R. K. Narayan (1906–2001)

Hello Young Lovers

Read by Richard Wulf
Length: ~7 hours

It’s always a delight to read Narayan. Malgudi Street, I feel I know it backwards. The vendors, the characters, the food, the little quarrels, the homour. Narayan’s books bring to life the villages and the people of my own favorite country, India.

Waiting for the Mahatma is the tale of Sriran and Bharati, two young people who meet at the beginning of the Indian war for independence. Bharati is passionate and fully committed to the cause. Sriran joins the movement only when he meets Bharati who is campaigning on the streets of his village in southern India.

Bharati will not marry the smitten Syrian until she has Gandhi’s blessing. Syrian is passive and sees the world through bewildered eyes. He’s innocent and seems to be dim-witted, but every now and then he shows spark, but then in the most inappropriate of times. Fortunately much of the time Bharati is around to put him in his place but not always, and when he follows the idea of an older man and tries, against Gandhi’s non-violence decree, to derail a train, he gets himself thrown into prison.

After several years Sryian is freed. It’s another world. Independence has been achieved and there’s the inevitable disorganization. He locates
Bharati who has relocated to Delhi where she lives with other Gandhi followers, caring for children who have been displaced from their families due to the Hindu-Muslim conflict. Gandhi has decreed that the children be given names of flowers, so as not to label them as belonging to any religion, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, lest they become embroiled in the now bloody conflict. Bharati spins her own cotton, weaves her own cloth. She’s still dedicated to Ghandi and his way of life. Gandhi is busy so the couple must wait patiently for his blessing.

It’s a simple tale elegantly told with love and humor, and the subtle irony one expects from a Narayan story. So much so that the unanticipated ending leaves the reader with a terrible chill.

Narayan is such a beautiful writer. Fortunately he was prolific and his books can be read time over time. They are indeed treasures. Read any you can get your hands on.… (more)

With a writing career that spanned two thirds of the 20th century, R K Narayan used to be one of the best-known Indian writers internationally (there were several shelves of his books in our public library when I was growing up), but he’s rather faded off the map recently. As someone who grew up heavily influenced by writers like Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett and P G Wodehouse, was promoted by Graham Greene, and who produced dozens of well-made middle-class novels, most of them set in the imaginary South Indian small town of Malgudi, he doesn’t really fit the profile we look for in postcolonial writers, but he was extraordinarily good at what he did, and there seems to be a lot of value in his Balzacian project of chronicling the way Indian small town society fits together.

ThIs recent reprint, with an introduction from that great modern comic storyteller Alexander McCall Smith, brings together three short novels from Narayan’s middle period, all written shortly after Independence.
In Mr Sampath: the printer of Malgudi a young man comes to Malgudi to set up a new, socially-critical weekly magazine. The only printer he can find willing to take on the legal risks is the eccentric Sampath, whose ancient printing plant clearly isn’t quite up to the job, but who somehow gets the magazine going anyway. All goes well until Sampath is distracted by an opportunity to get into the movie business, and chaos ensues as the young editor finds himself scripting a Hindu epic instead of writing columns attacking slum landlords and town officials.
The financial expert, Margayya, is a middleman who when we first meet him is making a good living sitting under a banyan tree outside the Co-operative Land Bank helping farmers to fill in their loan applications. A humiliation makes him determined to rise in the world and make a career for his son, and a few years later he has made it to a city office and is running a wildly successful pyramid scheme, but of course the son isn’t interested in following in his father’s footsteps, and the pyramid collapses…
Waiting for the Mahatma is more directly historical — a young man with no real political convictions is drawn into the Independence campaign after being asked for donations by a pretty girl who turns out to be in Mahatma Gandhi’s entourage. The only way to get close to the girl is to join the movement himself. Narayan cleverly manages to convey both the enormous excitement of the Mahatma’s personal charisma and the difficulty normal humans face in trying to put his radical ideas into practice in their lives.… (more)