My Days (20 page)

I had one hundred rupees in the bank and that had to be the starting capital. Mr. Sampath, who was my printer (and who became a character in one novel and two film stories), had said bluntly, “I'll do the printing side but you must provide the paper. I can't invest on that now. I should not have normally minded this service, but the present time is bad for me. I am ordering a double-cylinder printing machine and possibly a colour-printing Heidelberg—all my capital is locked up. You will be happy when you see your cover printed on Heidelberg and your text printed sixteen pages at a time.” After all this he asked for an advance. With a subscription of twenty-five rupees each from the more affluent four among my friends and one hundred of my own, I paid an advance to the printer, and expected the first number to come out in a week. Actually it took three months for the first one hundred and twenty pages to be printed, for although Sampath held forth visions of sixteen pages at a time, he could print only four on a treadle. It took me several weeks of anxious trips to the press before the last forme could be printed. After I had given up in despair, Sampath knocked on my door one midnight, and there he stood on the verandah holding out to me dramatically the first copy of
Indian Thought
and a thousand more waiting to be unloaded from a tonga at the gate. He looked triumphant as he said, “They are all neatly wrapped up; all that you have to do will be to write the addresses and send them off—if matter for the next issue is ready, I'd like to start it right away—my machines cannot remain idle, they are now geared for your job—you have no idea how many jobs I have had to turn down. . . .”

Indian Thought
overwhelmed and frightened me—it had an orange wrapper with my name on it, with a spreading banyan tree and a full moon behind silhouetting a tramp lounging in its shade. I turned the pages and hoped my readers would find them edifying and illuminating. My own piece was some scrappy anecdote of one page, and right on the second page started a paper on “Probability,” a highly technical exposition in mathematics. I had to include it because it was the first paper to arrive when Sampath was clamouring to compose the first forme. It was included also because its author was a revered mathematics teacher who had helped me to pass a public examination. I could not refuse when he offered it for publication, but it made no sense to me. Page after page of speculation and a formula on heads and tails of a tossed coin—HTTHH or something like that. I had a hope that my readers might understand it better, but literally only one reader congratulated me on my discovery of this paper. All the others ignored it or wrote to me in exasperation. A humorous story called “Unveiling” translated into English from an Indian language, which I later discovered was only a P. G. Wodehouse story in an Indian garb. Somebody's travels in Ladakh, an economic theory, a review by Paul Brunton of some mystic poems which baffled my understanding—an absolute hotchpotch, justifying the original title suggested by Purna, “Indian Thoughtless.” I brightened the second number with a deliberate effort—abandoned the orange cover with its silhouette of a tramp, and gave it some less ascetic appearance; included jokes and obiter dicta at page ends as space fillers. I soon realized that the fillers read better than the stuff occupying the main space on a page. What the journal was in my anticipation was a readable light magazine, every page alive with style and life, profundity with a light touch. What it actually turned out to be was a hotchpotch of heavy-weight academics and Wodehouse rehash—the sort of journal I would normally avoid.

I was soon to realize that the basis of my selection of articles for
Indian Thought
was not sound and in one instance even dishonest. I came to this conclusion when I read through in print a story of a mad dog living on filth. This dog had been a human being, a youth, in the previous incarnation, as narrated by the dog itself in the first person. The youth married, but went to bed with his newly-wed wife without going through a proper nuptial ceremony, and when discovered in the act felt guilty and committed suicide; was reborn as a street mongrel; one summer day in the heat of the sun, allayed his thirst by lapping up gutter water; went stark mad, attacked passers-by, and was clubbed to death. The story had a peculiar, pointless savagery which struck me as uproarious. It had been given to me by my newest landlord (the previous owner being dead), a young man who was setting out to be a writer, among other things. He did not approve of the half-yearly rental arrangement I had made with his predecessor, but demanded a monthly settlement, also an increase. The attack on Pearl Harbor and a mild air attack on Madras had created an exodus to the inland safety of Mysore. As a result, there was pressure on housing, and landlords generally tried to dislodge their existing tenants under various pretexts. My landlord also had caught the general trend, and began to drop in frequently from Bangalore to suggest that we vacate the house, ostensibly to enable him to carry out major repairs and modification. It was unthinkable at this stage. Our family had nowhere else to go, and we could not afford the latest scales of rent, even if we had found another suitable house. I was beginning to be haunted by visions of our family carrying rolls of bedding and trunks, trooping along the streets of Mysore, with the Great Dane on a leash, coming to rest in the open verandah of Sita Vilas Choultry—a public rest-house on Hundred Feet Road, where travellers and homeless persons congregated. This was a dreadful prospect to contemplate. My elder brother somehow would not take our landlord's demands seriously. He just said, “No one can disturb us, don't worry. Let us offer the young man a little increase of rent and we will be safe.” We offered a rise of ten rupees, which our landlord accepted; he left us in peace for a couple of months, but turned up again with the same story of having to remodel the house. I was the only one available to him for such discussions, my elder brother being away at his fertilizer factory morning till night, and my younger stuck in the palace office all day. The young man would drop in, take a seat, and start a discussion on houses in general and the problems of maintenance, always concluding, “We are obliged to remodel this house in the quickest time possible as we are anxious to move in here from Bangalore; we don't feel that Bangalore is going to be safe any more with the Japanese planes coming up to Madras.”

I said, “Why, there is every chance of their coming to Mysore if they come as far as Bangalore, after all such a short distance!” He changed his tactics presently, and explained that he was starting an Epsom salt factory in Mysore, was expecting war contracts, and wanted his house urgently. We had lived in this house for many years now, and it seemed impossible to move out of it at the present time. While I was wondering how to placate this young man and gain time, during one of his visitations he took out of his pocket his story and began to read it to me. I was struck by the sheer insanity of the whole conception and swallowing my judgement said some complimentary things about it. He looked pleased and for once went away without any mention of his house, and there was no more pleasing sight for me than his receding brown-suited figure (he was always dressed in a full brown suit without tie). I felt happy to have sent him away so pleased.

But I hadn't suspected the danger lurking in this situation. When the brown suit slid into my study next time, about two weeks later, he produced from his pocket a typed copy of his story, at a moment when I was struggling to make up pages to meet Sampath's demands. Sampath was becoming aggressive in regard to deadlines. He would keep sending me notes to say, “We are waiting to finish your formes before fulfilling other printing orders. We request you to co-operate with us and not put us to a loss or blame us later if we take up other work and are thus forced to delay yours.” This man, genial and informal in person, always sounded forbidding in correspondence, with his first-person plural. When I was in this predicament with Sampath's messenger waiting at the door, the young landlord begged, “I will be so happy if you can print this story somewhere.” I didn't want to lose a chance to place this boy under an obligation, and said point blank, “If you are so anxious to see your story in print, give it to me in writing that you will not disturb us at least for two years more, and there is your chance to see your story in print. Otherwise you may take it where you please.”

“Two years undisturbed . . . ! Impossible!” he cried and left in a huff. I felt that this was the end, and that we should gird ourselves for moving to Sita Vilas Choultry. That night the brown suit appeared again at my door. He looked careworn and as harried as myself. I asked coldly what his business was. As I had hardened myself for the migration to the public charity home, I felt I could at least have the pleasure of talking in the tone of my choice. He looked cowed by my manner and said, “Mr. Narayan, we are old friends. Let us compromise. Let us make it one year instead of two.” And I accepted his story, edited it, tried to make it sound less insane than it really was, and packed it off to the printer. When I read the story in the third number in cold print, I felt ashamed of myself as an editor; I felt I had prostituted my position for a domestic cause, and that my readers would be justified in stoning me at sight.

The fourth-quarter issue for October – November – December 1942 appeared in May 1943. Sampath, having had to print urgently an annual statement of a co-operative society and a Golden Jubilee Souvenir and twenty other items, had set aside my magazine. But he would not accept the blame for the delay. He said that I did not get him paper supplies in time, although lately he had assured me not to bother about such details any more as he had his own sources of supply. It had all become so nerve-racking that I decided to put an end to the publication with the fourth number. The journal had been financially self-supporting, but I felt that it was too much of a preoccupation and would kill me as a writer. My junior uncle, who was now a prosperous car dealer at Madras with many hundreds of clients eating out of his hand, had proved a dextrous salesman for
Indian Thought
too. Every day he had been sending a dozen addresses of new subscribers. He recruited all sorts of persons into our fold; people who would never turn the leaves of a book were now made to pay for the highbrow journal issuing from Mysore. I think my uncle must have offered them a drink and forced them each to part with a year's subscription. I had nearly a thousand subscribers on my list when I, or rather Sampath, decided to end the career of this journal.

Now I felt lighter at heart. No more worries about paper, printing, contributors, or subscribers. But it did not mean that my connection with the press had ended. I found Sampath a charming friend, always cheerful, bouncing with enthusiasm, full of plans (although not for printing jobs), and involved in a score of tasks not always concerning him. He specialized in the theatre, was a master of the dramatic arts, his office walls were covered with photographs of Sampath in various costumes and make-up and poses. He rehearsed his actors in his office, while galley proofs streamed down his desk untouched; he helped people in litigation by introducing them to his brother, an eminent lawyer; he found houses for those who needed that kind of help; he did everything zestfully except his printing job. He confessed, “You are welcome every day here if you like, you may treat this as your own office and meet people and write, but don't ask me to print anything for you. . . . There should be no printing obligations between friends.” I took him at his word and spent morning and evening at his parlour. At Sampath's I picked up a lot of printing jargon, many characters for my novels, and a general idea of the business of mankind in Mysore: all its citizens converging on the market at Sayyaji Rao Road every day, and being ultimately drawn to Sampath for a variety of reasons.

In a novel of mine Mr. Sampath became a film director. Today I find that the Sampath in real life too has become a very busy film personality, with a shooting schedule almost every day at studios in Mysore and Madras. Nor has he neglected his press work, which is still being turned out on his old treadle; he never made the mistake of actually expanding his equipment with double-cylinder or Heidelberg.

A
fter I had closed down
Indian Thought
and point blank refused to look at anything he wrote, my young landlord became aggressive. So every morning I went out to search for a house. It was a difficult task, as our requirements were rather complicated—separate rooms for three brothers, their families, and a mother; also for Sheba, our huge Great Dane, who had to have a place outside the house to have her meat cooked, without the fumes from the meat pot polluting our strictly vegetarian atmosphere; a place for our old servant too, who was the only one who could go out and get the mutton and cook it. We had all these conveniences at Rama Vilas, and we looked for a replica in every house we searched. Every day the pressure from the young landlord was increasing; apparently he had now come to live in Mysore. He would stroll around our garden proprietorially, look up at the coconut trees and count and recount the nuts, just to emphasize his ownership. We watched him through the window without any agitation, although legally we were entitled to this produce. Coconuts were a small price to pay for the benefit of having a roof over our heads. I avoided him. Finally it came to the point that he addressed me by mail with a registered letter, demanding that I vacate the house within fifteen days.