I was rather young when I first laid my hands on R.K. Narayan’s ‘Swami and Friends’. I had been addicted to comics like Amar Chitra Katha and would never touch anything else. But, one day, when I was very bored and there was not a single comic lying by, I reluctantly took up ‘Swami and Friends’. That is how I stepped into the world of Malgudi.

Soon, I found that Swami was a child very like myself. Swami’s petty jealousies and terrible agonies were my own. I suffered when his cruel master Ebenzes troubled him and wept when he was badly treated by friends. I was elated when Swami befriended Rajam and Mam, and finally, at Rajam’s departure, I could not hold myself from sobbing out aloud.

I wonder now, as I did then, how R.K. Narayan can conjure up a child’s world so easily as if he were himself no more than a child. No other writer, except perhaps Mark Twain has such ability to enter into the recesses of a child’s mind. Even now, whenever I wish to go back to my childhood again, all I have to do is take up “Swami and Friends”.