My Days (22 page)

Frantically busy morning, because I have still not completed my packing. John and Irene Vincent come to drive me to the airport. Kaplan at the desk becomes sentimental on my leaving. John Vincent carries my bags all through, in spite of my protests. They come up to the last inch of the barrier, and hand me a hamper of fruits and candies before saying good-bye.

T
he Guide
attained a certain degree of popularity, which, though pleasant in itself, brought in its wake involvements that turned out to be ludicrous and even tragic.

In September 1964, Dev Anand, a film producer and actor of Bombay, wrote to me from New York and then arrived one morning at my Yadavagiri home with the single aim of acquiring
The Guide
for a film production.

A small crowd of autograph-seekers had gathered at my gate, while inside, in my drawing-room, after formal greetings and courtesies, Dev Anand took out his chequebook, unscrewed the cap of his pen, and poised it over a cheque, waiting for me to pronounce my price for
The Guide
. He would draw any figure I might specify. This was too much for me. My thought processes became paralysed at the prospect of this windfall. I waved off his offer, held back his hand from inscribing more than a modest, reckonable advance against a small percentage on the future profits of the film.

I declared grandly, “Let me rise or sink with your film. I do not want to exploit you.”

“With your co-operation, we will definitely go ahead; and then the sky will be the limit,” he said.

As we proceeded, the sky seemed to be lowered steadily, and when the time came to demand a share of the profits, you could puncture their sky with an umbrella. I was told finally that the film of
The Guide
had failed to make any profit. They wrote to me, “We wish to assure you, however, that the moment we make any profit, your share will come to you automatically. . . .” And there I have left it for seven years now. The picture was supposed to have cost them nearly ten million rupees, but much of it was spent on themselves, in fabulous salaries and princely living while producing the film. Now and then they summoned me for vague consultations or to participate in a meet-the-press party, where they proclaimed their grand intentions and achievements after benumbing their guests with free-flowing alcohol.

Once I was summoned to Bombay to dine with Lord Mountbatten at Government House and to persuade him to persuade Queen Elizabeth to attend the world première of
The Guide
in London. I was taken directly from the airport to the banquet hall at Government House. It was a fantastic proposal—which perhaps originated in the imagination of the late Pearl Buck, who was a partner of Dev Anand in the production of
The Guide
. After a regal banquet, our hostess, who was the Governor of Bombay, discreetly isolated the film unit from the other guests and piloted them to the presence of His Lordship, seated in a side verandah. We settled around with our lines ready. Lord Mountbatten suddenly asked, “What's the story of
The Guide
?” Pearl Buck began to narrate it, but could not proceed very far with it. I heard her say, “There was a man called Raju—he was a guide—”

“What guide?” asked his lordship, in his deep voice.

This question upset her flow of narration. She turned to me and said, “Narayan, you tell the story.”

I would not open my mouth. Dammit, I had taken eighty thousand words to tell the story; I was not going to be drawn into it now. Press announcements had given Pearl Buck credit for writing the screenplay, and it was said that she had been paid an advance of twenty-five or two hundred thousand dollars, and I was not going to help her out now. She looked pleadingly at me, and everyone there tried to egg me on. I sat tight. Pearl Buck meandered: “There was Rosie—the dancer. . . .”

“Oh!” exclaimed M. “Who is she? What happened to her?” he asked with a sudden interest, which made Pearl Buck once again lose track of her own narration. I must admit that I enjoyed her predicament, as she treated Mountbatten to a mixed-up, bewildering version of
The Guide
. Other guests started to leave their distant posts and to infiltrate our carefully isolated group. “Most interesting, I must say,” Lord Mountbatten now said. He turned to his aide. “William, remind me when we get back to London. I don't know if the Queen will be free. . . . However, I'll see what I can do.” A person who as a viceroy had handled the colossal task of transferring power from Britain to India in 1947, now to be expected to promote
The Guide
—it seemed absurd. However, nothing was heard of this proposal again.

The American director suddenly clamoured to have a scene where two tigers would fight for a deer and kill each other. The producer grumbled that it was unpractical and expensive. But the director, claiming his artistic heritage from Elia Kazan, explained, “It will be symbolic. Also, being in colour the splash of blood on the screen will bring us rave notices, and then the sky will be the limit.” The catch-phrase did the trick; Dev Anand accepted the proposal, and filmed a tiger-fight at Madras. But after editing, the sequence lasted half a second on the screen, and looked like a blob of colour left on carelessly at the processing laboratory, despite the blood-curdling roars and other sound effects.

At the beginning, before starting the picture, they went to great trouble to seek my advice, and I had spent a whole day taking them round Mysore to show the riverside, forest, village, and crowds, granite steps and the crumbling walls of an ancient shrine which combined to make up the Malgudi of my story; they went away promising to return later with crew and equipment, but never came back. I learnt subsequently that they had shifted the venue of
The Guide
to Jaipur and had already shot several scenes on a location as distant from Malgudi as perhaps Iceland. When I protested, they declared, “Where is Malgudi, anyway? There is no such place; it is abolished from this moment. For wide-screen purposes, and that in colour, Jaipur offers an ideal background; we can't waste our resources.”

By abolishing Malgudi, they had discarded my own values in milieu and human characteristics. My characters were simple enough to lend themselves for observation; they had definite outlines—not blurred by urban speed, size, and tempo. I did not expect the heroine, the dancer, to be more than a local star, but the film heroine became a national figure whose engagements caused her to travel up and down hundreds of miles each day in a Boeing 707, autographing, posing for photographers, emerging from five-star hotels and palatial neon-lit theatres. They had built her up into a V.I.P., so that her visit by plane and jeep to her dying lover was organized by the Defence Department at Delhi, thus glamourizing the death scene itself. The most outrageous part of it was the last scene, in which an elaborate funeral and prolonged lamentation were added at short notice in order to placate eleven financiers who saw the final copy of the film tightly clutching the money-bags on their laps, and who would not part with cash unless a satisfactory mourning scene was added.

Next, I had trouble with a stage adaptation of
The Guide
by an old friend of mine, Harvey Breit, who was at one time the literary editor of
The New York Times
. His version was so different from mine that I withheld my permission to present it on the stage. For instance, his version managed to abolish the heroine. I objected to his omission and to the addition of two irrelevant characters, of his own; above all I objected to the hero's turning round and urinating on the stage. This controversy damaged our friendship to such an extent that at one point we had to communicate with each other only through lawyers. One morning in the year 1965, my lawyer telephoned me at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. “R.K., listen! If you have no particular business to keep you here, leave New York immediately, or better still, leave the country. Harvey Breit is subpoenaing you for an arbitration. I've told his lawyer that I don't know your whereabouts. Quit before they discover you at the Chelsea. . . . Yes, at once, immediately. If you are seen and the process-server drops the summons on the ground in front of you, you'll be committed. If you disobey it, you will be liable for contempt proceedings, which will be unpleasant. You will not be allowed to leave this country for six months or even a year.”

This was a terrifying prospect. I would not be able to maintain myself in New York for six months, or afford the legal expenses. I bundled up my belongings within an hour, spent a good part of the day cruising about in a taxi in the streets of New York (the best way to be lost to the world) and then, thanks to my friend Natwar Singh of our Foreign Service, secured asylum in the Indian Consulate until I could leave for the airport in the evening. I felt like a criminal on the run, a fugitive from a chain-gang. I remained in acute suspense until the Air India plane took off, afraid lest I should be off-loaded at the last minute to answer the summons. The summons, however, reached me in a plain cover, two weeks later, at Coimbatore. Ultimately, the arbitration did take place, and the verdict was in my favour.

The matter did not end there, however; Harvey Breit was too good a friend to be lost thus. He approached me again, promising to work on the script with me line by line and amend it.
The Guide
opened on Broadway in March 1968 and closed in less than a week, before I could pack a suitcase and leave for New York, involving the producers in a loss of three hundred thousand dollars or more. Harvey never wrote to me again. I learnt a week later that he had fallen dead, following a heart attack, on the landing of his sixth-floor apartment.

I
f all my non-literary interests, “arm-chair” agriculture, I find, has been most absorbing. I cut out and file country notes from newspapers, listen to the Farm Programme on the radio. I know how to get rid of weeds and pests, how to grow rice in flower pots, how to grow tomato without soil, the input proportion of fertilizer for such special tasks. I listen admiringly to any and every claim by a practical horticulturist as to how he manages to raise half a million flowers, jasmine or chrysanthemum, on a single acre, and despatch them to distant markets by air. I never doubt a word of whatever such an expert may say.

I sometimes speculated that if I possessed land, I'd be out at five in the morning in the field, with the early birds, and take a hand at ploughing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. The scent of earth and hay and the winnowed grains would be enough diversions for me. My afternoons would be spent in the flower garden. After watching the sunset, I would retire, following absolutely the plan and rhythm of Nature, a life uncomplicated by commerce or rush of any kind. This was perhaps the result of reading Thoreau's
Walden
and similar literature.

Driven by such recurring visions of “back to the soil,” I secured, a couple of years ago, an acre of land in Bangalore, nearly a hundred miles from where I live. It was situated outside the city but within the municipal limits and housing projects of Bangalore, on the highway between Bangalore and Mysore. My acre was part of a hillock, and I had a whole rock, a mini-mountain, on my northern boundary. From its apex, my land went down in a gentle slope on to level ground. I had enough space to think of a split-level cottage with a wide verandah (the main thing would be the verandah); one whole side of the mini-mountain could serve as a sheer backdrop for the cottage at different levels down to a garage in the basement. I must find the right architect to design it. Beyond my land was a village with less than a hundred houses, dominated by a double-storied house in which the headman lived. I had to call on this person the first thing because I had noticed manure heaps (belonging to him) dumped on my part of the land and also maize seedlings flourishing on my soil. This made me uneasy. I had to pay him a diplomatic visit, and explain how I had become the owner of the land and how I felt honoured to be his neighbour. I took care not to sound too aggressive since I knew that all troubles around land started thus, and developed into a regular faction with civil litigations carried on for years, leaving little time for anyone to raise even a blade of grass.

The headman promised to have the dumps removed in due course, explaining that “the boys” must have been spilling manure and seeds around. I promised him in return that I hoped to build a little shrine on the topmost rock of my mini-mountain, gather the village children in its corridors on an evening and teach them reading and writing, and impart to them various lessons about the modern world. As I spoke I suddenly discovered a purpose in life. If every person who is educated adopted a little group and imparted to it whatever knowledge he possessed, the 500 million population of India could be transformed in five years. Alas, my own pattern of life has left little time to put any of this into practice yet.

I lived in Mysore and, after leaving an agricultural expert on the spot to clear the land of stones and weeds and make it fit for cultivation, motored down off and on to watch his progress. He was a practical man, who knew all about soils and seeds and seasons. In due course my own maize plants stood four feet high, and I felt triumphant at the sight of them, but the field also teemed with trespassers. A well-worn foot-track cut diagonally across my land, connecting the highway with the villages beyond, and had been used by villagers from time immemorial. I had fenced my property with barbed wire strung across granite pillars but it did not affect the hoary practice; people just moved off a couple of pillars and pressed down the barbed wire, and there you were—the ancient passage continued. My agricultural expert explained that they weren't trespassers, but only rural folk passing from south to north as they had been doing for centuries.