‘May You Always Wear Red’ : Insights into the nuances of Indian culture : GRANDMOTHER’S TALE And Other Stories, <i> By R.K. Narayan (Viking: $23.95; 320 pp.)</i>

There is a saying in India, “May you always wear red,” a phrase spoken among women, and offered as a sort of benediction. Widows, who do not have an easy time of it in India, are prohibited by custom from wearing the color red. And so what this saying means is: May you die before your husband. May you be spared the indignities of a solitary old age.

It’s the sort of detail, a way of looking at things, that an American might never think of but which is an integral part of the world of R. K. Narayan, who has for many decades, in 13 novels, a half a dozen story collections, and in his memoirs and essays, described the nuances of his native culture with unparalleled tenderness and irony.

Narayan was once hailed by Graham Greene as “the novelist I most admire in the English language,” a remarkable compliment considering the source. Reading Narayan is a bit like reading Greene. Both writers belong to a generation of elegant storytellers, masters of their craft. Along with V. S. Pritchett, Narayan is one of the last remaining voices from this era. And as his new collection of stories makes clear, age has not diminished his talent but simply added an extra dimension of wisdom to his remarkable and enduring vision.

Some of the stories in “The Grandmother’s Tale” are new, some have been collected from earlier works. A number are extremely short--a mere three or four pages; others, like the title story, have the weight of a novella. In each we find ourselves once again in the town of Malgudi and its surrounding villages, Narayan’s equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, where the majority of his fiction has been set.

Faulkner once wrote that “the primary job that any writer faces is to tell you a story out of human experience. I mean by that universal mutual experience, the anguishes and troubles and griefs of the human heart, which is universal, without regard to race or time or condition. He wants to tell you something which has seemed so true, so moving, either comic or tragic, that it’s worth preserving.”

It is precisely the combination of the comic and tragic that makes Narayan’s stories worthy of the label “universal.” That, and the very ordinariness of the lives he so lovingly renders in fiction. He takes a Western reader into the very heart of an Indian village and the family compounds where the little dramas of marriage and money and kinship inevitably result in a tangle of human ties. The foreignness of the setting, rituals and traditions may seem to us exotic, but the underlying humanity of Narayan’s dramas can’t fail to strike a familiar chord.

His characters are mirrors of history, men and women betrothed to each other as children, raised up in a post-colonial India, who find that their own children, infected by the evils of modern education, Western influence and torrid Hindi films, no longer wish to abide by the old rules. In “Second Opinion,” a profligate son discovers his widowed mother has long ago arranged his marriage to a village girl when he was only 5. At first he rebels against the alliance, then, thinking his mother is on the verge of death, acquiesces, only to discover too late that his mother is in perfect health.

One finds this sort of ironic O. Henry twist in many of these stories. In “Lawley Road” the mayor of Malgudi feels he has not done enough to celebrate independence and orders that all British names be removed from road signs. A statue of Sir Frederick Lawley, perceived as the very incarnation of colonial evil, is torn down. The story is a sort of riotous send-up of forced political correctness: not only does the town become “unrecognizable with new names,” but Lawley is discovered to have been one of the most enlightened men of his era, championing independence early on. The statue, very difficult to remove from its lead pedestal (Britain had erected herself on “no mean foundation”) is put up again and newly venerated.

“A revolutionary change is needed in our society,” says a character in the story “Guru,” but what comes through in these tales is how firmly the old traditions prevail in modern India. Ninety percent of the marriages in India are still arranged with astrologers determining whether an alliance is propitious. The wheel of progress turns slowly, and yet the creaking can be heard. Annamalai, the gardener in the story of the same name, considers it a triumph that he can handle the telephone. In being able to distinguish the mouthpiece from the earpiece, he displays “the pride of an astronaut strolling in space.”

Dowries, gossip, the favor or disfavor of family deities and all sorts of superstitions command a center place in the lives of Narayan’s characters. These are simple people, shepards and knife sharpeners, child brides, housewives yearning to be novelists, yet beneath the simplicity of their lives is a rich tapestry of emotion. No story displays this better than “A House and Two Goats,” a story I first read some years ago in V. S. Pritchett’s anthology, “Best English Short Stories.” In it, an Indian couple, childless, destitute and reaching the end of their lives, encounter a New Yorker on vacation in India (“I told my wife, ‘Ruth, we’ll visit India this winter, it’s time to look at other civilizations’ ”). Muni, the old man, is tending his two remaining goats in a field near an ancient statue of a horse when the New Yorker stops to ask directions. Prevented by a language barrier from understanding each other, they nevertheless engage in a long and extremely funny conversation, in which the New Yorker tries to negotiate a price for the horse statue in English, while Muni retells the tale of the Mahabaharata in Tamil.

The story reveals the depth and subtlety of Narayan’s fictional sensibility, which is never overtly polemical, yet leaves a reader with much to think about--in this case, the irony of cultural misperception. Like all good stories, it is layered with meanings. What is so lovely about Narayan’s work, and what makes it so valuable in a world torn by racial misunderstanding, is the gentleness of his vision, the way he makes each of us a member of his wondrous universe. He left me longing to return to his country and yet feeling that I had already done so, simply by reading his stories.