Dear Mr Narayan,
This letter was not meant to be written to you. I had planned to write to Mark Zuckerberg the 30-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook whose meeting with our PM on today (Friday, 10 October) had been grabbing headlines. (What is Facebook you ask. Er, I guess you could call it this era's Malgudi — an imaginary village inhabited by virtual characters).
But as I was saying, I had planned to write to Zuckerberg, and to do so, I had logged on to Google (What is Google? Er, a kind of well-stocked library, like the one at the Maharajah's College High School, which is said to have fuelled your imagination).
Anyway, so there I was planning to write a letter to Mr Zuckerberg, when on opening the Google page (nevermind, I'll explain later), there, for all the world to see (or perhaps just its Indian users), was an elegant representation of your handsome face, on the book jacket of a book titled Malgudi Days.
And a few clicks later (nevermind) I realised that it was your birthday today (on Friday) and you would have been 108 had you lived! Mr Zuckerberg could wait, I told myself.
Because truth be told Mr Narayan, in this frantic, turbo-charged, headline-grabbing, high decibel world that we live in, your life and work are such a welcome antithesis to what Zuckerberg represents.
The quiet fictional village of Malgudi, brought alive so vividly with the deft strokes of your masterful pen, have come to represent an oasis of peace and tranquility. But more than your peerless prose Mr Narayan, I salute you for the life you led, which, for many, is emblematic of the ideal writerly life, one spent mostly away from the madding crowd, in solitude and discipline and in service of your muse.
Not for you, were the promotional book tours, the marketing and hype of book releases, the five figure advances and the jockeying for awards and grants. You worked at a regular clip, turning out a magisterial body of work, largely unconcerned by competition or reward.
Even your discovery, by Graham Greene was the result of such serendipity and happenchance that it's a story as charming as one of your very own. There you were, an unknown young writer in Madras, long before the advent of the internet or even fax machines, who'd sent his unpublished novel to a friend in Oxford, and the next thing you know is that the friend had shown it to Graham Greene —one of the greatest writers of the West, who went out of his way to mentor you, recommend you to his publisher and ensure its publication in 1935 as Swami and Friends.
So deep was his regard for your writing that Greene went on to champion three more of your books, and the most endearing thing about this friendship was that you only met each other decades later when you began travelling abroad in the 1950s!
I doubt whether in the transactional, 'you-scratch my-back-I-yours' world of today, such an instance of abiding regard and altruistic generosity would even exist. So, as much as I admire your simple, and luminous prose Mr Narayan, I admire the life you created for yourself. A life of simplicity and steady measured success that spanned 60 years!
You can see now why Mr Narayan, I opted to write to you instead of to Mr Zuckerberg, because at the end of the day, even though you both created books of great significance, your books Mr Narayan, nourish my soul and comforts it in away that Facebook never can.
Happy birthday Kunjappa — as your grandmother would have wished you. And yes, were you alive, I would have sent you a 'friend request'.
Yours sincerely etc
Malavika Sangghvi can be contacted at
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com
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