Grandmothers tale and se.., p.1
Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories, page 1
Dedication
To the memory of my daughter, Hema, who selected the additional stories for this volume in order to give it stature: for half a century my companion, friend, philosopher and guide, enriching my life with a granddaughter and a grandson.
Contents
Dedication
The Grandmother’s Tale
Guru
Salt and Sawdust
Judge
Emden
An Astrologer’s Day
The Blind Dog
Second Opinion
A Horse and Two Goats
Annamalai
Lawley Road
A Breath of Lucifer
Under the Banyan Tree
Another Community
The Shelter
Seventh House
Cat Within
The Edge
Uncle
About the Author
Also by R. K. Narayan
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Grandmother’s Tale
I was brought up by my grandmother in Madras from my third year while my mother lived in Bangalore with a fourth child on hand after me. My grandmother took me away to Madras in order to give relief to an overburdened daughter.
My grandmother Ammani was a busy person. She performed a variety of tasks all through the day, cooking and running the house for her two sons, gardening, counseling neighbors and the tenants living in the rear portion of the vast house stretching away in several segments, settling disputes, studying horoscopes and arranging matrimonial alliances. At the end of the day she settled down on a swing—a broad plank suspended by chains from the ceiling; lightly propelling it with her feet back and forth, chewing betel, she was completely relaxed at that hour. She held me at her side and taught me songs, prayers, numbers and the alphabet till suppertime.
I mention “suppertime,” but there was no fixed suppertime. My uncles returned home late in the evening. The senior uncle conducted a night school for slum children. (Some of them, later in life, attained eminence as pundits in the Tamil language and literature.) The junior uncle worked in the harbor as a stevedore’s assistant and came home at uncertain hours. Suppertime could not be based on their homecoming but on my performance. My grandmother fed me only when I completed my lessons to her satisfaction. I had to repeat the multiplication table up to twenty but I always fumbled and stuttered after twelve and needed prodding and goading to attain the peak; I had to recite Sanskrit verse and slokas in praise of Goddess Saraswathi and a couple of other gods, and hymns in Tamil; identify six ragas when granny hummed the tunes or, conversely, mention the songs when she named the ragas; and then solve arithmetic problems such as, “If a boy wants four mangoes costing one anna per mango, how much money will he have to take?” I wanted to blurt out, “Boys don’t have to buy, they can obtain a fruit with a well-aimed stone at a mango tree.” I brooded, blinked without a word, afraid I might offend her if I mentioned the stone technique for obtaining a fruit. She watched me and then, tapping my skull, gently remarked, “Never seen a bigger dunce . . .” It was all very taxing, I felt hungry and sleepy. To keep me awake, she kept handy a bowl of cold water and sprinkled it on my eyelids from time to time.
I could not understand why she bothered so much to make me learned. She also taught me some folk songs which now, I realize, were irrelevant, such as the one about a drunkard sleeping indifferently while his child in the crib was crying and the mother was boiling the milk. The most unnecessary lesson, however, in my memory as I realize it now, was a Sanskrit lyric, not in praise of God, but defining the perfect woman—it said the perfect woman must work like a slave, advise like a Mantri (Minister), look like Goddess Lakshmi, be patient like Mother Earth and courtesan-like in the bed chamber—this I had to recite on certain days of the week. After the lessons she released me and served food. When I was six years old I was ceremoniously escorted to the Lutheran Mission School nearby and admitted in the “Infant Standard.”
Later I grew up in Mysore with my parents, visiting my grandmother in Madras once a year during the holidays. After completing my college course, I frequently visited Madras to try my luck there as a free-lance author.
My junior uncle, no longer a stevedore’s assistant but an automobile salesman for a German make, set out every morning to contact his “prospects” and demonstrate the special virtues of his car. He took me out with him, saying “If you want to be a writer, don’t mope at home listening to grandmother’s tales. You must be up and doing; your B.A. degree will lead you nowhere if you do not contact ‘prospects.’ Come out with me and watch. . . .” He drove me about, stopped here and there, met all sorts of persons and delivered his sales talk, making sure that I followed his performance intelligently. I avoided his company in the evenings, since he wined and dined with his “prospects” to clinch a sale. During his morning rounds, however, I went out with him to be introduced to men, who, he thought, were in the writing line. He left me in their company to discuss with them my literary aspirations. Most of them were printers, established in the highways and byways of the city, or publishers of almanacs, diaries, lottery tickets and race cards, who were looking for proofreaders on a daily wage of ten rupees.
My uncle urged me to accept any offer that came: “You must make a start and go up. Do you know what I was earning when I worked at the harbor? Less than twenty-five a month, in addition to occasional tips from clearing agents. That is how I learned my job. Then I moved on to a job at a bookshop in Mount Road, cycling up in the morning, carrying my lunch, and selling books till seven in the evening. It was hard work, but I was learning a job. Today do you know what I get? One thousand for every car I sell, in addition to expenses for entertaining the prospects. You will have to learn your job while earning, whatever the wages might be. That is how you should proceed.”
After brooding over these suggestions, I began to ignore his advice and stayed at home, much to his annoyance: “Well, if you do not want to prosper, I will just say G.T.H. (go to hell). I have better things to do. . . .” (However, he relented subsequently after the publication of my first three novels, my first three in England.) In 1940, when I started a quarterly journal, “Indian Thought,” in Mysore, he took it upon himself to help its circulation, applying his sales talk at high pressure. Carrying a sample copy of “Indian Thought” from door to door, he booked one thousand subscribers in Madras city alone in the first year. Unfortunately, “Indian Thought” ceased publication in the second year since I could not continue it single-handed.
Although aging, my grandmother was still active and concerned herself with other people’s affairs, her domestic drudgery now mitigated by the presence of two daughters-in-law in the house. She sat as usual on the swing in the evenings, invited me to sit beside her, and narrated to me stories of her early days—rather of her mother’s early life and adventures, as heard by her from her mother when she, Ammani, was about ten years old.
Day after day, I sat up with her listening to her account, and at night developed it as a cogent narrative. As far as possible, I have tried to retain the flavor of her speech, though the manner of her narrative could not be reproduced as it proceeded in several directions back and forth and got mixed up with asides and irrelevancies. I have managed to keep her own words here and there, but this is mainly a story-writer’s version of a hearsay biography of a great-grandmother. She was seven when she was married, her husband being just ten years old. Those were the days of child marriages, generally speaking. Only widowers remarried late in life. It is not possible to fix the historical background by any clue or internal evidence. My grandmother could not be specific about the time since she was unborn at the beginning of her mother’s story. One has to assume an arbitrary period—that is, the later period of the East India Company, before the Sepoy Mutiny. My grandmother could not specify the location of their beginning. It might be anywhere in the Southern Peninsula. She just mentioned it as “that village,” which conjures up a familiar pattern: a hundred houses scattered in four or five narrow streets, with pillared verandas and pyols, massive front doors, inner courtyards, situated at the bend of a river or its tributary, mounds of garbage here and there, cattle everywhere, a temple tower looming over it all; the temple hall and corridor serving as a meeting ground for the entire population, and an annual festival attracting a big crowd from nearby hamlets—an occasion when a golden replica of the deity in the inner shrine was carried in a procession with pipes and drums around the village.
“What god was he?” I could not resist my curiosity; my grandmother knew as much as I did, but ventured a guess.
“Could be Ranganatha, an aspect of Vishnu, in repose in a state of yoga lying on the coils of the thousand-headed Adisesha. The god was in a trance, and watched and protected our village. They were married in that temple—my father and mother. Don’t interrupt me with questions, as I have also only heard about these events. My mother told me that she was playing in the street with her friends one evening when her father came up and said, ‘You are going to be married next week.’
“ ‘Why?’ she asked and did not get an answer. Her father ignored her questions and went away. Her playmates stopped their game, surrounded and teased her. ‘Hey, bride! Hey, bride!’
“ ‘Wait! You will also be brides soon!’ she retorted. She rushed back home to her mother, crying, ‘Whatever happens, I am not going to marry. My friends are making fun of me!’ ”
Her mother soothed her and explained patiently that she was old enough to marry, something that could not be avoided by any human being, an occasion when she would be showered with gifts and new clothes and gold ornaments. The girl, however, was not impressed. She sulked and wept in a corner of their home. After fixing the date of the wedding they kept her strictly indoors and did not allow her to go out and play. Her playmates visited her and whispered their sympathies.
On an auspicious day she was clad in a sari, decked in jewelry and taken to the pillared hall of the temple, where had gathered guests and relations and priests: a piper and drummer were creating enough noise to drown the uproar of the priests and chanting mantras and the babble of the guests. She was garlanded and made to sit beside a boy whom she had often noticed tossing a rubber ball in an adjoining street whenever she went out to buy a pencil, ribbon or sweets in a little shop. She felt shy to look at him now, sitting too close to him on a plank. The smoke from the holy fire smarted her eyes and also created a smoke screen blurring her vision whenever she stole a glance in his direction. At the auspicious hour the piper, drummer and the chanting priests combined to create the maximum din as Viswa approached the girl, seated on her father’s lap, and tied the yellow thread around her neck, and they became man and wife from that moment.
In a week all celebration, feasting and exchange of ceremonial visits between the bride and bridegroom parties ceased. Viswanath the bridegroom went back to his school, run by a pedagogue on a brick platform under a banyan tree on the riverside. He was ragged by his class-fellows for getting married. He denied it and became violent till the pedagogue intervened and brought his cane down on the back of the teasing member.
The boy said between sobs, “He is lying. I was at the temple with my father and ate, along with the others, a big feast with four kinds of sweets. Viswanath wore new clothes, a gold chain and a big garland around his neck. If I am lying, let him take off his shirt and show us the sacred thread. . . .” He bared his chest and held up his sacred thread to demonstrate that he had only a bachelor’s three-strand thread. The teacher was old, suffered from a sore throat and could not control his class of twenty-five children when a babble broke out on the subject of Viswa’s marriage. A few cried, “Shame, shame,” which was the usual form of greeting in their society.
The teacher tapped his cane on the floor and cried over the tumult, “Why shame? I was married when I was like Viswa. I have four sons and two daughters and grandchildren. My wife looks after those at home still, and runs the family; and they will also all marry soon. There is no shame in marriage. It’s all arranged by that god in the temple. Who are we to say anything against his will? My wife was also small when we married. . . .”
The girl’s life changed after her marriage. She could not go out freely, or join her friends playing in the street. She could not meet her husband, except on special occasions such as the New Year and other festival days when Viswa was invited to visit his wife’s home with his parents. On those occasions the girl was kept aloof in a separate room and would be escorted to his presence by young women who would giggle and urge the young couple to talk and say something to each other and leave them alone for a little time. The couple felt embarrassed and shy and tongue-tied but took that opportunity to study each other’s features. When they got a chance, the very first sentence the girl uttered was “There is a black patch under your ear.” She made bold to touch his face with her forefinger. Apart from holding each other’s right hand before the holy fire during their wedding ceremony this was their first touch. He found that her finger was soft and she found the skin under his left ear rough but pleasant. When she removed her finger she asked, “What is this patch?” She thrust her finger again to trace that black patch under his left ear. “Oh, that!” he said, pressing down her finger on the black patch. “It’s a lucky sign, my mother says.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked solicitously.
“No. They say it’s lucky to have that mark,” he said.
“How much luck?” she asked and continued, “Will you become a king?”
“Yes, that’s what they say.” And before they could develop this subject, others opened the door and came in, not wanting to leave the couple alone too long.
After that they discovered an interest in each other’s company. But it was not easy to meet. It was impossible for the girl to go out, unless chaperoned by an elder of the family. Even such outings were limited to a visit to the temple on a Friday evening or to a relation on ceremonial occasions. Viswa wished he could be told when and where he could see her. Occasionally he found an excuse to visit her home on the pretext of wanting to meet his father-in-law on some business but it did not always work, as the man would be in his coconut grove far away. Viswa did not possess the hardihood to step into the house to catch a glimpse of his young wife. She kept herself in the deepest recess of their house for fear of being considered too forward, and he would turn back disappointed. But he soon found a way. He spied and discovered that she was more accessible at their backyard, where she washed clothes at the well. There was only a short wall separating their backyard from a lane, which proved a more convenient approach since he could avoid a neighbor always lounging on the pyol and asking, “Ay! Visiting your wife? Insist upon a good tiffin . . .” It made him self-conscious. He would simper and murmur and hasten his steps only to be met by his mother-in-law at the door. Now, the backyard could be approached without anyone accosting him, but the lane was dirty and garbage-ridden; he did not mind it. On his way back from school if he took a diversion, he could approach the lane and the short wall. He placed a couple of bricks close to the wall, stood on the pile with his head showing up a few inches above it. It was a sound strategy though her back was turned to him, while she drew water from the well and filled a bucket and soaked her clothes. He watched her for a few moments and cried, “Hey!” When she did not hear his call he clapped his hands, and she turned and stared at him. He said, “Hey, I am here.”
Looking back watchfully into their house she asked, “Why?”
“To see you,” he said.
“Come by the front door,” she said.
And he said promptly, “I can’t. It’s no good. How are you? I came to ask,” he said rather timidly.
“Why should you ask?” she questioned. He had no immediate answer. He just blinked. She laughed at him and said, “You are tall today.”
“Yes,” he said. “Is your name Balambal? It is too long.”
“Call me Bala,” she said, picked up her bucket and suddenly retreated into the house.
He waited, hoping she would come back. But the back door shut with a bang, and he jumped off muttering, “She is funny. I should not have married her. But what could I do? I was never asked whether I wanted to marry or not. . . .”
He ran down the lane and sought the company of his friend Ramu, who lived in a house next to the temple and who knew when the pujas at the temple were performed and when they would distribute the offerings—sweet rice and coconut pieces. If one stuck to Ramu one need not starve for snacks. He could take Viswa to see the god at the appropriate moment when the evening service was in progress and wait. After camphor flames were waved and cymbals and bells sounded, the offerings would be distributed. Piously standing on the threshold of the sanctum Ramu would whisper, “Viswa, shut your eyes and pray, otherwise they will not give you anything to eat!”
At the next session Viswa was more successful. Standing on the pile of bricks, he told her, “On Tuesday evening I went to the temple.”
“Did you pray? What for?” she asked. Seeing his silence, she said, “Why go to temple if you don’t pray?”
“I don’t know any prayer.”
“What did you learn at home?”
He realized she was a heckler and tried to ward off the attack. “I know some prayer, not all.”
“Recite some,” she said.
“No, I won’t,” he said resolutely.
“You will be sent to hell if you don’t say your prayers.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“My mother has told me. She makes us all pray in the evenings in the puja room.”
