselves and grow at their own pace. But if you read the novel closely you will find that Malgudi seems idyllic because change is around the corner.

There is a larger world outside Malgudi where life beats out a different rhythm. Rajam, the student from Madras who stays for a brief time in Malgudi already has a tutor coaching him during the summer vacations. The charm and appeal of Malgudi for you and me may lie in the fact that it celebrates a way of life and an attitude to life that is in the process of disappearing, caught in a tension between the old and the new.

You might have already scheduled your vacation but try and make time for a master who brings vividly to life a world so distant, yet familiar. Believe me, you won't regret it.

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