66697602-The-Ramayana-R-K-Narayan

Another young man could not take his eyes off the lightly
covered breast of a girl in a chariot; he tried to keep ahead
of it, constantly looking back over his shoulder, unaware of
what was in front, and bumping the hindquarters of the
elephants on the march. 5
Many of Narayan’s virtues familiar to us from his fiction are
You stayed content in that sinner’s city, enjoying your food
and drink. Your good name was gone but you refused to die.
How dared you think I’d be glad to have you back? 4
But Narayan drops Kamban’s account at this crucial moment
in the book and chooses to bring in Valmiki’s much more
moderate version of Rama’s decidedly odd behavior. It is as
though he cannot fully acknowledge Rama’s lapse into
cruelty, although such an omission may also be due to
Narayan’s aversion to scenes of overt violence, verbal or
physical—an aversion that his fiction with its careful
avoidance of extremity makes clear.
Happily, Narayan doesn’t linger much over battle scenes,
where his prose seems to be weighed down by
untranslatable archaisms. The realistic fiction writer in him is
more at ease with the detail of everyday life. Here is a
description of the great crowd walking to attend Rama’s
wedding.