It’s going on 11 am and here I am sitting up in bed with end-of-term grades to submit, two outings to dress for, my daily walk still ahead of me, and a To Do list as long as my arm. One is supposed to get the grades in before starting in on the summer proper, but as usual I have allowed life to flow in and utterly derail me. I had resolved that because I have a lot on next week, I would get down to grading single-mindedly and submit the final grades for my classes early—for the first time ever, mind you. But here I am again, doing everything but, and with every hour that passes, dooming myself to an inevitable all-nighter a week from tomorrow.
But this is all very tedious. Let me tell it differently, with reference to literature. In R.K. Narayan’s delightful second novel, The Bachelor of Arts (1937), the wayward college student Chandran finds himself “face to face with November”, and the realization that half the college year is “already spent.” His B.A. examinations are looming and he has done nothing to prepare for them. “What one ought to do in a full year must now be done in just half the time.” So in a grand gesture that I well recognize, Chandran resolves to begin a rigorous programme of right living: to rise early, bathe in cold water, and give up smoking—just for starters. Then he draws up an ambitious programme of study.
He took out a sheet of paper and noted down all his subjects. He calculated the total number of preparation hours that were available from November the first to March. He had before him over a thousand hours, including the twelve-hour preparations on holidays. Of these thousand hours a just allotment of so many hundred hours was to be made for Modern History, Ancient History, Political Theories, Greek Drama, Eighteenth-century Prose, and Shakespeare. He then drew up a very complicated time-table which would enable one to pay equal attention to all subjects…Out of the daily six hours, three were to be devoted to the Optional Subjects and three to the Compulsory. In the morning the compulsory subjects and Literature at night.
Chandran duly arises at 5 am the next day; but from the very outset, the comedy of life begins getting in the way of his elaborate schedule. Something of great urgency turns up and utterly consumes his time for a fortnight. He has no option but to revise his initial programme to make up for the lost time.
He consoled himself with the fact that he had wasted several months so far, and a fortnight more, added to that account, should not matter…The time wasted in a fortnight could…be made up by half an hour’s earlier rising every day. He would also return home at seven in the evening instead of at seven-thirty. This would give him a clear gain of an hour a day over his previous programme. He hoped to make up the ninety study hours, at six hours a day, lost between the first of November and the fifteenth, in the course of ninety days.
But, notes the narrator wryly, “Man can only propose.” Chandran is inevitably drawn into other escapades that threaten to derail his programme yet again. And as it was with R.K. Narayan’s protagonist, so it was with me. As a junior faculty member facing the deadline for the submission of my book manuscript, I too drew up a rigorous—and altogether unrealistic—timetable with a certain number of hours per day and week allotted to the preparations. When, inevitably, I found myself a few weeks down the line having made no progress to speak of, I too sat down to revise my schedule by increasing the required number of hours of work per day. I consoled myself with the thought that I was not the first to have to revise my programme in this way. After all, the wildly prolific R.K. Narayan’s protagonist had had to do the same thing, hadn’t he?
But a few weeks soon became a few months, and, like Chandran’s, life had broken in and steamrolled over my best intentions. Once again, I found myself re-calculating the number of hours remaining until the hard—and fast-approaching—deadline and once again revising upward the number of hours per day that I would have to apply myself to the increasingly daunting task. I’m ashamed to say that this happened yet again, and yet again, I consoled myself with the example of my fickle—and, I neglected to acknowledge, entirely fictional—literary predecessor.
Somehow I muddled through, and the materials were duly submitted, though not before I had put my family to a lot of unnecessary heartache. For they were packed and ready to set out on our cross-country road trip with the motor running while I assembled the final manuscript and revised the cover note for the umpteenth time. We mailed the package Priority Mail on our way out of town. But this is not my point.
Some time later I returned to The Bachelor of Arts to revisit my hilarious and reassuring fellow-procrastinator who had had to revise his unrealistic timetable repeatedly. But although I went through the text with a fine-tooth comb, I couldn’t find it. Eventually, I had to accept that it wasn’t there. Sure enough, in chapters two through five, Chandran had drawn up his programme and then had had to revise it after events in his life overtook it. But he had only had to do so once. After that initial two-week delay, he had in fact stuck to his punishing schedule of rising at 4:30 am and not retiring to bed until 11:00 pm. He had not lapsed again. He had not had to ratchet up his hours per day yet again. I, on the other hand, had fallen away from my initial resolve repeatedly and had to revise and re-revise my daily timetable. My consolation, that the great R.K. Narayan’s comic hero had done the same, turned out to have been an utter fiction.
The realization shook me, but I managed to shake it off and soon returned to my bad habits, though now without the reassurance of fiction. Now I just hated myself.
So here it is, past noon now, and, as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers used to say on National Public Radio, “you’ve done it again, you’ve just wasted another perfectly good hour.“ As retirement sets in, I am inevitably making resolutions. It is important to start as you mean to go on, I tell myself—and not for the first time. I am at the other end of life from the young Chandran, who was just starting out. But I recognize his feelings as his college career came to a close:
As they dispersed and went home, Chandran was aware that he had passed the very last moments in his college life, which had filled the major portion of his waking hours for the last four years. There would be no more college for him from tomorrow. He would return a fortnight hence for the examination and (hoping for the best) pass it, and pass out into the world, for ever out of Albert College. He felt very tender and depressed.
Chandran does pass his exams and another, very poignant, chapter of his life begins. If you haven’t read R.K. Narayan’s early trilogy—Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, and The English Teacher—you have a treat in store. For my part, I still intend to start as I mean to go on. Stay tuned.