The other day, I was taken by surprise to spot a priest in the Lord Shiva temple in my town who sported the looks and descriptions of a typical R K Narayan’s character. The priest was pitch tar in colour and donned black rimmed spectacles. The man in his mid-sixties had smeared holy ash over his forehead and forearms that shone resplendently. Brooding over the incident later, I realised the late writer’s fictitious town Malgudi and the way it fits itself into the geography of any mediocre south Indian town. The ingenuity of the maverick writer was at once striking.
The hub of the Malgudi’s activities is market square, which is there in my town, where a clock tower stands majestically. The Albert Mission High School is not there and Sacred Heart Convent stands in its place. The town boasts of a Pennington market, built by a Lord Pennington. As people budge in and out of the market, the deafening din caused is almost akin to what Narayan depicts in his stories.
Every evening as I stroll to the railway station, it is Malgudi station that is a prominent landmark in the writer’s fiction works. I don’t see any Talkative Man like Rann moving in there to occupy the visitor’s room for a certain number of weeks, as it remains always locked.
Kabir Street is the avenue of the peace-loving landlords where people dozed off too slackened in the afternoons in the pyols. The Kandhadai Street is none the way less than Kabir Street. The Ellamman Street that marks the peripheral end of heart of Malgudi has been christened with a different name. At the end of Ellamman Street, Nallappa’s grove is not there, but sylvan settings begin. Small hamlets dot around my town as in Malgudi.
The archetypal railway station is but the one in the east of the town, about three miles away, that reminds me of the one in Malgudi. The visitor’s room in the station is well-furnished, but, remains under lock and key for fear that there might be a visitor to usurp it as Rann does in The Talkative Man.
The Sarayu River that supplies a perennial furnish of salubrious water for Malgudi flows but here it bears the name Kaattazhagar River and its gush vanishes as it reaches the mountain foot.
One hears the taluk office gong tolling the night hours in Narayan’s stories. That was a practice modernisation sounded the knell on. Each time I moped my way to a nearby village, something tells me it is but another one culled out of the Malgudi map. Near the town bus stand, I see a hire-cab driver who is but Gaffur look-alike. There are no Margayyas sitting outside the co-operative banks waiting to help the village rustics to fill in the loan application forms (as in The Financial Expert). But, a handful of scriveners ply their trade, drafting petitions and requisitions addressed to the local tahsildar.
It is this fiction-based obsession of mine for the last two decades that has dissuaded me from migrating to any metro leaving my ‘Malgudi’.