Narayan’s The English Teacher was published in 1945, seven years after The Dark Room. Probably it was the shattering blow that he received in the death of his wife Rajam, which rendered him incapable of sustained artistic effort, and during this interval he could write only short stories and sketches.
The English Teacher is an autobiographical novel. Much of Narayan’s personal suffering has gone into the making of this novel. It tells a love story with a difference. It narrates the domestic life of Krishna a lecturer in English in the Albert Mission College, Malgudi. Though he is thirty years old, he feels bored with life in the absence of his wife and baby daughter. They arrive after a few months, along with his mother. Krishna and Sushila, his wife, lead a happy contended life for several months. But then their house is not quite good, and so on an ill-fated day they go out on house hunting. As ill-luck would have it, Susila is stung by a flea, develops typhoid and dies after a few days.
The death of Susila is a stunning blow to Krishna. He is much upset and loses all interest in life and in his work at college. The only comfort to him is his little daughter Leela, who now occupies much of his time and attention. He frequently wanders about a lotus-pond where he meets a Sanyasi who can communicate with spirits of the dead. Through him Krishna is able to communicate with the spirit of his dear departed Susila. Krishna is thrilled, and regains his interest in life.
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Krishna now meets the head-master of a new Children’s School. He is very much impressed by his educational theories, gives up his job in the college to serve the new institution. That very night he is able to communicate with the spirit of his dead wife directly, for the first time. At this, an ineffable joy descends upon his soul.
Human connections are not achieved easily in Narayan’s fictional world. Indeed, what often strikes you about that world something well concealed by Narayan’s instinct for humour and sense of absurdity is its extraordinary lovelessness. A Brahmanical formality circumscribes the relationships within families, the father being especially aloof, often cold, and romantic love, when it occurs, is either a loss of self-control (The Bachelor of Arts, Mr. Sampath, The Guide, Talkative Man), or so beset by anxiety and fear Waiting for the Mahatma) that its failure comes (as in A Painter of Signs), almost as a relief to the protagonists.
This is what makes so remarkable the first part of The English Teacher, where the narrator, Krishna, describes the quiet happiness of suddenly falling in love with his wife. The happiness is celebrated here through the many details of domestic life: the little squabbles, the shopping expeditions, the reading of poetry, the fussiness over the first child, the search for a new house.
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Elizabeth Bowen was one of the many reviewers of the novel who commented on the rapturous state of Krishna’s being, which really derived in this most explicitly autobiographical of Narayan’s novels from the serenity and joy marriage brought to Narayan’s own life. Until his marriage, his novels still unpublished and the future a discouraging blank, Narayan seems to have been like Krishna, who, when the novel begins, is leading a largely unsatisfactory life as a teacher of English literature, trying to explain the poems of Southey to uncomprehending students at a missionary college.
The six years of married life with Rajam, his wife, seem to have returned Narayan, while he was still in the midst of the long ordeal of growing up and finding a vocation for himself, to that “joy over nothing in particular” of his childhood.
