At the end of her charming novel Rukmini Aunty and the R.K. Narayan Fan Club, Sita Bhaskar quotes the Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith’s admiration for the much-loved creator of Malgudi Days, first published as a collection of short stories in 1943, and later turned into a popular TV series in 1986. “He was a major influence in writing the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” McCall Smith is cited as saying. “Narayan succeeded in creating small, self-contained worlds for his quirky characters which gives him an avenue to explore their eccentricities and problems.”
The statement provides a perfect frame to read Bhaskar’s work, a fictional revisiting of the controversies over the restoration of Narayan’s home in Yadavagiri in Mysore (now Mysuru), where he spent many years writing some of his best work, until poor health forced him to move to Chennai in the 1990s to live with his daughter during his last years. After his death in 2001, Narayan’s heirs handed over the house to a developer, who began to knock down the run-down building in 2011. That same year, thanks to a spirited campaign by a local newspaper, Star of Mysore, the Mysore Urban Development Authority declared the writer’s former home a heritage building and put an end to the demolition.
Eventually, the government of Karnataka bought the property, despite protests by some local writers who felt the gesture was misguided, since Narayan, apart from being a Tamilian, wrote in English, not in Kannada, and did not deserve such an honour (even though he modelled Malgudi partly on Mysore, a city he dearly loved). In 2016, the restored home was opened to the public as a museum. Some of Narayan’s possessions—glasses, pens, clothes—are displayed in the spartan house, a testimony to his frugal lifestyle.
Bhaskar’s novel follows the contours of this process of transformation of a dilapidated house into a shrine to literary excellence through the adventures of a group of local women, most of whom have never heard, let alone read, Narayan. During a visit to her nephew Vinod and his wife Janani in the US, the eponymous Rukmini Aunty and her husband Sesha Uncle go to Hannibal in Missouri to see The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which leaves them mightily impresse
Back home in India, like many of her compatriots, Rukmini Aunty is unaware of the towering legacy that lies neglected in her own backyard in Mysuru, until Janani, an avowed fan of Narayan, points out the irony to her aunt-in-law. Despite her initial scepticism, on Janani’s insistence, Rukmini Aunty manages to co-opt the neighbourhood women into coming together to save the late writer’s home. The rest of the novel follows the petty intrigues that try to foil their attempts, until a progressive commissioner of the city steps in to save the house from falling prey to touts and real estate sharks. Into this semi-fictionalised scaffolding, Bhaskar weaves in digressions, mostly related to NRIs coming to Mysuru to discover the peculiarities of their ancestral land.
Nithya, an 18-year-old with luscious curls, plays a prank on his parents and grandmother when they take him to a temple to donate his hair. Mukta, a young woman from Chicago who is house-sitting for a cousin for six months falls for Mahesh, a handsome man with a “cute butt” (she christens him “Mr CB”) from her yoga class. Since he shows no interest in her, Mukta decides to take matters into her hands and pays a visit to his parents, with hilarious consequences. Then there is Swami, a little boy from the US living in Mysuru with his grandmother for a year, who, despite being nothing like his namesake in Narayan’s Malgudi Days, manages to put the whole family into a tizzy when he goes missing.
In and of themselves, the diversions are each worthy of a good laugh, but Bhaskar doesn’t weave them into her plot in any consequential way. The episodes, delightfully reminiscent of Malgudi Days and No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, stick out a bit, but the reader can make peace with this free-flowing style and enjoy the subplots as they come and go.
While the writer’s gaze is sympathetic, even on the crooks who gather to smoke up in the seclusion of Narayan’s abandoned home, she is deeply aware of the class, caste and social dynamics that play out among her characters. As an NRI herself, who lives between Madison and Mysuru, Bhaskar knows the blips that afflict both her constituencies: NRIs living abroad cut off from the reality of modern-day India and that of Indians living in India, cocooned in their caste and class privileges. Although it is never spelled out, the fact remains that Narayan’s upper caste status may have been a deciding factor for a fictional group of (mostly) Brahminical women to come together to save his legacy
Elsewhere, too, while poking fun at the absurdity of divine vows or an Indian American woman’s faith in the power of her horoscope to get the love of her life, Bhaskar gently acknowledges the persistence of oddities in 21st-century India. It is this weird hodge-podge of modernity and tradition that continues to keep the country, and the people from it, uniquely fascinating, their eccentricities at once exasperating and endearing.