“It was Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. He considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar. After the delicious freedom of Saturday and Sunday, it was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the thought of school; that dismal yellow building; the fire-eyed Vedanayagam, his class-teacher; and the headmaster with his thin, long cane…”

This is the opening para from R.K.Narayan’s ‘Swami and Friends’. I can and will never forget these lines. The first book I possessed was the Malayalam translation of ‘Swami and Friends’, and I was six years old then. I still remember how I used to lie down on the thin parapet of the long verandah and read the book again and again. So immersed was I in the lives of Swami and his friends that I had fallen down from the parapet quite a few times.

I didn’t know then that the book was written long, long ago in 1935 because though Swaminathan was a boy, I identified with him, especially his views on Mondays. I had just started going to school and hated getting up on Mondays and going to school. I would forcibly close my eyes and act as if I were fast asleep while my mother went on shouting at me to get up. Like Swami, I also felt, after the ‘delicious freedom’ of Saturday and Sunday, it was so difficult to get up in the morning on a Monday.

Like Swami, I too looked at my school as a dismal yellow building, and the first period on Monday was Maths and we had a ferocious looking Kelu Master as our Maths teacher. We all dreaded him. Like Swami’s headmaster, our Kelu Master also came to the class with a thin, long cane, and he used it abundantly too.

Unlike me, Swami had his grandmother living with him, and it was to her that Swami confided all about his friends. Unlike me, Swami played cricket with his friends. Unlike Swami’s Malgudi, I lived in a city. But like Swami, I and my friends indulged in all sorts of naughty activities. So, though I was a girl, I identified with him, and his mischief.

When I read about how Swami felt when there was a new arrival at his house, I thought of the days when my mother was lying down on a cot with my tiny sister beside her. Every single incident in the book enthralled me because I felt Swami was me and R.K.Narayan was narrating my own story.

So emotionally and sentimentally attached was I to the first book that I bought a hard bound edition for my son when he was just four. He had just started reading comics then but when I saw the title ‘Swami and Friends’, I could not but pick it up for him. After that, almost every night was spent with me reading out each line and translating it into Malayalam for him. Actually I was reliving my childhood when I read out the book for my son.
That is why R.K.Narayan as a writer has a very special place in my heart. So, I was very saddened when except a couple of newspapers, nobody else felt the need to remember him on his 100th birthday last week. Television channels were busy celebrating the 64th birthday of a film star. It is true compared to the popularity a film star enjoys, how many will be interested to hear about a writer called R.K.Narayan who wrote about real Indians and almost won the Nobel Prize for literature?

N.Ram, the Editor of The Hindu wrote, “He might have approved of the low key of these celebrations - adding, in all likelihood, this caveat: “If celebrate, you must’. N. Ram further wrote, “Narayan disliked anything extravagant, sentimental, and artificial.”

What gladdened me about N.Ram’s article was this observation of his. “The Narayan I knew would certainly have been far more pleased with the prospect of his debut novel, ‘Swami and Friends” being in print in 2035, a hundred years after its publication, than with the celebration of his hundredth birthday.” I, for one, am sure about one thing; if I am alive 29 years from now and if I have a small grandchild then, I would certainly be gifting the child a copy of ‘Swami and Friends’.