The great Indian novelist R.K. Narayan once quoted the 11th-century poet Kamban who said he was “like the cat sitting on the edge of an ocean of milk, hoping to lap it all up.” The poet was speaking of his own efforts to render the vast Sanskrit epic “The Ramayana” into Tamil verse, but the statement also applies to Narayan. Over a long life — he died in 2001 at the age of 95 — Narayan translated every nuance of Indian social life, during a period of huge upheaval, into fiction all the more magical for being so stubbornly down-to-earth. Like Kamban’s cat, he kept lapping at an inexhaustible ocean, not of milk but of human hopes and sorrows, all of it played out under the flitting shadows of hidden gods.

Seven of his 14 novels have now been collected in two volumes (Everyman, 616 and 646 pages, $25 each), with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith. Through these works, which range from “Swami and Friends” of 1935, his first novel, to “Waiting for the Mahatma,” published some 20 years later, we enter the quirky and inimitable town of Malgudi. Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, this is an invented place but one that quickly becomes as real — or as unreal — as our own hometown. Far from seeming an exotic locale, Malgudi startles by its familiarity. We know these grandiose uncles and wheedling tradesmen, these dreamy clerks and “shrunken palsied patriarchs,” as if they were our kin. When Ramani, the tyrannical husband in “The Dark Room,” berates his long-suffering wife Savitri for “tormenting him with cucumbers” at supper, we’re amused by his persnickety diction, but we shiver a little too. Domestic despots are the same in Malgudi as in Duluth.

Narayan has been described as a chronicler of “little lives.” That’s misleading. The lives of his characters have an epic cast, though it’s slyly concealed. The Hindu gods are never far away. They too are familiars. However deluded or devious, the citizens of Malgudi set up their household shrines, present offerings at local temples, and model their actions on those of divinities or legendary heroes. In a European novel, such characters, like the stingy landlord in “Mr. Sampath,” at once grimly penurious and deeply devout, would embody the crassest hypocrisy. In Malgudi, life is subtler. Narayan’s landlord is avaricious and spiritual in equal measure; the vice and the virtue stand in counterpoint and make him what he is. He isn’t Silas Marner, defined solely by his flaw.

Not that Narayan accepts this without qualms. In his introduction to his retelling of “The Ramayana” (Penguin, 177 pages, $13), he remarks that “even in the humblest social unit or family, we can detect a Rama striving to establish peace and justice in conflict with a Ravana.” (The Ravanas represent the forces of evil in the epic.) Narayan’s characters routinely entertain grandiose ambitions. What intrigues him, both as comic novelist and as moralist, is how they contend with the gods and the devils inside them. The ambitions may be absurd. Mr. Sampath gives up being a printer in the deranged hope of becoming a film producer. The comedy, as well as the pathos, of his quest lies in the contortions of character he undergoes as his genial, and better, self struggles against his own indwelling Ravana.

The same affectionate lucidity Narayan bestows on his Malgudians he extends to the objects they cherish, which often serve as surrogates for their deeper selves. He’s especially good at evoking the longing for a home; no author has so movingly described the supreme self-contentment of the householder. But his delicate attention encompasses other, humbler objects. In “The English Teacher,” Narayan’s most autobiographical novel, the narrator, aptly named Krishna, dotes on his battered alarm clock which he lovingly describes:

It had a reddening face, and had been oiled and repaired a score of times. It showed the correct time but was eccentric with regard to its alarm arrangement. It let out a shattering amount of noise, and it sometimes went off by itself and butted into a conversation, or sometimes when I had locked the room and gone out, it started off and went on ringing till exhaustion overcame it.

This clock is a small presiding god in the narrator’s tidy life and precipitates the most tragic events in the story.

In another novel, Narayan wrote of “the very intricate mechanism of human relationships.” All his fiction explores this mechanism. In a much-quoted blurb Graham Greene stated that he was grateful to Narayan because “without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.” There’s truth in this, but I’d go farther. Without Narayan we might never have fully known what it’s like to be human.

eormsby@nysun.com