Miniatures

By Paul Gray

In a brief introduction to this collection of 28 tales, Indian Author R.K. Narayan states that "the short story is the best medium for utilizing the wealth of subjects available. A novel is a different proposition altogether, centralized as it is on a major theme, leaving out, necessarily, a great deal of the available material on the periphery. Short stories, on the other hand, can cover a wider field by presenting concentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulence."

At first blush, this assertion seems to drop conventional wisdom on its head. Everyone knows that the novel is literature's great grab bag, shapeless enough to accommodate nearly everything a writer wants to cram into it. Short stories allow little wasted motion. But Narayan, 78, turns out to be a perfectly accurate commentator on his own methods. Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, while shorter than most novels, is a riotous mosaic of small details in which nothing, finally, seems irrelevant.

The common ground holding most of these tales together is the Malgudi district, a fictional area of southern India that Narayan has been tilling for the past 50 years. Not much changes in Malgudi. The British, who are rarely mentioned in this book, have come and gone. World War II is recalled for its temporary effects on the price of rice. The riots that break out between Hindus and Muslims when India achieves independence are seen through the eyes of a neutral, nondescript hero: "It was on the whole a peaceful, happy life--till the October of 1947, when he found that the people around had begun to speak and act like savages." The assassination of John F. Kennedy reaches this region as a rumor, and a fairly incredible one at that. The slain President's last name sounds like the Tamil word for glass. "Could any man give himself such a name?" asks one local skeptic.

The life in Narayan's stories consists largely of people doing just what they and their ancestors have been doing for hundreds of years. They propitiate the gods as best they can. In Nitya, a couple remember a solemn vow to shave their two-year-old son's head and offer his hair as tribute if he recovers from whooping cough and convulsions. Unfortunately, the healthy young man is now 20 and in no mood to cooperate: "You had no business to pawn my scalp without consulting me." The hero of All Avoidable Talk is a clerk who learns from his astrologer that a period of bad luck will end if he can avoid saying anything that might give offense to anybody for one more day. Naturally the employee has nothing but grief at the office and finds himself, to his horror, visiting his boss's house, brimming with insults, as the deadline approaches.

A number of Narayan's characters set out in the morning literally not knowing how or whether they will eat that night. In Four Rupees, a man is offered the job of recovering a treasured brass pot that has fallen down a well. He is horrified at the prospect of shinnying down 60 ft. into the unknown. Nevertheless, he succeeds. When he proudly brings his wages home, his wife looks at his disheveled state and decides he has robbed someone for the money. A similar outcome awaits the hero of A Horse and Two Goats. An old man, who daily pastures the two scraggly remnants of a once expansive flock, is accosted by a tourist from the U.S. The American wants to buy the stone horse on whose pedestal the Indian sits. The Indian wants to sell his goats. One speaks only English, the other, except for the phrase "Yes, no," only Tamil. After much "mutual mystification," a deal is struck. The shepherd returns to tell his stunned wife that he has made 100 rupees off the goats, even as they appear behind him, bleating at the door.

While inventing and telling such incidents the author remains both sympathetic and dispassionate. Narayan's mastery of lucid English has somehow been achieved without the condescension and exasperation that Western converts often feel toward their unenlightened compatriots. The narrator of Annamalai, a writer by trade, describes his method of coping with a difficult but intriguing servant: "The only way to exist in harmony with Annamalai was to take him as he was; to improve or enlighten him would only exhaust the reformer and disrupt nature's design." From Narayan's decision to suspend judgments hangs a galaxy of irresistible tales. --By Paul Gray