Malgudi Express

“The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness…Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them”. – Francis King

In spite of his abilities of insightful observations, what Mr. King possibly will not be able fathom is the rush of happy memories R K Narayan brings to someone who has grown up reading his stories.

Setting off for work today, I picked up Malgudi Days and as Chennai suburbia zipped past so did the stories roll from one to the other, bringing to life, simultaneously, the characters from a nondescript town somewhere in South India, and days from my past when I came across them.

As I read the first story, An Astrologer’s Day, I could almost see smudgy pencil marks underlining, then strange, words in my reader in class 8th. That was my first acquaintance with these words. As life went on and things started getting complicated, the words and phrases picked up undertones and connotations beyond the simple definitions I had scribbled next to them. But seeing them once again being mouthed by an astrologer who, "...sat under the boughs of a spreading tamarind tree..." the words shrugged off all the grime they had collected over the years and became virgin again, expressing only what the author intended them to.

Narayan’s earthy style enchants you twice, first with the characters and the stories themselves and second, with memories of shared ‘tiffins’ with school time crushes, pot bellied English teachers, butterflies of the night-before-exam variety, Doordarshan, wannabe rock stars giving a rendition of the Malgudi tune on their electric guitars and preparations of elocution pieces . It is said that the sense of smell has the greatest ability to bring back old memories; if it’s true then I’m sure that the stories from Malgudi carry the aroma of childhood.