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Bravo!
I never heard of the second Shashi and don't know or care if it is a man or woman or in between.
And I am hearing of the first Shashi all the time for all the wrong reasons...
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"Shall I go away?" I asked in a whisper.
"Yes. Good night," she said feebly.
"May I not come in?" I asked, trying to look my saddest.
"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.
...End of Chapter 5, RKN's The Guide
'...There are areas you have neglected. For example, do you deal with man-woman relationship with any seriousness? Aren't you prudish when it comes to sex?'
'Not exactly prudish, only I take the hint. When a couple, even if they happen to be characters in my own novel, want privacy, I leave the room; surely you wouldn't expect one, at such moments, to sit on the edge of their bed and take notes?'
'Why not? Just what would be expected of a novelist concerned with realism. I have closely studied your handling of this particular aspect, and found you wanting. Take your earliest Dark Room where the head of an office seduces his pretty trainee. Your latest Painter of Signs where Daisy and Raman are thrown physically together for days on end, and then of course your Guide, that masterpiece of glorified adultery, in all these and others, while one expects a great deal from your pen as a realist, you dismiss the time hastily; the utmost you afford the reader is a quick eavesdropper's or key-hole viewer's report, slurring over the dynamism of love.'
'Is there any need for elaboration? I find that the very mention of a darkened room with whispers coming through the bolted door, stirs your imagination to such an extent that you ask for more. I am confident that at a certain point I can safely leave it all to the reader's imagination without fettering it with wordy descriptions. Particularly after D.H. Lawrence, no writer can have anything original or fresh to say about lovers. However, to please you, I am prepared to add a footnote at appropriate places in my novels: "For further details look up Lady Chatterley's Lover." Even the authors of American best-sellers, which provide its readers bed scenes at regular intervals, say once every five thousand words, exhibit nervousness while seeking new phrases for an old experience, and often degenerate into a sort of popular treatise on anatomy.'
...RKN
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...On stepping into my very first class I felt startled, as it consisted of of elderly women, each one holding a copy of The Guide in her hand.
I was pleased no doubt at finding my book in so many hands, but I felt uneasy. If they cross-examined me on my book, I should feel lost; they had the advantage over me of being up-to-date with the details of my story. I stiffened into a defensive attitude, and became wary, as I took my seat.
...RKN
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About half a century ago, in my first youth (now I am in my second, what with this perennial blogging of youthful reminiscences), I saw the blockbuster Hindi movie, Guide. Bollywood was a term not invented by then. I liked the movie well enough not to walk out after half an hour which is my norm.
And then I bought my first RKN book, The Guide. It was a mistake. I couldn't read it beyond the first few pages. As I wrote in an earlier blog, I find that when I see the movie first and then try to read the book, I can't make any headway...the book falls short of the movie. It is the other way round with reading the book first and then seeing the movie later...disappointment either way.
About half a century ago, in my first youth (now I am in my second, what with this perennial blogging of youthful reminiscences), I saw the blockbuster Hindi movie, Guide. Bollywood was a term not invented by then. I liked the movie well enough not to walk out after half an hour which is my norm.
And then I bought my first RKN book, The Guide. It was a mistake. I couldn't read it beyond the first few pages. As I wrote in an earlier blog, I find that when I see the movie first and then try to read the book, I can't make any headway...the book falls short of the movie. It is the other way round with reading the book first and then seeing the movie later...disappointment either way.
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/10/reading-seeing.html
A couple of years later I was on a one-day trip to Vizagh and found a slim book by RKN titled Next Sunday and bought it on the spur of the moment...money was scarce then but the paperback was priced at a mere Rs 2. I read it at one go in the sleeper compartment and must have reread the pieces a dozen times here and there. It is now a constant companion to me in my blogging world. The book didn't have a preface or foreword or even a table of contents (which I made up recently). The pieces evoke my youthful memories of the Nehruvian socialistic days of the 1950s.
I bought a few more of RKN's novels and enjoyed them. Before he left IIT KGP, Aniket gifted me a new collection of pieces titled A Writer's Nightmare and other stories. And DB's daughter, Dola, gifted me RKN's A Story Teller's World and other stories. All these are safely there in my bookshelf and I refer to them quite often.
Sometime in the 1970s I had bought RKN's My Days. And read it with gusto.
DB and I were sharing a room in the physics department of IIT KGP for 20 years. And one day I was talking about My Days to DB and he borrowed the book from me. And read it. And said that his wife and daughter (both MAs in Eng Lit from Jadavpur University) liked the book so much that they wanted him to buy a copy for them. And DB was too lazy to go to the College Street bookshops in Cal, and asked me if I could gift them my copy.
I was just biding my time: DB had two books on Quantum Field Theory: Lurie's Particles and Fields and Sakurai's Advanced Quantum Mechanics. I had none. And DB had no use for Sakurai which was all physics with a capital P as its foreword claims. While Lurie was all nitty-gritty formal stuff, very teachable.
Sakurai was my cup of tea.
So I offered him a deal: he could keep My Days as long as he wants and I would keep his Sakurai as long as I want. And then we exchange them back like field theoretic entities...virtual emission and absorption. He jumped at my suggestion.
I got back My Days and he got back his Sakurai the day I retired 20 years later...he retired a year later.
One of those days it was a late rainy evening. And a scooter stopped at the gate of my Qrs C1-97 and my friend and professor of ME, Amalendu Mukherjee, entered dripping wet and looking all jittery. And as he settled in my guest chair, he told me nervously:
"My son's career is at stake. I don't know what to do"
"What is the matter?"
"He flunked his IIT JEE"
And then I asked him to relax and narrated to him the story from My Days of how RKN failed in his English exam and how lightly his HM father took it:
A couple of years later I was on a one-day trip to Vizagh and found a slim book by RKN titled Next Sunday and bought it on the spur of the moment...money was scarce then but the paperback was priced at a mere Rs 2. I read it at one go in the sleeper compartment and must have reread the pieces a dozen times here and there. It is now a constant companion to me in my blogging world. The book didn't have a preface or foreword or even a table of contents (which I made up recently). The pieces evoke my youthful memories of the Nehruvian socialistic days of the 1950s.
I bought a few more of RKN's novels and enjoyed them. Before he left IIT KGP, Aniket gifted me a new collection of pieces titled A Writer's Nightmare and other stories. And DB's daughter, Dola, gifted me RKN's A Story Teller's World and other stories. All these are safely there in my bookshelf and I refer to them quite often.
Sometime in the 1970s I had bought RKN's My Days. And read it with gusto.
DB and I were sharing a room in the physics department of IIT KGP for 20 years. And one day I was talking about My Days to DB and he borrowed the book from me. And read it. And said that his wife and daughter (both MAs in Eng Lit from Jadavpur University) liked the book so much that they wanted him to buy a copy for them. And DB was too lazy to go to the College Street bookshops in Cal, and asked me if I could gift them my copy.
I was just biding my time: DB had two books on Quantum Field Theory: Lurie's Particles and Fields and Sakurai's Advanced Quantum Mechanics. I had none. And DB had no use for Sakurai which was all physics with a capital P as its foreword claims. While Lurie was all nitty-gritty formal stuff, very teachable.
Sakurai was my cup of tea.
So I offered him a deal: he could keep My Days as long as he wants and I would keep his Sakurai as long as I want. And then we exchange them back like field theoretic entities...virtual emission and absorption. He jumped at my suggestion.
I got back My Days and he got back his Sakurai the day I retired 20 years later...he retired a year later.
One of those days it was a late rainy evening. And a scooter stopped at the gate of my Qrs C1-97 and my friend and professor of ME, Amalendu Mukherjee, entered dripping wet and looking all jittery. And as he settled in my guest chair, he told me nervously:
"My son's career is at stake. I don't know what to do"
"What is the matter?"
"He flunked his IIT JEE"
And then I asked him to relax and narrated to him the story from My Days of how RKN failed in his English exam and how lightly his HM father took it:
My father, in spite of his strict attitudes in school matters, had one very pleasant quality --- he never bothered about the examination results. He always displayed sympathy for a fallen candidate; he had no faith in the examination system at all. But even he was forced to exclaim in surprise, "Stupid fellow, you have failed in English! Why?" Proficiency in English being a social hallmark, I remained silent without offering any explanation, though I knew why. One of our English texts was a grey-bound book of chilling dullness called Explorations and Discoveries, pages full of Mungo Park's expeditions and so forth. In my whole career I have not come across any book to match its unreadability. I had found it impossible, and totally abolished it from my universe, deciding to depend upon other questions in the examination from Oliver Twist or Poetical Selections. But I found in the examination hall that four out of six questions were based on Explorations --- that horrible man the question-setter seemed to have been an abnormal explorationist. I gave up, left the examination hall in half an hour, and sat in contemplation on one of the brick monuments beside the lily pond.
Amalendu then asked:
"Where can I get that book?"
"My copy is with DB"
"Can I borrow it from him for a day?"
"Perhaps, yes. He lives in Qrs C1-11 near the Tech Market"
"It is already 11 in the night"
"Don't worry...they sleep late"
Next evening Amalendu was at my Qrs again and said:
"I went to DB's Qrs last night and borrowed the book. I finished it in one sitting and I returned it to him just now. And I am going to buy a copy of it from Cal and would keep it by my pillow and read it whenever I feel low and depressed."
I was happy that RKN has proved an anti-depressant for my friend.
Sometime next year, Amalendu stopped his scooter while I was on my evening walk and asked a question on an application of Farday's Law saying that Abhro, his son, raised it...this is the sort of professional hazard for every physics prof...folks ask all sorts of weird questions on the street and expect an immediate answer from you.
The question was new to me and I managed to give a fairly satisfactory outline of its answer, without the math. And Amalendu left happily...he knew more physics than most engineers.
And then I sat down with the problem and did all the math involving all sorts of line and surface integrals of fields and found it publishable in Physics Education. And as always with me, the boy who poses a new and interesting question becomes my co-author...he is like a Ph D guide. The problem appeared in the next issue of PE.
Five years after I retired and was living in Hyderabad, I had a chance to take my wife back to KGP which she loved to revisit to meet her few remaining younger family friends on a 3-day visit. And while I was walking to the Tech Market, Amalendu stopped by and we were talking about good old times. And he recalled his late night visit to my place in pouring rain and RKN's My Days. And I asked him about Abhro. And he said:
"Abhro is doing fine as a professor of engineering in Bhubaneswar and shows off his paper with you in Physics Education to all his colleagues. He is married and gifted me a grandkid"
Happy memories...
The other day I was browsing Aniket's gift-copy of RKN and re-read the piece, Misguided 'Guide'. And had a frantic impulse to read the novel. I thought it should be ok since I forgot all about the film except its songs. And found that my half-century-old copy of the book was just missing from my small collection. Someone must have borrowed it and felt too shy to return it.
So I ordered a new paperback from Flipkart and it arrived in just 3 days...Rs 175 including delivery charges. Apparently Dev Anand had read it in one sitting, but he was a BA in Eng Lit, unlike me. And my interest in the book is no longer the story but the style since I am more mature now than I was fifty years ago.
So it took me one whole day...I hardly read any book nowadays...busy thinking of what to blog every evening.
I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative. And being a south Indian, unlike the old lady students of RKN, the Reluctant Guru of America, I could relate to the Malgudi of the 1950s.
The book is a marvel. The plot may be the hackneyed eternal triangle, but here you get to empathize with all the three vertices: Railway Raju, the guide of Malgudi; Marco, the archeologist husband; and the snake-dancer, Rosie (aka Nalini). All of them appear very much like parts of oneself with their respective human weaknesses. There is an inevitability in the story.
You also feel good about the other minor characters like Gaffur, the driver; the Mother and Father of Raju; even the house-keeper, Joseph.
And the most interesting character, Velan, the rustic, who turns Raju into an opportunistic saint and then a holy sadhu having to go on an unwilling hunger strike.
And the Rain God.
And the ending is enigmatic...apparently the reader is left in doubt if Raju dies in the end or survives.
My take is that he does die as he did in the film...otherwise readers would ask for a sequel. And there could be a plethora of them for imaginative folks.
All in all, a good thing I did finding the time to read the book.
Not all are however enamored of RKN's simple style. Here is the wiki-entry:
According to Shashi Tharoor, Narayan's subjects are similar to those of Jane Austen
as they both deal with a very small section of society. However, he
adds that while Austen's prose was able to take those subjects beyond
ordinariness, Narayan's was not.[99] A similar opinion is held by Shashi Deshpande
who characterizes Narayan's writings as pedestrian and naive because of
the simplicity of his language and diction, combined with the lack of
any complexity in the emotions and behaviours of his characters.[100]
Bravo!
I never heard of the second Shashi and don't know or care if it is a man or woman or in between.
And I am hearing of the first Shashi all the time for all the wrong reasons...
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