Talking of Voids
His books are writings of silences – silences that gnaw on retrospection, silences of the chimera, silences of the nuance of a bucolic lingo and then again, silences that correspond with or impinge on, the rustic fabric of reality.
Narayan was a menace, a hazard and thus always a cliquey experience. He was a passionate bloke, a honeycomb of little humanities, quiet gestures and somewhat a conundrum of a world simpler than a photograph. His words suffered delightedly in sentences that were choked, irrevocably always, all too soon with an indiscreet full-stop, his language was as liberal as it was conservative, as passive as it was subversive, his plots assessed a fundamentality as curious as the one you draw on to mentally undress a woman, with a flicker of perversion, always inadequate for speculation. From the schematic ordinariness of his art, redolent of cavorting childhood memoirs and a pleasant nervousness of adolescence, to his simple-minded method of life and a dazzling literary aristocracy tautly dressed in edible prose, the enigma that R.K. Narayan was, was hindered by the commonest form of banality that is but being human. Narayan is dead. It is meant as plainly to be said, as he would have elected to have written himself. The death of a writer is as meaningless as his existence; it is similarly pointless, and similarly, redundant, for every writer is alive in a wide eight inches of black ink that walks the spine of each book and sings softly to a patient eternity. Narayan’s fashion of writing is not the contemporary fancy concert of propaganda, vestiges of which crop up debatably in ‘The Hungry Tide’ by Amitav Ghosh, ‘Shadow Lines’ by the same, and obviously, anything by Rushdie, nor is it a polite but vicariously posed tribute to the cause. His prose is lyrically ordained and if a compassionate comparison is in disposition to be made, the nearest one gets is to Khushwant Singh minus his eccentricities with innuendos and lusty, erogenous narratives (it is only civil to ask of a man to mind his age).
His characters although not unique, are inspiring. By the strained use of a chemical reaction of inexperience and ideal hardihood, Narayan employs the moldering decompose of carefully cultivated literary protagonists as his heroes, if we admit to the blunder of calling them that. Most works revolve around the growth of a protagonist, Narayan underscores its stiltedness. Circumstances, vicissitudes, time or the scandalous orgy of experience engender no change in his preconceived idea of an emphatic character. Whether it is Chandran or Swami or anyone from the bulk at Malgudi, Narayan impoverishes them of anything beyond a certain sadness of yielding imperfections, a pinch of this here, a pinch of that there, and you have the commoner, R.K. Narayan’s model. Climbing up from a glaring text-book case of marginal identity crisis onto another arbitrary narrative of a tiger in the woods, it is least bothersome for the most lax Narayan critic to scoff that he worked within distressed seams, a roster of themes that he trenchantly experimented inside. Narayan loved Malgudi, and he decided to stay.
Narayan engaged the scenario of a life, wrenched of its hypocrisies, parasitical evils and that infectious quotient of hardheaded realism, daft malcontent, silly innuendos and subtracted of such a loathsome saddle, he talked idly and solicitously of the amoebic social malpractices like that of child marriage and dowry system without demonstrative irony or the loud, strident clamorings of satire. He wasn’t a feminist, neither a social reformer nor a political chronicler – he was a common writer of a common land of a common perspective and a common passion for nuances.
The sort of starkness that one comes across in his novels is torturous to imagine; red-eyed, incisor-baring, drooling truths of a life of negligent boredom, and the only pregnant action being a refuge from it. Every work of Narayan’s is a philosophical expounding of an allegorical fact – a naked torso is more complex than a clothed one. His torsos, unclothed of frivolous grandiloquence, a conceited magnanimity of forced imageries, and an all too condescending air, were bare and thus, beautiful in a simplicity that was nothing but cleverly naïve. His moral implications were so benign and delicate that a borderline can be etched between what he intended for us to perceive and what we wishfully make of his intentions.
R.K. Narayan is dead and we’re bequeathed with his wit, his wisdom, his musings and most notably, his generous possession, Malgudi.
About the Author
Rating: Not yet rated