Mysore Diary

Last week, my friend Manoj and I made an impromptu trip to Mysore. Battle-hardened (and therefore wiser) by the failures of innumerable such well-laid out plans made in the past, we decided to do it in the spur of the moment. The one-day trip was our rebellion against planning, organizing, conceptualizing and other such claustrophobic words that tend to straightjacket the freewheeling spirit of explorers.

We left early, at around 6 am. At first I was drugged with disbelief that I still had it in me to go for a trip conjured up so rashly. The unrelenting stream of weekend photographs on Facebook had over the years numbed me to a point of conviction that this is the sort of thing that others did, while I was to look at them passively, without an opinion.

To be fair, it’s inexplicable, perhaps shameful that I hadn’t been to Mysore in the four years that I have been living in Bangalore. Most people would have been there just because they had run out of things-to-do in life, if not the genuine curiosity to visit a new place. Perhaps it’s an unadulterated and pristine laziness within me that provides the dull answer.

I have a Royal Enfield Thunderbird bike that I have bought recently. Though I did not for once envision burning the road as they show (sometimes literally) in advertisements, but I was a little surprised to find how routine, even insufficient it all felt. Addiction to extracting the maximum value out of time has reduced travel – the lone escape for mankind – to something of a tense transaction. All through the trip, the feeling of “is it fun enough,” was never far away.

If I have been giving out the impression that the trip was a burden then it’s not true. We went to the Mysore palace whose grandeur was quite impressive. The highway itself was a pleasure to drive on. But what would remain unforgettable for me, was a visit to the novelist RK Narayan’s home, in ways I didn’t necessarily want.

I had this in mind every time I thought of going to Mysore. A sort of a literary pilgrimage undertaken by an overawed admirer. How I imagined it would be; with memorabilia and manuscripts arranged on neat shelves with squeaky glass covers, in rooms, where the silence would be so solemn, that even whispers would echo. May be, the pen or the typewriter with which he wrote “The Bachelor of Arts” laid down with such care and precision, as if they had a life of their own, evoking within me a deep piety. Or the pair of thick rimmed spectacles through which Narayan saw the world and made light of it through wisdom and wisecracks. Or a photograph of Narayan along the river Kaveri, where he would go for long walks, lost in those sunsets, smoking his cigarettes, etching his characters and plotting his twists amid self-satisfied chuckles. Ah, the calmness and solitude of writers. And finally, I would title this post as “Memories of Malgudi.”

Instead what I saw, broke my heart in an instant. An isolated run-down home with the solitary ageing security guard, speaking only in Tamil or was it Kannada? We caught hold of one of those hangers-on, with newly discovered translating skills, itching to help newcomers in their town. Through him we got to know that Narayan’s house is under ‘litigation.’ His daughter, now residing in Chennai had decided to sell the house. The Government of India, on finding this out, wrested the house from her and decided to turn it into a heritage site. The house, as it stands now, does look like a heritage site but from the Harappan age. Accumulating debris, no doubt from restoration work had been abandoned mid-way. You wouldn’t know if the house is under repair or disrepair. Broken windows, walls and ceilings all left unattended. Inside the compound a drunk or may be exhausted old man looked at us with transfixed eyes as he lay statuesquely. It was a house in which Narayan never lived.

We click pictures with Thangaiah, the security guard, who was happy with the attention. He knew it was Narayan’s house, a great writer, and probably wondered why this house was in such condition for so long.

As we left, I thought of all the writers who loved Narayan’s novels, including VS Naipaul who’s famously hard to please. Graham Green who helped him get published first and remained a lifelong friend. An unassuming man, chronicling South-Indian life, in gentle prose, laced with understated humour. A precursor to today’s Manu Joseph. What happens to these people’s houses once they die? The answer was in front of me, a house if it was shown on TV, would be mistaken for being destroyed in an air-raid.

Narayan was never a sentimental writer, and I am not a sentimental person. But I felt the need to be sad. My mind rested on the irony of it all. It felt better. It was something Narayan would write about with a funny turn of phrase.