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Unit 5: The Vendor of Sweets by R K Narayan

journalist from Malgudi. During this time, he also published two collections of short stories: Notes
Malgudi Days (1982), a revised edition including the original book and some other stories, and
Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, a new collection. In 1987, he completed A Writer’s
Nightmare, another collection of essays about topics as diverse as the caste system, Nobel Prize
winners, love, and monkeys. The collection included essays he had written for newspapers and
magazines since 1958.
Living alone in Mysore, Narayan developed an interest in agriculture. He bought an acre of
agricultural land and tried his hand at farming. He was also prone to walking to the market
every afternoon merely to interact with the people. In a typical afternoon stroll, he would stop
every few steps to greet and converse with shopkeepers and others, most likely gathering
material for his next book.

In 1980, Narayan was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament,
for his contributions to literature. During his entire six-year term, he was focused on one issue—
the plight of school children, especially the heavy load of school books and the negative effect
of the system on a child’s creativity, which was something that he first highlighted in his debut
novel, Swami and Friends. His inaugural speech was focused on this particular problem, and
resulted in the formation of a committee chaired by Prof. Yash Pal, to recommend changes to the
school educational system.
In 1990, he published his next novel, The World of Nagaraj, also set in Malgudi. Narayan’s age
shows in this work, as he appears to skip narrative details that he would have included if this
were written earlier in his career. Soon after he finished the novel, Narayan fell ill and moved
to Madras to be close to his daughter’s family. A few years after his move, in 1994, his daughter
died of cancer and his granddaughter Bhuvaneswari (Minnie) started taking care of him in
addition to managing Indian Thought Publications. Narayan then published his final book,
Grandmother’s Tale. The book is an autobiographical novella, about his great-grandmother
who travelled everywhere to find her husband, who ran away shortly after their marriage. His
grandmother narrated the story to him, when he was a child.
He travelled widely and bestowed with several honours. He did not leave his accustomed
milieu, though, which was Mysore, where he built himself a house, went for talkative walks,
and savoured the quotidian pursuits of life, including agriculture, which he studied with interest.
In 1989, he was appointed to membership of the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Indian
Parliament. His inaugural speech there was on the subject of Indian children. Children, he said,
were being deprived of time to play or to look at birds and trees. In 2001 he died. His mind was
clear to the end, and on his deathbed, he spoke of his desire to write another novel. He had
confessed to friends, “I have become lazy since I entered my nineties.”
Narayan’s novels are sometimes described as simple. The prose is indeed limpid, the descriptions
clear, and the emphasis is on direct and intelligible storytelling, invoking a cast of vivid
characters. To the modern reader, accustomed to artice and allusion, this may give the books a
slightly dated feel, and yet it is this quality of simplicity and directness, which makes them such
ne works of art. Narayan is a storyteller rst and foremost, a characteristic which puts him in the
company of the great 19th century novelists as well as those twentieth century writers, such as
Somerset Maugham, who believed that the novelist’s business is to narrate. His storytelling,
though, sometimes has a somewhat rambling avour, with plots that can wander and sometimes
betray an absence of resolution. However, this is not necessarily aw: real lives are often aimless
and unresolved, and when we read of such lives in literature, we are quick to recognize their
authenticity. There is nothing false in the world, which Narayan creates – quite the opposite, in
fact: these novels convey the taste and texture of India with a vividness, which strikes the reader
as utterly true. Even those who have no rst-hand experience of India will feel that what they
experience in reading these books is a taste of the real place.

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