Give Us a Grin

The Guide by R. K. Narayan.  Penguin Classics 196pp.  $16.00.  ****

If you have some time on your hands these days—maybe you’re recently retired, or lost your job during the pandemic—have you thought of becoming a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, or Kashmir Shavism?[1]  I realize you’re supposed to be enlightened to do that, but is that really necessary?  Have you ever looked at Non Duality magazine (maybe not; I can’t seem to find it on the Internet anymore); all the people in that publication, all the smiling faces, are people who claim to be enlightened.  They have books and websites.  They’re certified by the World Enlightenment Society.[2]

I sometimes pick up a spiritual magazine—I subscribe to Tricycle, and often look at Lion’s Roar—and am fascinated by the ads, face after smiling face of people who are essentially saying, Look at me!  Come to my website!  I know how to really meditate!  All these other people don’t!  The primary talent these folks seem to have is to smile warmly and confidently, I might even say fearlessly, as if to say: this is the face of enlightenment!  This is true joy!  Inner peace!  Look how peaceful I am!

I worry, however, that those smiles actually represent desperation, as if to say, shit, I’ve got a car payment due and the rent doesn’t go away, it’s tough living in LA, if I can’t get a few students soon I’m going under.  Being a spiritual teacher is tough these days.  Competition is fierce.  Even the pale faded looking vipassana teachers who live on dana, their only payday the occasional stint at IMS, nevertheless have to make payments on that used Volvo, even if it only cost a few hundred bucks.  How do they get by?

Isn’t everybody basically saying the same thing?  The real does not die, the unreal never lived.  Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment.  The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death.  Spend some time reading I Am That, an afternoon or two will give you the idea, and you’re pretty much ready to go.  (I got these sentences from the cover.  I didn’t even open the book.)  I’m not saying these things aren’t true.  I tend to think they are (except at 3:00 in the morning).  I’m just saying they’re commonplace.  Platitudinous.  It isn’t that hard to be a spiritual teacher!  (I’ve never used so many exclamation points in my life.  Have I turned into a fifteen-year-old girl?  I’ll have to figure out my pronouns.)

What I’m talking about is more or less the premise of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, which takes place in India, where Advaita Vedanta was invented (not that it was actually invented.  It’s timeless.  It existed before time.  So did you, by the way).  The title character is a man named Raju, who began his life as a tour guide.  Actually, he was a shopkeeper first, in a very successful shop that his father had created, but because it was doing so well he could hire someone else to be the clerk, freeing him to lead tours to cultural sites.

But as the novel opens—the chronology is jumbled, though never confusing—he has just gotten out of prison and is contemplating his next move, sitting cross-legged in an outdoor temple.  He isn’t posing at all, just happens to be sitting there, but a local villager comes along and pours out his problems, primarily with a young cousin who won’t go along with an arranged marriage.  Raju’s suggestions to the man are commonplace and ordinary (just like the great spiritual truths!), but they strike him as a revelation, and before long he’s bringing various of his relatives to see Raju, including the young lady in question.  Again, Raju doesn’t say much, but the young woman finds his very presence inspiring, realizes she’s being too stubborn, and agrees to the marriage in question.  Raju does virtually nothing, and brings about this marvelous result.  A guru is born.

His past life—which he tells in chapters that alternate with the present—is actually more interesting.  His father had an ordinary shop until a railroad ran a track beside it, and located a station there.  What a gold mine.  Raju when he became a tour guide didn’t know much, but he knew the important sites, and found people to get the tourists there; that’s half the battle in India, where travel is difficult.[3]  Unfortunately, he falls in love with the wife of one of his clients, a woman who loved dance but was married to a dull scholar who thought dance wasn’t even an art form.  I’m opposed to adultery in general, but in the case of that oppressive abusive marriage I’ll make an exception.  That affair, alas, was the beginning of the end of his successes in life, so maybe the old rules of conduct are correct.  Then again, his ruin led eventually to his becoming a guru, so maybe it wasn’t all bad.

I haven’t scratched the surface of the story, including the vast success Raju met with before he made the mistake that sent him to the slammer (a place which he actually enjoyed, weirdly enough; nothing in this novel is as it seems).  What we realize by the end of the book is that, if Raju does become a guru—or if people take him for one—it’s because he has the hard-earned knowledge of life.  He becomes a guide because he gives good advice.  And if to some extent he’s been impersonating a guru, when push comes to shove, he takes on the role with integrity.  I found the ending of the book startling, but right in line with what the book says as a whole: you might not be a guide when you begin, but it’s possible to grow into the role.

[1] I actually have no idea what either of these things is, though I’ve read about them both extensively.

[2] No such thing, alas.

[3] For the difficulties of travel in India, I know of no book better than my brother’s, Getting Down at Bhubaneshwar.  Sorry for the nepotism, but there it is.