Quotes of the Day

J.D. Jayachandran (M.A. Eng., M.A. Hist., M.A. Soci., M. Ed.), the headmaster of the ELM (Evangelical Lutheran Mission) Fabricius Higher Secondary School in Madras, South India, clears his throat with a cough and says in a weak voice: "I am told that he came back once to look at his old school, yes."

"When?"

"In 1998. But it was the summer holidays then, and everything was closed shut. So he had to turn and go back home."

"Did you make any effort to contact Mr. Narayan after that?" I ask. "I'm sure you know he was considered one of the world's most important writers in the English language."

The headmaster coughs. He seems confused; he looks at the huge wooden nameplate on his desk that proclaims his title and four master's degrees. He begins telling me he lives a long way away from the school, that he is going to retire this year. An aide comes to his rescue: "There is a photo of Mr. R.K. Narayan in the Correspondent's Room. You must see it at once."

I follow him, hoping it is a rare early photo of the author, but it is just a cheap color enlargement of the familiar bald, thickly bespectacled, gnomelike Narayan in his final years. I walk about the school, which is just like thousands of other schools in India—a drab, dusty edifice with a big courtyard that looks far too small for its 1,400 students. Yet ELM Fabricius is no ordinary school. Something happened here 90 years ago that transformed Indian writing in English forever, and made the world pay attention to it.

In 1935, a slim manuscript by a 28-year-old Indian writer with a very long name—Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami—landed on the desk of the novelist Graham Greene in England. The manuscript, a novel, told of the adventures of a schoolboy named Swaminathan in a make-believe South Indian town called Malgudi—modeled largely on the author's life at ELM Fabricius, where he had studied for nine years. Swaminathan makes friends, plays cricket, fights with his headmaster, quits his school, joins another, fights with this headmaster too, runs away from home, comes back, plays more cricket. Although the young writer's prose featured a classical polish and correctness, a uniquely national sensibility shone through it. In one scene, Swaminathan is watching an ant go down a gutter on a leaf, the leaf overturns and the ant drowns. Instinctively moved by an ancient Indian empathy with all the living world, Swaminathan performs an impromptu ritual: "He took a pinch of earth, uttered a prayer for the soul of the ant, and dropped it into the gutter."

Greene was impressed. He pulled a few strings and in 1935 the book was published as Swami and Friends. To make his name more user-friendly for an English-language audience, the author's name was truncated to R.K. Narayan. More novels quickly followed. They were filled with vivid characters, stylishly written, and they were all set in the same make-believe town. For more than half a century, engaged in perhaps the most sustained burst of fictional town creating since Balzac, Narayan populated his Malgudi with cricket-crazy schoolboys, population-control advocates, talking tigers, aggressive taxidermists, charlatans turned godmen, and nationalistic sweet-sellers—all inimitably Indian. Everything about Malgudi was thoroughly exotic, and yet—thanks to Narayan's psychological insight, humor and humanism—it all seemed very familiar, too.

The world fell in love with Malgudi. Conventional wisdom holds that Indian writing in English made it big in the West with the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981. Not so. Narayan's works were the first to earn that distinction. He had already acquired an international reputation by the end of World War II, and by the early 1950s, his circle of admirers had expanded to include E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham. "Narayan's success was a big breakthrough for Indian writing in English," says N. Ram, editor in chief of The Hindu, India's most respected newspaper, and co-author of a biography of the writer. Narayan's fame—which reached its zenith in the 1960s after The Guide, his novel about a charlatan posing as a godman, was made into a Hollywood movie—showed Indians everywhere that they could win respect for themselves as writers in the language of their former colonizers. As V.S. Naipaul recalled in the New York Review of Books in 1999: "Forty to 50 years ago, when Indian writers were not so well considered, the writer R.K. Narayan was a comfort and example to those of us (I include my father and myself) who wished to write."

Narayan, who continued to write into his 90s, died in 2001. Only four years later, it is hard to find traces of his world in Purasawalkam, the neighborhood where he was born. His childhood house, near the ELM Fabricius school, has long been demolished, replaced by a hotel. Even the ELM Fabricius that Narayan knew and wrote about is gone. The old school has been rebuilt, headmaster Jayachandran says; not much remains from Narayan's day other than an ancient, massive tree in the courtyard.

As I am getting ready to leave, I notice again the imposing wooden board on the principal's desk declaring his array of academic credits—M.A. Eng., M.A. Hist., M.A. Soci., M. Ed. Four master's degrees? It's the kind of extravagant personal detail Narayan would have loved. I ask Jayachandran about the four qualifications. He flashes an endearingly boyish grin, and rolls a large golden watch on his wrist. "I wanted to learn everything and understand the whole world when I was a young man," he says. "My English education was very classical. All of Shakespeare, all of the classics. But I've forgotten everything because of time." We talk about his sociology degree next. "It gave me a chance to study everything of importance: juvenile delinquency, marital problems ..." Suddenly he can't stop speaking. Right in front of me he grows into a certifiable Narayan character—the big talker shimmering with hyperbole in his dingy setting. How on earth did this man slip from Malgudi?

I leave the school and walk around Purasawalkam, and it occurs to me that Narayan's Malgudi is not dead. It is as alive and vital as the large tree in his school courtyard. Strange names and strange institutions—the kind of quintessentially Indian strangeness Narayan had an eye for—thrive around me: something called the Advanced Nuclear Medicine Research Institute is advertised by a small sign from the top of a commercial building; not far off, a group of tired men eat in a shabby restaurant with a weird-sounding name—Hotel Romus. Everything is normal in this neighborhood, and everything is incongruous. Walking about Purasawalkam, touching things and people that seem to have been shaken out of a Narayan manuscript, I realize that his Malgudi did not belong in an ancient, ossified India. It was part of a recently fabricated place, a sudden delta of Indian and European civilization that has yet to be entirely penetrated and discovered by its residents. The best Indian writers in English—people like Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth—make this journey into their strange, barely discovered country, and the world watches in fascination. But the journey began a long time ago, in one of the rooms of the ELM Fabricius Higher Secondary School.

• Aravind Adiga
• R.K. Narayan's childhood haunts show few traces of the great novelist. But the world he described is still vibrant