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Through a...

Our garage was a jungle of junk, cobwebs and scorpions which were big or very small, but all quite deadly. Scorpion hunting was a favourite sport for us children. We would move an old tin or kick the rubble. Sure enough, a scorpion would scuttle out. We would beat it to pulp with a stick or stone. My brothers had another pastime. They would catch grasshoppers. The idea was to train them to do tricks, and amaze the world with a grasshopper circus of their own. But the creatures died after a day in their cardboard boxes, though the boxes were lined with grass and filled with tasty titbits from our kitchen.

Perhaps you think we had cruel games. But all children are like that. You see them killing butterflies, throwing stones at dogs, teasing kittens. Only when we grow older do we learn to be kind and realise that selfishness is bad. But even then not all of us learn these things. Otherwise why would there be fights and wars?

But let me get back to the garden again. It was a never-ending source of stories that I made up for myself. For example, have you never watched an ant hill? Seen the ants going about busily? There are usually two orderly files -- one going out, the other coming in. My elder brother, the one just before me, was very inventive. He used to tell me that these ants lived in an enormous township inside the hill. This town had broad streets and big houses, post offices and police stations, playgrounds and movie theatres. Why, the ants even had their own cinema posters. He never tired of spinning fantastic stories about the secret life of the ants!

My two sisters were married and gone. They only came on occasional visit. My brothers lived with us, three of them, almost grown up. But they could all be counted upon to make my life interesting. What a fine time we had together! When the rain clouds loomed in the sky, all of us would run out and watch the way they made shapes and spread themselves into a dark blanket above. My brothers let me join their games sometimes -- from cricket to kite-flying. All of them read aloud to me from English books and explained the difficult parts.

Father used to get many magazines for his school. They arrived in big bundles every week, from Madras, London and New York -- Harpers, Boys Own Paper, Punch, Atlantic, American Mercury, The Merry Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement… My brothers read the magazines before they were taken away from our house.

The Strand Magazine published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stores about the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. I remember sitting on my brother's lap as he read those stories out to the three younger ones, translating them for me into Tamil. Mother had gone to the Ladies' Club, leaving us in his charge. This must have been the safest way of keeping us under his watchful eye!

My mother was a remarkable woman. Hers was a hectic life. We had retinue of servants, including a cook, but she, had her hand full managing the household. She did some cooking at times. It was of the experimental kind. She would bake shortcakes and butter biscuits for us. Once she followed a magazine recipe and made toothpowder! At another time she made a new kind of fuel for the boiler, a copper vessel with a water heating system attached to it. Come summer and she would start rolling out papads at home -- flat round pieces like chapattis which were dried on the terrace. We children would hop around and try to help her. She never said it was a bother but let us do what we liked.

Mother had several hobbies. One of them was to buy litho prints of gods and human beings. She would dress them up with bits of cloth, mirrors, beads and sequins. How hideous they looked! But in those days they were in fashion. One of her pictures was called 'Vanity'. It had a woman decked out in gold-lace sari and gaudy jewellery.

Mother was good at both tennis and badminton. She also played golf. She was the unbeaten local chess champion. She played a good game of bridge as well. At home we loved it when she joined us for carrom or card games. She brought so much life and laughter with her.

I was very proud of my mother. Whatever I know I learnt from her. What a voracious reader she was! She had never stepped into school or college, but there was nothing she did not know about Sanskrit and Tamil literature. She kept up with English writing through translations. We boys would read to her and tell her everything we found in books and magazines.

How many myths and legends she knew! I must say that the best versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata I know are from her story-telling.

At night she would come up to lie down on her bed upstairs. Then all of us would gather around her. We would chat, crack jokes, tell stories, tell her about our friends, ask for advice… Just thinking about those times makes me happy. How lucky we were to have such a wonderful mother!

Father… There is just one word to describe him -- 'formidable'. Are you frightened by that word? Well, it means just that -- 'frightening'. As a school teacher and headmaster he was very stern about discipline. I was rather scared of him. But as you know, you need not hate the person you dread. Just look at him, isn't he like a marble statue with his beak of a nose and a bald head like Julius Caeser? Can any child get close to someone like that?

This is what my elder brother and novelist R K Narayan wrote about father in his autobiography, My Days: 'He has the personality of a commander-in-chief rather than a headmaster', people used to remark, a stentorian voice, a sharp nose and a lion-like posture -- a man who didn't fuss about children openly, and never sat around and chatted with the members of the family as was the habit of others. He moved in fixed orbits at home. He had a well worn route from his room to the dining or bath room, set hours during which he could be seen at different points, and if one kept out of his way, as I thought then, one was safe for the rest of the day.

He left for school on a bicycle, impeccably dressed in tweed suit and tie, crowned with snow-white turban, at about 9:30 every morning, and he returned home at nine at night, having spent his time at the officers' club on the way, playing tennis and meeting his friends, who were mostly local government officials. At night a servant would go out with a lantern in order to light my father's path back home, and to carry his tennis racquet, leaving him to walk back swinging his cane, to keep off growling street dogs all along the path, which lay sunk in the dust.

I must admit I did not know my brother Narayan was a writer until I saw that he had won a prize from The Merry Magazine for a short story. This was called 'Dodu, the Moneymaker." It was about a little boy struggling to find money for his urgent needs -- like groundnuts and candy! I was very excited because this sounded suspiciously like me. Moreover, the hero of the story had my name!

After that I watched Narayan's activities with respect. He would pound away upon huge Underwood typewriter. Perhaps all that banging was for his first novel Swami and Friends, a story about boys growing up in a small town called Malgudi. All Narayan's stories were to be set in this non-existent town. But little did I think then that I would get to know Malgudi as well as Narayan himself. Because later, I was to illustrate my brother's stories. At that time Narayan was also writing articles for a newspaper in Madras. I had a cycle. My brother used to pay me a commission to pedal furiously to the post office and mail his copy to time.

I was about nine or ten when I decided to be an artist. I would cycle for ten miles around our home to find interesting landscapes to paint. Mysore was a good place for this -- full of trees, streams, hills and old ruins. I also learnt a lot by looking at illustrations in foreign magazines. The cartoons were a special attraction. I began to draw cartoons and found the local papers willing to publish them! The people I chose to poke fun at were international names -- Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi! I must have one well because I was asked to draw posters too, for the defence programme and for adult education. I earned my pocket money and never had to trouble my parents for it. 'Dodu' had found the way!…

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