My Days by R. K. Narayan

father, and the parallel room by me and my elder brother, as usual, where we had the advantage of watching a very pretty neighbour as she bent over her studies in her room upstairs, clearly visible from our window; that she was not distracted by our attention was proved when eventually she won first class in several subjects in the B.A. and received medals at the convocation in the same year as I took my degree lost in a back row.
    Our room had a broad wooden staircase which led nowhere. I used its top landing for storing a monstrous typewriter that I had acquired at Madras and had brought with me in a capacious linen basket, since it was presented to me without a cover. It looked like a computer. It had separate keys for capital and lower cases; and its carriage moved with a big boom. All afternoon I sat on the landing and typed a play called Prince Yazid , the story of an independent-minded Mughal prince who was tortured and tormented by his father. After several decades, this was recently returned to me from the office of my literary agent, David Higham, where it had been discovered among their destroyable papers, and one may judge of its career from this simple fact. The entire staircase rocked and boomed when I was at work, and my father sometimes protested against the noise, whereupon I would have to haul the machine over to the roof of the house and type there. My brother Seenu, as ever, helped me with typing the play and often quoted lines from it admiringly. If I am not mistaken, he was the only reader of Prince Yazid . All this amount of desperate composition was to allow me to earn money and help the family. My father still had three of my younger brothers at school, and Seenu himself in M.A.; Seenu still remembers his first day in M.A. when his professor, teaching Indian culture, began, “Culture is of different kinds: agriculture, physical culture, sericulture, and so forth. But we must distinguish between cultures and find out their common characteristics and differences. All culture is one.” In spite of this teacher, Seenu persisted in his M.A. studies, as they would mean a better market value for him than a mere B.A. My elder brother worked in a radio-repair shop and then as the manager of a bus service, and was away the whole day until midnight; he added fifty rupees a month to the family budget. My father occasionally enquired of me, “What are you attempting on that road-roller?” (my typewriter). He gently suggested that I should not be wasting my time thus.
    Having nothing to do in Mysore, I moved off to Bangalore and stayed with my grandmother, who was there to recoup her health; and so back again under the care of my grandmother after many years’ interval. I wandered about the streets of Bangalore, dreaming and thinking and planning. On a certain day in September, selected by my grandmother for its auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line of a novel; as I sat in a room nibbling my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all ready-made, with a character called Swaminathan running down the platform peering into the faces of passengers, and grimacing at a bearded face; this seemed to take me on the right track of writing, as day by day pages grew out of it linked to each other. (In the final draft the only change was that the Malgudi Station came at the end of the story.) This was a satisfactory beginning for me, and I regularly wrote a few pages each day.
    At about this time one of my father’s efforts to place me bore fruit. I received a government order appointing me as a teacher at a government school in our old Chennapatna, where I used to spend my vacations as a schoolboy. So I was going back one fine morning by train from Mysore to the land of my grasshopper collections. I was seen off at Mysore with great enthusiasm by everyone in the family; everybody was happy that I was to work in Chennapatna,