Out of Business

 

What comes to our mind first when we hear the name of the legendary writer, R.K. Narayan? Yes, it will be an unequivocal answer always and forever: Malgudi.  There was a time for the kids of 90’s like me who used to wait anxiously and endearingly for the screening of Malgudi Days serial in Doordarshan channel. Each episode would leave an imprint of our Indian culture and ethos and one would badly and madly fall for the simple and subtle life stories revolving in, around and within this fictional town located somewhere in South India. I could not resist myself from waiting for the upcoming episodes of the rustic simplicity and enduring images they carve on my emotional smithy. The very name of Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami is always a symbol of modest writing style for me. “No one ever accepts criticism so cheerfully. Neither the man who utters it nor the man who invites it really means it.” This frank and brutally honest adage of R.K. Narayan allures me to his readable style endowed with his fertility of imagination suffused in the sheer verities of ordinary life.

 

R.K. Narayan, the first Indian English writer to bag the Sahitya Akademi Award has made the Indian social cultural fabric familiar to the foreigners via his creative outpourings. He made India accessible to the people in alien shores by offering a window of vision to peep into the Indian sensibilities.  The trio of Indian English Literature namely, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao played a pivotal role in placing India as well as Indian English Literature to the World map of English Literature. His remarkable contribution to the ‘Indianisation of English Literature’ is explicit in his creation of his fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. Like William Faulkner’s ‘Yoknapatawpha’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex’ and Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s ‘Kuttanad’, he is widely known as the creator of India’s most loveable town of Malgudi, where majority of his stories were set. He won numerous accolades for his literary oeuvre comprising Padma Bhushan, AC Benson Medal by the British Royal Society of Literature and Padma Vibhushan.

 

According to Prof. G.J.V. Prasad, “R.K. Narayan is the village gossip, your friendly uncle who always knows something or the other about everybody and, even better, tells a story in such a way that you can visualize every detail, that you recognize every character, that you hear the voices, even as you laugh at the storyteller’s comic vision. His humour does not distort reality; his irony does not lessen the truth value of his works.” This really exemplifies the grandeur of R.K. Narayan’s lucid and clear-cut writing style. I came across R.K. Narayan’s short story titled “Out of Business” quite accidentally and incidentally. This story is taken from his Malgudi Collection and his self-effacing narrative made me finish it with no time. Reading a short story like “Out of Business” stirred myriad of queries and thoughts in me. I was able to strike some chords with the contemporary scenario of lockdown and how it has created a terrible impact on the economic lives of multitudes.

 

“Out of Business”, as the name suggests renders the picture of the protagonist, Rama Rao who is no more a part of the business he has been doing for the last five years. He worked as Gramophone Company with its factory somewhere in North India and he was its local agent of Malgudi. Everything turned upside-down owing to the collapse of the company. He fell into a financial crisis and life became a struggle for Rama Rao and his family. He was forced to shift from his bungalow to a very small house. “The money in the bank was fast melting. Rama Rao’s wife now tried some measures of economy. She sent away the cook and the servant; withdrew the children from a fashionable nursery school and sent them to a free primary school.” He tried hard to make both ends meet. He was in pursuit of job in many places by sending applications but in vain. Ideas popped up in his mind one after the other and he started spending a lot of his time doing crossword puzzles of ‘Captain’ journal hoping that he would win some money.

To read my full article, please check the link given here:

https://www.boloji.com/articles/52070/the-illustriousness-of-r.k.narayans-out-of-business