The MCC (an abbreviation from Swami and Friends) too returns cheekily, this time as the Mysore City Corporation.
The RK Narayan Museum in Mysore. Pics courtesy/Wikimedia Commons
Title: Rukmini Aunty and R K Narayan Fan Club
Author: Sita Bhaskar
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
Cost: Rs 399
A group of curious women lean from the window of Rukmini’s meditation room in yoga poses. They are peering at the dilapidated house on Vivekananda Road, opposite Rukmini and Sesha’s abode in Mysore. The house in question is where the beloved writer RK Narayan lived, and wrote his best works. His fan club comprising women from the neighbourhood have taken upon themselves to find a way to restore it. Sita Bhaskar’s new novel Rukmini Aunty and the RK Narayan Fan Club (Penguin India) takes readers into a small neighbourhood in Mysore, and explores questions of heritage and literary culture through humour and a sense of nostalgia for the twentieth century writer’s world.
RK Narayan
Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel, in an essay about Narayan titled ‘Real Magicians’, had said, “He respects his characters, respects their created natures. This is why he can make jokes about them and stay friends with them.” Bhaskar’s characters pay homage to this familiarity with the peculiar habits of the ordinary world that Narayan created. Often her minor characters, the families in the neighbourhood, make appearances from Narayan’s oeuvre: Swami from Swami and Friends, the reluctant godman and Bharatnatayam dancer from The Guide as characters in a young filmmaker’s film, and a boy called Nitya whose parents had vowed to have his hair shaven, borrowed from the short story ‘Nitya’. The MCC (an abbreviation from Swami and Friends) too returns cheekily, this time as the Mysore City Corporation.
However, it is in the world that exists outside of the borrowed stories where Bhaskar pays a greater tribute. She offers her readers characters like Rukmini Aunty, Sesha Uncle, and the fan club members, who display middle-class sensibilities of contemporary India. They have relatives in America, pursue yoga and meditation classes, encounter day-to-day bureaucracy, find information on Instagram reels, and stand on the cusp of modernity while trying to hold on to the last threads of family traditions.
An illustrated cover of the book. Illustration Courtesy/Mohith O
Like Narayan’s prose, these characteristics are best demonstrated through dialogues between the characters rather than descriptions. One laughs with them and adores them. Several chapters also give the illusion of being self-contained, but the stories come alive best when they are brought together for a single purpose — to be weighed up at the fan club meetings. Although constructed at a different time from Narayan, Bhaskar’s world makes one believe it could easily be Narayan’s, were he alive and writing today.
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