A precious discovery

Deccan Herald

05-07-2025

After publishing several major Kannada stories in Prajavani and other publications in Mysore state, the nineteen-year-old Rajalakshmi N. Rao published The Rain, her scintillating debut story in English, in The Illustrated Weekly of India in late 1954. On the heels of the buzz around this story by a Kannada writer, B R Nagaraj, the editor of the Sunday Magazine of Deccan Herald, dropped in at her parents' home in Kalyan, a Bombay suburb, to ask her to write for his paper. She wrote a dozen exciting short stories for DH over two and a half years. These stories appeared as lavish full-page spreads along with stylish illustrations..Rajalakshmi's stories in English reveal an intense literary talent at work. Acutely observant, metaphorically laden, and philosophically ambitious, they disclose a preoccupation with the existential dimensions of human relationships. In the tightly-woven story, The Rain, the rise and decline of intimacy and love in a newly married couple unfolds against three monsoons with the 'never-ending' rain being a different kind of presence each time. Besides, her virtuoso descriptions of the rain are something to savour independently inside the story..The two quartets of Rajalakshmi's stories host the close scrutiny of self-examining protagonists, often female, and on occasion, male. The protagonists are, for the most part, educated young urban individuals in want of self-realisation or, as one of her characters puts it, desiring to 'snap out' of 'emotional anesthesia,' or whose intellectual and emotional worlds ask to be brought in sync. These literary explorations, which candidly encompass sexual matters, are not as frequently seen in Rajalakshmi's equally intense Kannada stories that show other thematic preoccupations..The self-scrutiny of women characters in Rajalakshmi's English stories can, at times, hold a mirror to patriarchal power games, but it usually does not stop there and moves on to arrive at an enhanced self-awareness, a truer capacity for love. In the final story in the second quartet, Pastorale, a character appears to offer a considered rumination in this regard: 'Perhaps peace comes not by trying to merge oneself in another, but by merging oneself with oneself; not by looking for impossible perfections in others, but by striving for perfection in oneself; not by searching for oneself in others, but by discovering others in oneself; not by believing that others exist for being taken, but by believing that oneself exists to be given.'.A fascinating feature of Rajalakshmi's stories is their casting of inanimate objects as sentient beings. Summoning them as feeling and thinking objects realigns the self-centred human relationship with reality. Consider the following instances pulled from across her stories: 'Darkness quivered in the room like a hungry bear. She closed her eyes upon its suffering'; 'The machine huddled silent, cold, alone.'.Most of Rajalakshmi's stories move across a third-person and a first-person narration, which imbues the telling with layered, shifting intensities. She also reaches out to wildly inventive metaphors to place her philosophical reflections in front of us. My favourite among such instances appears in the story, Winter: 'This, the sky paved with cow-dung cakes, this, the moon, frightened but putting on a brave brass front, this, the incredibly agile star with its easy, opaque optimism, this is real and eternal. Thus was it when the earth tore itself free, a gem fallen from its setting, and thus will it be when you and I and we are mica smithereens shrouding the bombed remains of Beauty.'.Rajalakshmi's free-spirited stories exude a daring confidence and a quest for vision. Her bold exploratory probing of the inner self is simply unlike what is found in the writings of her contemporaries like RK Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandaya, and Nayantara Sahgal. Her stories continue to be a radiant presence..Recuperated recently from the DH archives, Rajalakshmi's English stories appear along with her Kannada stories in a new anthology of her short fiction, Sangama-Pastorale, that I have compiled and edited. This book, which releases today at the Mysuru Literature Festival, nourishes literary sensibilities, enriches critical awareness.