WHEN I was visiting my home, in New Delhi, a while back, I considered making a journey to the state of Mysore, a thousand miles to the south, to see R. K. Narayan, the writer, but my pilgrimage got lost in my empty pockets. I wanted to meet Narayan not because he had written eleven novels and produced two volumes of short stories, not because he was acclaimed the best novelist in India (fiction-writing is a fledgling art in my country), not even because he had the reputation for being a saint (there are too many poseurs in Hindustan), but for an almost obsessive personal reason. I was drawn to Narayan because his books, though written in English, a language foreign to most of his countrymen and also to most of his characters, have the ring of true India in them. He had succeeded where his peers had failed, and this without relying on Anglicized Indians or British caricatures to people his novels. My fascination with his art was personal, for, as I had written him, “like you, I find myself, but only now and again, writing as an Indian for an audience thousands of miles away, spectators with moods and habits so different from our own that it is not easy to be more than a tourist guide to them.” For me, the magic of his unpretentious, almost unliterary novels was his astonishing marriage of opposite points of the compass. My wish to know him was fulfilled here in New York, when I picked up my telephone one summer afternoon and heard a soft voice from the other end: “Um! This is Narayan. ‘If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.’ You know, we are living practically next door to one another. I am just a couple of blocks away from you. Um! Can I come over?”
Within a few minutes, Narayan was at my flat, on East Fifty-eighth Street. A neither too stout nor lean figure, he strolled in rather boyishly. One shoulder appeared to be lower than the other, and his lilting walk recalled the end of the Bharat Natyam, an Indian classical dance in which the performer finishes by returning to the place where he took his first step, his shoulders gracefully preceding his legs in a swaying motion. Narayan dropped into my best armchair and, with a smile revealing a great many polished teeth, said, “I feel at home. Um! Do you?” I had to laugh.
Narayan, who is fifty-five, has a sharp face, with a full mouth, a slightly hooked nose, and a very impressive forehead capped with thinning gray hair. The most noticeable thing about his face, however, was his impish, mischievous eyes, peering out from behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. His body was loosely, carelessly clothed in nondescript gray trousers, a tweed jacket, and a white shirt, which was oddly finished off with an improvised tie pin, a piece of red thread wound around one shirt button. If it were not that he has the wheat-colored complexion of a Brahmin, in India he might pass unnoticed, as an anonymous member of the roving multitude; only a constant expression of innocence, and a certain elusiveness about him, rare anywhere, saves him from seeming bland.
