engagements as Secretary of the Historical Association recently formed at his college. And this exactly is what more often than not happens to all our best intentions. The passage thus reveals Narayan’s ironic awareness of the fundamental contrast between what men intend to do and what they are actually able to do.
Srinivas in
Mr. Sampath encounters the extraordinary character of Sampath at the Bombay Anand Bhawan in Market Road. Sampath is a printer who owns the Truth Printing Works in Kabir Street. He agrees to publish Srinivas’s journal. The press is divided by a curtain. Srinivas in his simplicity comes to assume that Sampath has numerous members on the staff of his press who pursue their jobs behind the curtain. But in reality there…show more content… When Raju finds it impossible to escape, he decides to make a clean breast of everything about himself. He then tells his chief disciple Velan the whole truth about himself, his relationship with Rosie, his crime and the punishment it earned for him. But the outcome of this confession was contrary to his expectations. Instead of condemning him for having trifled with the faith of simple, credulous villagers and sparing him the trouble of carrying on with the fast as Raju has expected, his confession strengthened Velan’s faith in his saintliness. It rather gave the simple-hearted peasant a sense of satisfaction arising out of the thought that of all the inhabitants of Mangala he alone was granted the privilege of being the confident of the Swami as is evinced by his reaction to Raju’s confession: ‘Why all this, Swami? It is very kind of you to address, at such length, your humble servant’ (R. K. Naraan, p. 208)13. He goes on to say, ‘And I’ll never speak a word of what I have heard to any one’, and thumping his chest in a dramatic gesture to emphasize the assurance that he will never divulge this secret, he adds, ‘it has gone down there, and there it will remain’ (R. K. Naraan, p. 209)14. Raju, who had not yet dreamt of any such result of his clean confession, is stunned; at the same time, he is filled