With "The English Teacher" on a rainy day...

Dark green leaves against a grey background, the sound of the rain on the autorickshaw tops, people clad in colourful raincoats whizzing past, shining cars, and the occasional thunder. I had almost forgotten how beautiful Chennai looks when it rains. And the world through my window came as a pleasant surprise this morning.

I share some strange bond with this city so much so that I yearn for it physically without even realising it. There is a familiarity about it that is at once heart-warming. Where else can I see the Thatha-s (grandfathers) dropping in at Aavin Milk Booth outside my house [the only one in the area] at the crack of dawn before proceeding on their morning walks, the crows that line the parapet walls & television antennae on the terrace and the childish delight of chasing them away, the green PTC giants and the 'milk' lorry that comes to replenish the booth at around 11pm. To the average person, all this may seem absurd. After all life does not depend on these. But I have always claimed I am 'less than' the average person and I find inexplicable delight in the most trivial of things. I am strangely sentimental about inconsequential things.

The best thing to do on a rainy day is to curl up with a good book under my own private circle of light. The world falls around me like a heavy shroud and I lose myself in the dance of words. I have been reading R K Narayan's The English Teacher. When I was young and 'important', I had a mental block against Indian authors. The very idea of describing the Indian scenario in english seemed preposterous to me - the Indian streets looked incongruous when viewed through english words. Only Knights and Barons can be described in english - not 'maharajah' and 'divan'. But R K Narayan's autobiography My Days changed all that. The book shattered all my blocks for and against language and its limitations.

The English Teacher, the most autobiographical of RKN's works can be divided into two parts [in the reader's mind]. The first one is distinctly Malgudian - apart from the fact that it is indeed set in Malgudi, I am referring to the language and treatment - characters and situations introduced with characteristic RKN humour, tastefully South Indian. Some descriptions seem incongrous to me [mental block again?] - like the protagonist's romantic outing with his wife when he calls her 'Jasmine'. But the second half makes up for all this. RKN departs from his usual style and goes beyond words while describing Krishna's despair at his wife's death. He merely hints at how distinctly Krishna's emotional world changes through the changes the physical world acquires at the absense of his wife. His three year old daughter, at one point, still unaware of her mother's death, approaches the father with a conspiratory smile, and tells him she knows her mother is not in the other room [which had been quarantined owing to the mother's illness], that she had peeked in when no one was looking. The innocence of the child is so poignantly described in this scene that one prays that she should never learn of her mother's death. I may not agree with the psychic "means" of the gradual reconciliation of the protagonist and his understanding of life and death, but the "end" is soothing and left me with a sense of calm. Krishna, hitherto the individual preoccupied with mundanities, grows to such a stature through the course of the novel that one really marvels his love for his wife and how much her death affects him in the deepest sense that it leads him to the hardest quest of all - understanding and peace.

Ahh well, the simple pleasures of life - Chennai, rain and RKN...