Book Review “Malgudi Days”

Malgudi Days “by R. K. Narayan”. Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami is abridged as

R. K. Narayan.
R. K. Narayan was born in 1906 in Madras, and later graduated from Maharaja’s College in
Mysore. He published his first novel Swami and Friends in 1935 at the age of 29, and subsequently
went on to publish numerous novels, five collections of short stories, two travel books, four
collections of essays, a memoir, and some translations of Indian epics and myths. Two collections of
R. K. Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Days (16 stories) and Lawley Road (8 stories), and eight new
stories, were merged to produce a collection of 32 short stories consequently titled Malgudi Days.
Malgudi Days is widely considered to be R. K. Narayan’s most prominent and popular book.
The highly illustrious and famous cartoonist R. K. Laxman is the author’s brother.

In this quarantined lockdown isolated period I started to read few old books and it is one of them.
Malgudi days book, most of us know the stories in some way or the other. It was adapted to a TV
Series when we were growing up and we got hooked up to it back then. The children and adults
both had the same amount of interest.
After a long time I am able to get my hands on the book that the Series was based on.
Malgudi days is a collection of 32 short funny and witty stories. The stories happen in malgudi an
imaginary town located somewhere on the banks of Sarayu (a river in South India).
Even though it is common to call malgudi is an imaginary town, I didn’t felt it is imaginary while
reading the book. You can trace it as any village in south India if you have travelled there. The
stories carry the scent and sounds of these villages and one can instantly blend into the situations in
the stories.
There was everything in Malgudi that a proper city should have: a little post office, a grocery shop,
Town Hall Park, a vendor selling fried groundnuts, an astrologer with his cowrie shells and
paraphernalia, the Vinayak Mudali Street with four parallel streets, City X-Ray Institute at Race
Course Road etc. Even as I read through the stories in Malgudi Days, I can actually picture myself
transported through the streets of a full-fledged city, making it difficult to shake off the feeling that I
have lived in this town.
In all there are 32 stories and all the stories revolve around a town in south India called Malgudi
(it’s a fictitious town as mentioned earlier so don’t look it up in the map). The characters in each
story are so well crafted that we can identify them with the few people around us, they are pretty
ordinary characters but then again they are extraordinary in their manners.
I would even comment the TV Series in this regard that they did a pretty decent job with the book
as the people still remember a lot many characters from that Series still.
All the stories are excellent, it’s hard to pick a few but a few I liked and important to mention are
The Missing Mail, The Doctor’s word, The blind dog, Such Perfection, Engine Trouble, Forty-Five
a month, The Axe, Lawley Road, A willing Slave, Leela’s Friend, Mother & Son, Selvi, Second
Opinion.
In “The Missing Mail” a village postman’s emotions with a household are displayed when he
doesn’t deliver a bad mail to the house until the daughter of the house is wedded.
In the “Doctor’s Word” it shows how a doctor’s word is considered to be God’s word and just by
listening to a lie how the doctor’s friend cruises through a bad disease which almost killed him.
In “Forty-Five a Month” a man’s tussle with the love for his child and fighting with the financial
reality is depicted where he wants to take his little daughter for the movie after promising her but he
has to slog in the office every day and the result he gets is a five rupee increase.
In “Mother & Son” the relationship of mother and son is beautifully shown when after getting angry
with his son she says some harsh words to him and later she becomes restless when her Son doesn’t
come back late in the night. The love and relationship are beautifully depicted.

Each story is unique and touches some or the other part of our everyday life and as Mr. Narayan
mentions in the beginning that the characters of Malgudi can be found anywhere in the world and
the stories have universal appeal. None of the stories are interrelated or even influenced by each
other.
There is a quote on the back cover of the book by Francis King which I liked and totally agree with
he says, “The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of
most human happiness…Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhow: a few bring it off, Narayan is one of
them”.
This pretty much summaries the entire book. If we are looking for some obvious humour, laughs,
mystery, drama, love stories, etc. then this is not what we will get from it. The book will leave no
impression on us when we finish any story (it’s a collection of short stories) but then when we will
be off the book each story will leave a lasting impression on us. The beauty of the stories as King
aptly says is the extraordinary ordinariness.
Very few authors can capture the human emotions in such a beautiful way.
I enjoyed “Malgudi days” thoroughly and this has re-kindled a wish to watch the entire TV Series
again.
Thanks.