Short story by R.K.Narayan

 Hello everyone, in this blog i will discuss about some questions related to R.K.Narayan short story.

 Question 1:- explore the role of teacher and student in the short story 'Crime and Punishment '

Introduction 

R K Narayan mingles humour, sarcasm, irony and a serious undertone in his story. He portrays his characters, in a vivid and realistic manner, and they seem to spring up from the society around us. The hopes and dreams of the parents, the poverty of the school master which makes him take tuition class after six hours of working in the school, the mischievous nature of the boy, the silly mistakes that they commit, the dilemma the teacher faces, the predicament of the boy at the end, all are finely woven together.

Question 1:-Dynamic role of teacher and student in crime and punishment by R.K.Narayan

The teacher in the story “Crime and Punishment” by R.K. Narayan is a hardworking man. He teaches 6 hours in the school and then he comes to teach the small boy in the nursery for just 30 rupees a month. He has to work for three hours in the nursery teaching a gorilla of a child. This shows the teacher is very poor. Otherwise he would not come to teach such a mischievous imp after his normal school hours. 

The teacher suffered at the hands of the parents also. Every day he had to listen to the lectures of the parents on child psychology for half an hour. The father had written a thesis on infant psychology for his M.A. The mother had studied a good deal of it for her B.A. So, both lectured to him on the same lines. It seemed that the parents of the boy thought he was made of thin glass. They pampered him a lot and they wanted the teacher also to be very kind to the boy and not to annoy him in any way. The teacher found it hard to manage the boy. The boy had a lot of love and money. 

His parents built the nursery for him. They bought him expensive toys. They even gave him a small pedal motor to move about in the garden. His cupboard was filled with chocolates and biscuits which he could eat whenever he wanted. He was a highly pampered, spoilt child. The teacher could lose his temper when tempted too much. He slaps the boy because the boy persisted in making the same mistake in spite of the corrections so many times. The hard slapping made a red mark on the cheek of the boy. The boy used that mark to blackmail the teacher. 

He teacher had to play with the boy acting as a station master. Then the train stops running and the boy wants him to repair it. But the teacher is not at all mechanical minded and he can’t do that. Then the boy makes him tell stories. He tells the story of the tiger and the bison and the story of AN Baba and 40 thieves. The boy wants to hear the story of the tiger and bison again. When the teacher refuses the boy runs home, the teacher in hot pursuit. The teacher has good presence of mind. 

When the father asks why they are running about, the teacher says they are just playing about to keep up their spirits. The teacher can lie if there is a need! Poor teacher! He has to suffer so much for getting an extra amount of Rs.30 per month! I think he represents many teachers in our society who do not get a decent salary and have to nd others ways of making both ends.

Question 2:- write a analysis of short story 'An Astrologer Days?

An Astrologer’s Day’ is a story from the Indian author R. K. Narayan’s 1943 collection Malgudi Days. The Malgudi of the collection’s title is a fictional city in India, where all of the stories in the collection take place. The opening story in the book, ‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is about an unnamed astrologer who is confronted by a stranger who questions his abilities.

The story is about revenge, the past, and the reasons why we make the decisions we make in our lives. If you find this analysis helpful, we also recommend this discussionNarayan’s story is a short tale with a twist, and its plot is neat in the way it brings together its several strands. We learn at the end of ‘An Astrologer’s Day’ that the title character only left home and became an astrologer in the first place because he feared he had killed Guru Nayak after they drunkenly quarrelled. That one moment of anger determined the subsequent path of his life, and forced him to move to a new town and to alter his identity, so nobody from his village would chance to recognise him.

But he is able to recognise Guru Nayak when this figure from his youth turns up one night. Faced with a tricky customer who is sceptical of his abilities (quite rightly, it turns out, since the astrologer is essentially a blagger), he is backed into a corner and only saved from humiliation when he recognises his client as the very figure from his past who had set his life on its subsequent course.

This chance encounter is significant because, oddly enough, it ends up doing exactly what an encounter with an astrologer is meant to do: it gives the client clarity regarding his future, and he is now happy to return to his village, safe in the knowledge that his wrongdoer is dead.

Of course, this ‘knowledge’ is actually lies, but Narayan appears to be suggesting that the astrologer’s actions, performed out of cowardice and a desire to save his own skin, also avert the wrongful execution of vengeance. It is better for Guru Nayak to believe his would-be murderer dead and let go of the past, after all these years.

Similarly, the astrologer’s recognition of Nayak enables him to assume the role of a genuine astrologer, if only for one night, and speak with the air of an oracle or seer. Nayak is utterly convinced that the man is genuine clairvoyant, after he revealed he knew so much about his life. The astrologer is thus given a chance to be relieved of the burden of guilt he has carried around with him for all these years.

In ‘An Astrologer’s Day’, Narayan makes effective use of light and dark symbolism. But light can be misleading as well as illuminating. At the beginning of the story, Narayan’s third-person narrator tells us that the ‘gleam’ in the astrologer’s eyes is often interpreted by clients as a sign of his ‘prophetic light’, but is in reality his keen eyes searching for more customers.

We are told that the lack of ‘municipal lighting’ in the area is part of its charm: the light comes from the nearby shops, and not all of these have their own lights, so the street is plunged in a curious mixture of light and shadow.

This is symbolic of the story itself, where truth and lies, like those lights and shadows, are conflated and confused. It is significant that it is when the stranger (later identified as Guru Nayak) lights his cheroot pipe that the astrologer recognises him as the old associate from his past: the light here illuminates his old adversary but Nayak himself remains in the dark concerning the true identity of his interlocutor.