Sankara praises the river in his ‘Hymn to Ganga’ (‘Gangāstotraṃ’):
Rather a fish or a turtle in Thy waters,
A tiny lizard on Thy bank, would I be,
Or even a shunned and hated outcaste
Living but a mile from Thy sacred stream,
Than the proudest emperor afar from Thee.24
The true protagonist of these stories are not the men and women who throng the ghats of Kashi, but the Ganga herself. Like a thread of gold, the river braids the stories into a seamless whole. On the Ganga Ghat is steeped in the spiritual life of Kashi and is an eloquent reminder of the centrality of the city and the river in the Indian consciousness.
What is remarkable about these three stories is Rao’s understanding of women. Javni, Nimka and Sudha come across as real people whom we may have known. They are not characters in fiction. Sudha’s story is especially poignant. Born into a wealthy family, she gives up a life of ease and privilege. A spiritual aspirant, she leaves home and goes forth into homelessness in search of, as her name implies, the nectar of Knowledge.
It was Rao, who, more than any other writer of his generation — which included Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) and R.K. Narayan (1906–2001) — established the status of Indian literature in English during India’s struggle for independence from British rule. Neither Anand nor Narayan had come anywhere close to Rao’s innovative approach to fiction. Rao’s fiction is a philosophical quest in search of the word as mantra that would lead to liberation. Rao never considered himself to be solely an Indian writer. He had spent his formative years in France and not in England. Though his novels are rooted in the Indian philosophical tradition, they are universal in scope. Rao was conscious of the fact that English is an Indo-European language and therefore distantly related to Sanskrit. In his fiction, English, French and Sanskrit rub shoulders with one another in a linguistic family reunion of sorts. What is explored is the nature of language itself in an attempt to know the Truth.
The English language does not have sufficiently deep roots in India. It is therefore important for the writer to find his own individual style through which to express his world view. The reader, on his part, if he is not to misread the text, must get to know the writer’s epistemological viewpoint, or the sum total of beliefs, preconceptions and values which the writer shares with others within a sociocultural context.
R. Parathasarathy
Saratoga Springs, New York
15 January 2014
1
I have a small white house here, with a courtyard. From the back I look over coconut trees, and huts, and somewhere there’s the sound of the sea.
I was appointed divisional clerk, Trivandrum, some two years ago. I left my wife and two children at Pattanur. My eldest was five years of age, my youngest three. It’s not so easy to change schools, you know; and then it was monsoon time. When I thought of the bad new road (which leads to Kamla Bhavan, the noble name my fat landlord inflicted on this blue and ochre-banded building), I suffered to think of Usha coming back from school in this mess. Usha has sensitive hands, and her schoolmistress Tangamma was always telling her: Child, you have the fingers to make a nice braid. You will be a dutiful wife. My wife Saroja said: ‘Nice thing for teachers to be talking of wives already.’ But that is the way with my wife. She cannot help all the time talking of the wife. I am a quiet man, and to speak the truth, I don’t yet know what it is to mean husband.
Yes, at last I had a house. It was new and it was white. It had ochre bands on it — almost as on a temple — and I could hear the sea.
Now that the monsoon was as its fiercest, there was a problem even about going to the office. I ate every day at the Home Friends; the food was bad, but the freedom was so good. When I did not eat at the Home Friends, I could always go to the Trivandrum Brahmins’ Hotel. There the food smells less bad but the place looks more untidy. Life is always this choice — to choose an old house nearer the office or the new one sitting amidst coconut gardens. My wife saw this and said: ‘Oh, it’s just like home, coconut trees, huts, and the sound of the sea.’ For she is from Alwaye. And she never tired of saying how her old grandfather spoke of the way the Dutch landed some two hundred years ago, and thank heavens the Kartikuras’ house was two miles inland — but you could hear the sea — and the Dutch took away all the able-bodied men to fight (or to become Christians), and Kartikura House, being two miles inland, was left in peace. So the two miles and the coconut trees saved the Kartikura people, and thus emerged my wife, and from her and me, Usha and Vithal, my last born, a boy so round and fresh, with a tilak on his brow, and he leaps when he sees a car, and says, ‘Take me on a pom-pom,’ but I make him ride on my knee. But here, in Trivandrum, I sit alone and ride my own knee, as it were. I like being alone. I like eating dose and drinking coffee at Jyothibhavan. ‘Hey, take this away, this is such bad coffee,’ you can always say to the Brahmin boy, but you cannot say that to Saroja. She will talk of the Dutch and Christianity — and the sea.
The Dutch of course are an able-bodied people who have white ships. I have seen them because I have been to Bombay. During the war I tried to get into the navy and have better emoluments. At the interview they made me sit and leap so much, I cried, ‘Ay ya yo yo,’ and said: ‘No more silver than this hand can earn driving a nib.’ A man is meant to work for his wife, to feed her, and for the children to go to school (I so much liked Usha coming back along the railway embankment from school — three miles are three good miles from Pattanur to Alwaye, but then there’s the signal, the red and green lights, and all the other children, and father at home. Vithal was, of course, always in his mother’s arms).
I was thirty-three, and I had ever wondered that one is alive. I wanted to become a rich man, for then my wife would be so happy that I could do what I liked. If my plans went well — and in the new India plans are never so difficult, the new is made with plans — I would build a big house, like contractor Srinivasa Pai. He is some distant cousin of mine, and I no more like his house than I like his face. But people usually introduce me in the office saying, ‘This is Mr Ramakrishna Pai, cousin of Srinivasa Pai of Chalai Bazaar,’ as if I belonged to some royal lineage. My lineage smells of chilli and cardamom and tamarind as my wife’s does of coconuts. But then my wife’s people had two or three boats that plied the canals, and banditry and pilfering can make a lot of difference with prices. One can build a Kartikura House on thuggery. My wife was the second child; the first daughter was amply given away to a merchant in Ernakulam. Sundari (my wife’s sister) must tell Ramu, her husband, about the Dutch and the sea. Ernakulam must have many ruins and the Dutch must have left a few guns there. In Kartikura House they still show you Dutch cannon balls. When you plough for the tapioca sowings, the cannon balls come out just like the tapioca. Usha used to say, ‘The cannon is hard tapioca but this tapioca is man’s.’ Thus the cannon became the gods’. Strange how we transform all things into ours. Our houses must look like us, just as our ancestors built temples in the shape of man. In Chidamabaram Temple, Shankar Iyer says, the image of Shiva occupies the place of the heart. Then what is the place Parwathi1 occupies? I sometimes wonder whether I have a heart as I wonder in summer whether the rains will ever come. In heat I strike. I struck my wife only twice and have left marks on her face.