In this story, we meet ex- gateman Govind Singh who after twenty-five years of good, clean service as the gateman of Engladia’s feels that he has gone mad. After retirement,trouble brews for him as in his free time he starts making dolls and proceeds to create entire models of places – a market scene, his oldoffice to name a few. They garner a lot of appreciation from people at the office and a few of his creations, he presents to his General Manager who had spoken to him twice in his twenty-five years of service – the day he was given the job of a gateman and the day he retired.
He comes to know through the man who gives him his monthly pension that the General Manager loves these models and this fills him with encouragement and happiness. Narayan has very acutely portrayed feelings of a blue-collar employee, the chasm which is there between them and the white-collar employees and how much of this class barrier affects the life of this gateman.
Govind Singh creates a model of the office and presents it. A few days later he receives a registered mail which makes him go into a state of panic (In the past he had received two mails which had been a source of torture for him till the contents had been read out).
Read the story to know what the registered mail contains and how it leads Govind to start believing that he has gone mad. Read it to see how well Narayan has captured the thoughts of a third class employee and at the same time commented through him on the strong class barrier which still exist in India.
A very interesting opposite take can be seen in George Orwell’s Shooting An Elephant where Orwell talks about his time as an officer in Burma and how he felt the pressure of being a White in that place and the consequences it had. Although both the stories talk about very different things –one talks about class, the other about race and colour but the pressure they exert on a man is a common ground for the comparison.
Narayan has a peculiar way of ending his stories, they do give through the character, a final conclusion but at the same time we see in most of his stories the character walking away in the end.
Narayan often creates stories of people who exist at the periphery. In this story we meet a gateman, while in the Hungry Child we meet a signboard painter, in An Astrologer’s Day we meet a quack acting as an astrologer, In God and the Cobbler we meet a cobbler and a hippie, in The Trail of the Green Blazer we meet a pickpocket, in The Axe we meet a Gardner, in The Missing Mail we are told the story of a postman.