Re-Reading
Of family values
Joynub Nabila Obayed appreciates an old tale
The English Teacher
R.K. Narayan
Michigan State University Press
MOST often what we see as 'the end' of a story does not always draw a proper end. A new journey begins with another story. Similarly, in the novel The English Teacher, Krishna, who is the English teacher in the Albert Mission College, goes through a journey of life that does not end with the end of the story. It seems like a very ordinary story but often the extraordinary incidents take birth from the ordinary story. This autobiographical novel written by R. K. Narayan is based on this theme.
Author of the famous Indian book The Malgudi Days, R. K. Narayan remains, even in death, a person with a wonderful sense of story organization and creativity. He is creative enough to find the extraordinary part within an ordinary life. The English Teacher is a very good piece of storytelling that has illustrated his creativity of showing the extraordinary part within the ordinary life of Krishna and creativity in writing. This novel is dedicated to his wife Rajam.
Krishna acts as the main character in this novel and teaches English at a college and stays at the college teachers' quarter. His introverted character trait is depicted by the fact that he lived in the college quarters in spite of having his own family. But when he brings his family, including his wife Susila and daughter Leela, from the village to live with him and leaves his quarters to live with his family, his learning from life begins. He learns to be social, he learns to handle his child and love his wife. It is as if life teaches him to love, to become humane.
Although from the surface the novel appears to be telling an ordinary story of a man's journey of life, which journey includes such matters as how he learns the values of life, after reading half of the novel a reader will find his intense love for his wife and family taking centre stage. He slowly discovers that this story is not about his life but about the love of his life, Susila. In the middle of the story, Krishna's loss of his wife shifts the story from one level to another and the extraordinary part of his life starts. On that crucial point his life makes him say, "God has given me some novel situations in life."
The proverb goes that love never dies. This novel eventually proves the truth of it by giving physical shape to it, specifically through creating a mystical environment in the novel after the death of Susila. Personally, as a reader, while reading the book I never thought at the beginning or even in the middle of it that the novel could take such a twist before the story ended.
One would certainly like readers to read this story because it is a very intense and touching tale that deals with the deep psychology of the human mind and, more importantly, it reveals the fact that the extraordinary thing that a person can find in his or her ordinary life, mental peace, is "a moment of rare, immutable joy --- a moment for which one feels grateful to life and death."
Joynub Nabila Obayed is a critic.
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