R.K. Narayan never gave Malgudi a map reference, and that was the point. The town existed precisely because it could not be pinned down, a composite drawn from Mysore, from Bangalore's older quarters, from the kind of South Indian railway town that smells of filter coffee and diesel and has a silk merchant two doors from the post office. But the 1986 Doordarshan serial made the question unavoidable: where, exactly, was this?
