Swami and the Thief – Malgudi Days

Translated into Urdu Hindi Tamil Sindhi

Swami and the Thief – Malgudi Days

Swaminathan, a cheerful and lazy schoolboy, always looked for excuses to avoid anything difficult. Whether it was homework or discipline, he would find a way to escape. One day, his father, tired of Swami’s laziness, gives him a challenge: “Tonight, you must sleep alone in the office room.”

Swami is scared. The office room is dark and quiet, with shadows that seem alive. He tries everything to avoid it — fake illnesses, emotional appeals — but his father won’t listen.

Reluctantly, Swami lies down in the room, too frightened to close his eyes. Every little sound terrifies him. Suddenly… he hears footsteps. A figure moves in the dark.

In a moment of blind panic, Swami grabs a chair and hurls it at the shadow. A cry is heard — it’s a thief!

The family rushes in. There on the floor lies an actual burglar, injured. Swami is shocked — and so is everyone else.

The next morning, Swami is a hero. His father proudly tells the neighbors. Teachers clap for him. His friends call him brave.

But in his heart, Swami knows the truth:
He was just terribly afraid.

Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan’s beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan’s excitement about his country’s initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan’s portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband’s humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan’s most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness.