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….
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/a-precious-discovery-3617488
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