My Days (21 page)

My brother as ever remained unperturbed. “What if there is a notice? It is not so easy to throw out a tenant. We have been here for fourteen years, and any court will have to take that into consideration. They will have to concede us as least half a month for each year we have stayed, that way we will get at least seven months. . . .”

I don't know where he got this piece of law from. However, I was worried; and so every morning, I made it a mission to search for a suitable house, and I also contacted some housing brokers. I went about, street by street, looking for
TO LET
signs. We were determined that we should not move too far out of our present orbit. Our milk-suppliers, children's schools, friends, contacts, and grocers were all here, and it would have been impossible to uproot ourselves completely and go out farther than Weavers Lines, Chamundi Extension, or Chamarajapuram. I examined at least two houses each day; houses became an obsession with me night and day. I felt it was degrading to live in a rented house and immediately applied to the City Trust Board for land.

Meanwhile, my landlord sent me another legal notice giving me ten days to vacate the house. I became desperate and went up to consult my friend Sampath as to what I should do now. He at once took me up a staircase to his brother's law office and succinctly presented my case to him. His brother was a busy lawyer, a mighty-looking man whose very personality was reassuring. He looked through my papers and said, “I will deal with your landlord. Don't worry.” However, my mother insisted that I should not take advantage of the legal position but give up the house and move elsewhere. I continued my search.

On my rounds one morning when I was passing down the third street from ours, I saw Professor Hiriyanna, a venerable man who taught Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the university, standing at his gate, and I stopped by for a chat. Although he was very much my senior, we often met at his gate or a street corner and discussed books and publishers. He was negotiating with Allen and Unwin for the publication of his book on Indian philosophy, and felt confused by certain clauses in the publisher's contract and consulted me about their meaning. This morning, while talking on general matters, I told him also about my housing worries.

“Why don't you take that house?” he said, pointing at a big bungalow to his right. “It is my daughter's, I think it is vacant. Rent and other details you will have to settle with her.”

It was a propitious moment. Within a week, we moved over to 963, Laxmipuram, only two streets away from our original habitat. It was a large house with a spacious compound, several rooms, and enough space for all of us and Sheba—above all the same neighbourhood as before.

In 1948, on the penultimate day of January, I plunged into house-building activities by turning the clod ceremoniously with a pickaxe on a plot of land allotted to me at Yadavagiri, situated on the northern outskirts of Mysore. The place was still undeveloped, but it was a highland giving a noble view over the landscape for miles around. We had selected this particular spot because of a frangipani tree standing on its edge in full bloom. In spite of the several aesthetic points in its favour, the place was desolate—miles away from where we lived, without a road, water supply, or electricity. The “foundation” ceremony was conducted with gusto and bonhomie, with distribution of sweets and puffed rice under the frangipani, organized expertly by the contractor, who with a measuring tape and white paint ran around marking the foundation lines. It was all very convincing and filled us with hope and visions.

But that was the best part of the business. After such a spectacular start the house made only limping progress for the next five years—for want of funds, cement, steel, timber, and above all because of constant friction between me and the building contractor, who kept up a perpetual demand for money without showing commensurate progress in the building. I managed to find the money by borrowing. Payments produced only a short-lived friendliness, for he would turn up again with fresh demands. He had an extraordinary system of drawing his bills, adding up a criss-cross of measurements, rates, and charges and producing a total figure before which whatever money I gave seemed a trifle and left him grumbling. “Unless I am paid for my work, I can't really go on.” Whereupon I'd borrow again and try to propitiate him. It took a long time for me to realize the fact that his system of billing was of a visionary nature, much of the demand being for impalpable, unseen items, and that I ought to get rid of him. The house made no visible progress but my debts were mounting, and shuttling between Laxmipuram and Yadavagiri on foot, sometimes two trips in a day, to supervise construction had exhausted my strength and wrecked my nerves. Once again with the help of Sampath's lawyer brother, I had to initiate a process of arbitration before I could get rid of this contractor and engage another one.

Nearly five years after inauguration, my house was ready for occupation. The other members of the family could not yet move in, for the younger generation's schools and colleges and my brothers' offices were all around Laxmipuram. So I kept my Yadavagiri house as a retreat for writing. I divided my time between Laxmipuram and Yadavagiri, enjoying the company of the family in one and of my books and papers in the other.

I had designed a small study—a bay-room with eight windows affording me a view in every direction: the Chamundi Hill temple on the south, a variety of spires, turrets, and domes on the east, sheep and cows grazing in the meadows on all sides, railway trains cutting across the east-west slope. I had a neighbour in the next compound, and hint of another one half a mile away on rising ground in the west, where occasionally one could see a light at the window. I listened to the deep call of the woodcock in the still afternoons, and the cries of a variety of birds perching on the frangipani tree. Such perfection of surroundings, as I had already realized in my college days, was not conducive to study or writing. I spent long hours absorbed in the spectacle around and found it difficult to pull my thoughts back to writing. Subsequently I found it helpful to curtain off a large window beside my desk so that my eyes might fall on nothing more attractive than a grey drape, and thus I managed to write a thousand words a day and complete two novels and a number of short stories during the years of my isolation at Yadavagiri.

I
n 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.