The Guide is the most popular novel of R.K. Narayan. It
was published in 1958, and won the Sahitya Akademy Award for 1960. It has also
been filmed and the film has always drawn packed-houses.
It recounts the adventures of a railway guide, popularly
known as ‘Railway Raju’. As a tourist guide he is widely popular. It is this
profession which brings him in contact with Marco and his beautiful wife,
Rosie. While the husband is busy with his archaeological studies, Raju seduces
his wife and has a good time with her. Ultimately Marco comes to know of her
affair with Raju and goes away to Madras leaving Rosie behind. Rosie comes and
stays with Raju in his one-room house. His mother tolerates her for some time,
but when things become unbearable, she calls her brother and goes away with
him, leaving Raju to look after Rosie and the house.
Rosie is a born dancer, she practices regularly and soon
Raju finds an opening for her. In her very first appearance, she is a grand
success. Soon she is very much in demand and their earnings increase
enormously. Raju lives lavishly, entertains a large number of friends with whom
he drinks and gambles. All goes well till Raju forges Rosie’s signatures to
obtain valuable jewellery lying with her husband. The act lands him in jail.
Rosie leaves Malgudi and goes away to Madras, her hometown. She goes on with
her dancing and does well without the help and management of Raju, of which he
was so proud.
On release from jail, Raju takes shelter in a deserted
temple on the banks of the river Sarayu, a few miles away from Malgudi, and
close to the village called Mangla. The simple villagers take him to be a
Mahatma, begin to worship him, and bring him a lot of eatables as presents.
Raju is quite comfortable and performs the role of a saint to perfection.
However, soon there is a severe famine drought, and the
villagers expect Raju to perform some miracle to bring them rain. So he has to
undertake a fast. The fast attracts much attention and people come to have
darshan of the Mahatma from far and wide. On the twelfth day of the fast, Raju
falls down exhausted just as there are signs of rain on the distant horizon. It
is not certain if he is actually dead or merely fainted. Thus the novel comes
to an abrupt close on a note of ambiguity.
The last pages of Narayan’s best novel, The Guide, find
Raju, the chief protagonist, at the end of a lifetime of insincerity and pain.
As a professional guide to Malgudi’s environs, he invented whole new historical
pasts for bored tourists; he seduced a married woman, drifted away from his old
mother and friends, became a flashy cultural promoter, and then tried,
absentmindedly, to steal and was caught and spent years in jail, abandoned by
everyone.
His last few months have been spent in relative comfort
as a holy man on the banks of a river: a role imposed on him by reverential
village folk. But the river dries up after a drought and his devotees start
looking to him to intercede with the gods. Raju resentfully starts a fast, but
furtively eats whatever little food he has saved. Then abruptly, out of a
moment of self disgust, comes his resolution: for the first time in his life,
he will do something with complete sincerity, and he will do it for others: if
fasting can bring rain, he’ll fast.
He stops eating, and quickly diminishes. News of his
efforts goes around; devotees and sightseers, gathering at the riverside,
create a religious occasion out of the fast. On the early morning of the
eleventh day of fasting, a small crowd watches him quietly as he attempts to
pray standing on the river bed and then staggers and dies, mumbling the
enigmatic last words of the novel, “It’s raining in the hills. I can feel it
coming up under my feet, up my legs….”
Characteristically, Narayan doesn’t make it clear whether
Raju’s penance does actually lead to rain. He also doesn’t make much of Raju’s
decision, the moment of his redemption, which a lesser writer would have
attempted to turn into a resonant ending, but which is quickly passed over here
in a few lines. What we know, in a moment of great disturbing beauty, is
something larger and more affecting than the working-out of an individual
destiny in an inhospitable world.
It is and the words are of the forgotten English writer
William Gerhardie, on Chekhov, but so appropriate for Narayan that sense of the
temporary nature of our existence on this earth at all events…through which
human beings, scenery, and even the very shallowness of things, are
transfigured with a sense of disquieting importance.
It is a sense of temporary possession in a temporary
existence that, in the face of the unknown, we dare not overvalue. It is as if
his people hastened to express their worthless individualities, since that is
all they have, and were aghast that they should have so little in them to
express: since the expression of it is all there.
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