CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In February 1956 my daughter married her cousin Chandru. In spite of house-building, I had put by enough to celebrate the wedding with music, feasting, lights, and the entertaining of a lot of guests assembled from all over south India, nor did I overlook the orthodox rites and rituals enjoined in the Scriptures.
When my daughter packed up and went away to live with her husband, I felt rather at a loose end at first. Having practised the role of a protective father all along, I found myself unemployed, but soon enjoyed the added rank of being a father-in-law. Both of them wrote to me regularly and the tone of their letters was full of assurance and confidence in their future. I realized they were a very happy couple.
This was the correct moment for the Rockefeller Foundation to think of me for a travel grant. I accepted the proposal and was lost during the following weeks in a set of unaccustomed activities such as passport-getting, inoculations, obtaining a bank permit, and form-filling—repeating any number of times my “name in full,” “father’s name,” “date of birth,” and so on. Finally I did break out of the triangular boundary of Madras, Mysore, and Coimbatore and left for the United States, in October 1956.
At this time I had been thinking of a subject for a novel: a novel about someone suffering enforced sainthood. A recent situation in Mysore offered a setting for such a story. A severe drought had dried up all the rivers and tanks; Krishnaraja Sagar, an enormous reservoir feeding channels that irrigated thousands of acres, had also become dry, and its bed, a hundred and fifty feet deep, was now exposed to the sky with fissures and cracks, revealing an ancient submerged temple, coconut stumps, and dehydrated crocodiles. As a desperate measure, the municipal council organized a prayer for rains. A group of Brahmins stood knee-deep in water (procured at great cost) on the dry bed of Kaveri, fasted, prayed, and chanted certain mantras continuously for eleven days. On the twelfth day it rained, and brought relief to the countryside.
This was really the starting point of The Guide. During my travels in America, the idea crystallized in my mind. I stopped in Berkeley for three months, took a hotel room, and wrote my novel. I shall quote from a journal I kept at that time:
BERKELEY
Another day of house-hunting, having firmly decided to stay in Berkeley rather than at Palo Alto in order to write my novel. Scrutinizing of advertisements in Berkeley Gazetteer, following up hearsay accounts of apartments available; thanks to Ed Harper’s help visit the university housing centre, and tell one Mrs. Keyhoe (I could not concentrate on business, as my inner being clamoured to know if “Key-hole” was being mis-spelt.) of my quest. “Here is a man who wants a room for writing with kitchen facilities, private bath, prepared to pay et cetera, et cetera,” she would pour forth into a telephone. Finally we march out with a list in our hands. . . . None of the apartments we inspect proves acceptable. While browsing around the campus bookstore on Telegraph, I suddenly look up and notice Hotel Carlton staring me in the face, never having noticed its presence before. Walk in and find Kaplan, the manager, extremely courteous and full of helpful suggestions—he’s willing to give me a room where I may use a hot-plate for cooking my food, daily room service, separate bed and study, ideal in every way, the perfect hotel for me. And it costs seventy-five dollars a month.
Check out of my seven-dollar-a-day hotel at two and check in at Carlton at five minutes past two next afternoon. That very night acquire an electric hot-plate, a saucepan, rice, and vegetables, and venture to cook a dinner for myself. Profound relief that I don’t have to face again the cafeteria carrot and tomato!
For the first time a settled place where I don’t have to keep my possessions in a state of semi-pack. I am able to plan my work better. I am enchanted with the place, everything is nearby, two cinemas, three or four groceries, and any number of other shops; I can walk down and buy whatever I may need, and peep at the campanile clock to know the time; its chime is enchanting. . . .
Nothing much to record, the same routine. I have got into the routine of writing—about one thousand five hundred to two thousand words a day anyhow. I have the whole picture ready in my mind, except for some detail here and there and the only question is to put it in writing. Some days when I feel I have been wasting time, I save my conscience by telling Kaplan at the desk, “I am going to be very busy for the next few weeks trying to get on with my book.” A restatement of purpose is very helpful under these circumstances. Graham Greene liked the story when I narrated it to him in London. While I was hesitating whether to leave my hero alive or dead at the end of the story, Graham was definite that he should die. So I have on my hands the life of a man condemned to death before he was born and grown, and I have to plan my narrative to lead to it. This becomes a major obsession with me. I think of elaborate calculations: a thousand words a day and by February l I should complete the first draft. In order to facilitate my work I take a typewriter on hire; after three days of tapping away it gets on my nerves, and I lounge on the sofa and write by hand with my pen. Whatever the method, my mind has no peace unless I have written at the end of the day nearly two thousand words. Between breakfast and lunch I manage five hundred words, and while the rice on the stove is cooking, a couple of hundred, and after lunch once again till six, with interruptions to read letters and reply to them, or to go out for a walk along the mountain path, or meet and talk to one or the other of my many friends here. . . .
Having written the last sentence of my novel, I plan to idle around Berkeley for a week and then leave on my onward journey. I have lived under the illusion that I would never have to leave Berkeley. All the friends I have in the world seem to be gathered there. Berkeley days were days of writing, thinking, and walking along mountain paths, and meeting friends. And so, when the time comes for me to plan to leave, I feel sad. How can I survive without a view of the Sather Gate Bookshop, the chime of the campanile clock, the ever-hurrying boys and girls in the street below, the grocer, the laundry, and the antique shop? I shall miss all these musical names on the streets—Dwight Way, Channing, Acton, Prospect, Piedmont, Shasta, Olympus, Sacramento—I shall miss all those scores of friends I have somehow managed to gather. I shall miss Lyla’s voice on the telephone. When the sun shone the telephone was certain to ring and she would say, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” . . .
The whole of Sunday busy cancelling my original plan to leave on Monday. The whole of Monday spent at bank counters, the baggage-forwarding agency, and the telegraph office. Late in the evening Biligiri dropped in. John came to ask if he could drive me to the airport next day, but the Vincents have already offered their help. Ed Harper came in with a box of candies to announce to me, Indian style, the birth of a son.
Frantically busy morning, because I have still not completed my packing. John and Irene Vincent come to drive me to the airport. Kaplan at the desk becomes sentimental on my leaving. John Vincent carries my bags all through, in spite of my protests. They come up to the last inch of the barrier, and hand me a hamper of fruits and candies before saying good-bye.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Guide attained a certain degree of popularity, which, though pleasant in itself, brought in its wake involvements that turned out to be ludicrous and even tragic.
In September 1964, Dev Anand, a film producer and actor of Bombay, wrote to me from New York and then arrived one morning at my Yadavagiri home with the single aim of acquiring The Guide for a film production.
A small crowd of autograph-seekers had gathered at my gate, while inside, in my drawing-room, after formal greetings and courtesies, Dev Anand took out his chequebook, unscrewed the cap of his pen, and poised it over a cheque, waiting for me to pronounce my price for The Guide. He would draw any figure I might specify. This was too much for me. My thought processes became paralysed at the prospect of this windfall. I waved off his offer, held back his hand from inscribing more than a modest, reckonable advance against a small percentage on the future profits of the film.
I decl
ared grandly, “Let me rise or sink with your film. I do not want to exploit you.”
“With your co-operation, we will definitely go ahead; and then the sky will be the limit,” he said.
As we proceeded, the sky seemed to be lowered steadily, and when the time came to demand a share of the profits, you could puncture their sky with an umbrella. I was told finally that the film of The Guide had failed to make any profit. They wrote to me, “We wish to assure you, however, that the moment we make any profit, your share will come to you automatically. . . .” And there I have left it for seven years now. The picture was supposed to have cost them nearly ten million rupees, but much of it was spent on themselves, in fabulous salaries and princely living while producing the film. Now and then they summoned me for vague consultations or to participate in a meet-the-press party, where they proclaimed their grand intentions and achievements after benumbing their guests with free-flowing alcohol.
Once I was summoned to Bombay to dine with Lord Mountbatten at Government House and to persuade him to persuade Queen Elizabeth to attend the world première of The Guide in London. I was taken directly from the airport to the banquet hall at Government House. It was a fantastic proposal—which perhaps originated in the imagination of the late Pearl Buck, who was a partner of Dev Anand in the production of The Guide. After a regal banquet, our hostess, who was the Governor of Bombay, discreetly isolated the film unit from the other guests and piloted them to the presence of His Lordship, seated in a side verandah. We settled around with our lines ready. Lord Mountbatten suddenly asked, “What’s the story of The Guide?” Pearl Buck began to narrate it, but could not proceed very far with it. I heard her say, “There was a man called Raju—he was a guide—”
“What guide?” asked his lordship, in his deep voice.
This question upset her flow of narration. She turned to me and said, “Narayan, you tell the story.”
I would not open my mouth. Dammit, I had taken eighty thousand words to tell the story; I was not going to be drawn into it now. Press announcements had given Pearl Buck credit for writing the screenplay, and it was said that she had been paid an advance of twenty-five or two hundred thousand dollars, and I was not going to help her out now. She looked pleadingly at me, and everyone there tried to egg me on. I sat tight. Pearl Buck meandered: “There was Rosie—the dancer. . . .”
“Oh!” exclaimed M. “Who is she? What happened to her?” he asked with a sudden interest, which made Pearl Buck once again lose track of her own narration. I must admit that I enjoyed her predicament, as she treated Mountbatten to a mixed-up, bewildering version of The Guide. Other guests started to leave their distant posts and to infiltrate our carefully isolated group. “Most interesting, I must say,” Lord Mountbatten now said. He turned to his aide. “William, remind me when we get back to London. I don’t know if the Queen will be free. . . . However, I’ll see what I can do.” A person who as a viceroy had handled the colossal task of transferring power from Britain to India in 1947, now to be expected to promote The Guide—it seemed absurd. However, nothing was heard of this proposal again.
The American director suddenly clamoured to have a scene where two tigers would fight for a deer and kill each other. The producer grumbled that it was unpractical and expensive. But the director, claiming his artistic heritage from Elia Kazan, explained, “It will be symbolic. Also, being in colour the splash of blood on the screen will bring us rave notices, and then the sky will be the limit.” The catch-phrase did the trick; Dev Anand accepted the proposal, and filmed a tiger-fight at Madras. But after editing, the sequence lasted half a second on the screen, and looked like a blob of colour left on carelessly at the processing laboratory, despite the blood-curdling roars and other sound effects.
At the beginning, before starting the picture, they went to great trouble to seek my advice, and I had spent a whole day taking them round Mysore to show the riverside, forest, village, and crowds, granite steps and the crumbling walls of an ancient shrine which combined to make up the Malgudi of my story; they went away promising to return later with crew and equipment, but never came back. I learnt subsequently that they had shifted the venue of The Guide to Jaipur and had already shot several scenes on a location as distant from Malgudi as perhaps Iceland. When I protested, they declared, “Where is Malgudi, anyway? There is no such place; it is abolished from this moment. For wide-screen purposes, and that in colour, Jaipur offers an ideal background; we can’t waste our resources.”
By abolishing Malgudi, they had discarded my own values in milieu and human characteristics. My characters were simple enough to lend themselves for observation; they had definite outlines—not blurred by urban speed, size, and tempo. I did not expect the heroine, the dancer, to be more than a local star, but the film heroine became a national figure whose engagements caused her to travel up and down hundreds of miles each day in a Boeing 707, autographing, posing for photographers, emerging from five-star hotels and palatial neon-lit theatres. They had built her up into a V.I.P., so that her visit by plane and jeep to her dying lover was organized by the Defence Department at Delhi, thus glamourizing the death scene itself. The most outrageous part of it was the last scene, in which an elaborate funeral and prolonged lamentation were added at short notice in order to placate eleven financiers who saw the final copy of the film tightly clutching the money-bags on their laps, and who would not part with cash unless a satisfactory mourning scene was added.
Next, I had trouble with a stage adaptation of The Guide by an old friend of mine, Harvey Breit, who was at one time the literary editor of The New York Times. His version was so different from mine that I withheld my permission to present it on the stage. For instance, his version managed to abolish the heroine. I objected to his omission and to the addition of two irrelevant characters, of his own; above all I objected to the hero’s turning round and urinating on the stage. This controversy damaged our friendship to such an extent that at one point we had to communicate with each other only through lawyers. One morning in the year 1965, my lawyer telephoned me at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. “R.K., listen! If you have no particular business to keep you here, leave New York immediately, or better still, leave the country. Harvey Breit is subpoenaing you for an arbitration. I’ve told his lawyer that I don’t know your whereabouts. Quit before they discover you at the Chelsea. . . . Yes, at once, immediately. If you are seen and the process-server drops the summons on the ground in front of you, you’ll be committed. If you disobey it, you will be liable for contempt proceedings, which will be unpleasant. You will not be allowed to leave this country for six months or even a year.”
This was a terrifying prospect. I would not be able to maintain myself in New York for six months, or afford the legal expenses. I bundled up my belongings within an hour, spent a good part of the day cruising about in a taxi in the streets of New York (the best way to be lost to the world) and then, thanks to my friend Natwar Singh of our Foreign Service, secured asylum in the Indian Consulate until I could leave for the airport in the evening. I felt like a criminal on the run, a fugitive from a chain-gang. I remained in acute suspense until the Air India plane took off, afraid lest I should be off-loaded at the last minute to answer the summons. The summons, however, reached me in a plain cover, two weeks later, at Coimbatore. Ultimately, the arbitration did take place, and the verdict was in my favour.
The matter did not end there, however; Harvey Breit was too good a friend to be lost thus. He approached me again, promising to work on the script with me line by line and amend it. The Guide opened on Broadway in March 1968 and closed in less than a week, before I could pack a suitcase and leave for New York, involving the producers in a loss of three hundred thousand dollars or more. Harvey never wrote to me again. I learnt a week later that he had fallen dead, following a heart attack, on the landing of his sixth-floor apartment.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If all my non-literary interests, “arm-chair” agriculture, I find, has been mo
st absorbing. I cut out and file country notes from newspapers, listen to the Farm Programme on the radio. I know how to get rid of weeds and pests, how to grow rice in flower pots, how to grow tomato without soil, the input proportion of fertilizer for such special tasks. I listen admiringly to any and every claim by a practical horticulturist as to how he manages to raise half a million flowers, jasmine or chrysanthemum, on a single acre, and despatch them to distant markets by air. I never doubt a word of whatever such an expert may say.
I sometimes speculated that if I possessed land, I’d be out at five in the morning in the field, with the early birds, and take a hand at ploughing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. The scent of earth and hay and the winnowed grains would be enough diversions for me. My afternoons would be spent in the flower garden. After watching the sunset, I would retire, following absolutely the plan and rhythm of Nature, a life uncomplicated by commerce or rush of any kind. This was perhaps the result of reading Thoreau’s Walden and similar literature.
Driven by such recurring visions of “back to the soil,” I secured, a couple of years ago, an acre of land in Bangalore, nearly a hundred miles from where I live. It was situated outside the city but within the municipal limits and housing projects of Bangalore, on the highway between Bangalore and Mysore. My acre was part of a hillock, and I had a whole rock, a mini-mountain, on my northern boundary. From its apex, my land went down in a gentle slope on to level ground. I had enough space to think of a split-level cottage with a wide verandah (the main thing would be the verandah); one whole side of the mini-mountain could serve as a sheer backdrop for the cottage at different levels down to a garage in the basement. I must find the right architect to design it. Beyond my land was a village with less than a hundred houses, dominated by a double-storied house in which the headman lived. I had to call on this person the first thing because I had noticed manure heaps (belonging to him) dumped on my part of the land and also maize seedlings flourishing on my soil. This made me uneasy. I had to pay him a diplomatic visit, and explain how I had become the owner of the land and how I felt honoured to be his neighbour. I took care not to sound too aggressive since I knew that all troubles around land started thus, and developed into a regular faction with civil litigations carried on for years, leaving little time for anyone to raise even a blade of grass.