Malgudi days; not nights. There are dark moments in [the] thirty-two short stories [of Malgudi Days], but the tragic logic is usually broken by a spot of joy in the middle or a bit of puckishness at the end. Ambiguity? The term implies a muscularity of will foreign to Narayan. He does not strive for ambiguity, nor force the action in a tragic direction, nor in a sentimental direction. The salient virtue of his art in these miniature displays is his entire ease before the double faces of existence: the tragic / joyful, funny / sad, good / evil weave of things. If nature could write, someone has said, it would be Tolstoy. But in its calms it might also be Narayan. The sun in these Malgudi days beams from beneath his brow, and its light is generous and steady and benign….

I have two impressions of the place. First, Malgudi...