“The only thing I was certain of was that I loved her, and I suffered the agonies of restraint imposed by the social conditions in which I lived.”
– R. K Narayan in My Days
The novelist and short-story writer R. K Narayan experienced an “impossible love-sickness” as a young man. When he was living in Bojjanna Lines, he longed for a girl in a green sari with a pale oval face and another girl who studied at Maharani’s College. Soon a married British lady doctor warmed the cockles of his heart, and he disposed of an English pen friend who had not reciprocated his unmitigated love. In July 1993, he had fallen in love again and falling out of it, Narayan no more a lover until the day he died, had been impelled by destiny. The impossible love-sickness that Narayan experienced was made possible by the Hindu practice of matching one’s horoscopes. One probable reason for the extreme love-sickness that Narayan experienced was that he was more easily affected by feminine charm than other young men of his age. The fact that none of the girls whom Narayan fell in love with feigned interest in him shows that he was spectacularly interested in being in love rather than receiving it. His love for the middle-aged British doctor was taken to a ridiculous level. His careful, close observation of the ladies he sought attention from in a time when social customs were rigid, was fine in prose but not in practice. The daughter of the headmaster of a school nearby became his wife at the end of an undoubtedly predestined meeting with an astrologer (did he see that coming?) who told him that their horoscopes finally matched. Had he not met the astrologer, rigid social customs, and unyielding cowardice from the village elders, his potential wife and him, would have sickened the possible love that could have once taken fruit. The moon, I suppose, was not happy with them.
The impressions I gather from Narayan’s love-life, of the social conditions in which he lived as a young man in the nineteen thirties, is wide-ranging. True the social customs were caste-based in which castes and genders were segregated. He did not have to mend his ways finally and on marrying his wife his parents were happy. The astrologer who his father-in-law had known was uncaring, blunt and in a casual way told Narayan to tell the headmaster to go ahead with his daughter’s marriage, notwithstanding their horoscopic planetary alignments. Perhaps a marriage like that had never happened before where he lived, and society frowned upon boys and girls marrying without consulting their parents or horoscopes. Narayan did not. The marriage was promptly celebrated, and when Narayan wrote about it in an extract in My Days in 1974 god knows whether he had the “writers’ mind” which would have allowed him to see it in a non-dual way.
Rigid were the social customs that it seemed impossible that a man falling in love and letting lose his urge to go up to his damsel would have been taken lightly. His future father-in-law was open-minded. His constant prodding about Narayan’s job opportunities shows that he was concerned about how his daughter (unemployed and washing vessels) would manage the household from the expenses earned by a freelance writer. Narayan’s time was cruel to lovers finding love; and women, of course, were treated most cruelly. If Narayan’s wife did what Narayan had done, she would have been castigated, perhaps killed by one of her family members. Although her father, liberal for those times, yielded to the pressure ‘from the stars’, one never knows the temperament of a patriarch who had heard from a stranger – Narayan – that he wanted to marry his daughter.
Narayan fell in love with his wife before meeting her. He was in love with her since he stared at her through corner of his eye while she drew water from the street-tap, oblivious to him. He, one of the greatest writers, was after all, a human. It is his approach to love which passes muster with his readers. There is a tendency in all of us to be attracted by the physical; the creaturely aspect of worldly life shrivels our fractured selves to the core. This is love, but not true love. We do love our lovers because we find their bodies physically attractive. (I must confess as a person who has been so loved.) But, we also progress from mere physical love to what is more spiritual and sacred. ‘I am not the body.’
Narayan’s love moved from the physical (when he loved the pretty ladies for their looks) to the social (when astrologers and elders who decided the fate of their progeny took a step back) and then to the essentially sacred, where social customs and bodily attractions ceased. That was a state beyond the body, mind and intellect – a state of absolute surrender to his potential wife. It was not fate that fixed his marriage to Rajam. It was love. He loved Rajam because he moved from being in love to being able to love unconditionally. The soon-to-be mature Narayan had the ability to transcend the domains of physicality, society and astrology. He became a man who was deeply saddened by the demise of his wife in 1939. Rajam had died of typhoid.
Speaking about his successful marriage to his wife, Narayan said: “In spite of all these fluctuations and hurdles, my marriage came off in a few months, celebrated with all the pomp, show, festivity, exchange of gifts, and the overcrowding, that my parents desired and expected.” Narayan’s astrologer would have chuckled and agreed. He did see that coming!
