In his spare time, of which he had a great deal, and to augment his income, of which he had little, Mr Narayan wrote what he called Topics for the local English language weekly newspaper, The Mayapore Gazette. In addition, his services were available as a letter-writer, and these were services used by both his Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He could converse fluendy in Urdu and Hindi and the local vernacular, and wrote an excellent Urdu and Hindi script, as well as his native Tamil and acquired Roman-English. “Roman-English” doesn’t convey anything to me; I’m guessing it might mean English written in the Roman alphabet, but how else would it be written? It would appear rather to be baktattam, from baktat ‘plod, trudge, walk slowly’; see Xerîb’s comment below.