Instead, both watch the dissolution of the union with an almost fatalistic helplessness. Similarly, it is hard to understand why Rama seeks fulfilment in other women while averring his love for Madeleine at the same time, or why he never tells her of his affairs in spite of his claim that he keeps no secrets from her. Rama, the narrator, does not answer such questions; he only chronicles the breakdown of the relationship, almost impersonally, as if there were little he could do to save it. He also does not feel himself responsible for having affairs with other women, one of which involves a ritual second marriage, while being married to Madeleine at the same time.

What is lacking, then, is adequate motivation for the actions of the characters, something that most readers are conditioned to expect from the novel. Perhaps a better approach, however, instead of asking of the novel something that it did not intend to give, is to consider what it does clearly provide; indeed, questions that appear unresolved on the literal level are resolved more satisfactorily on the symbolic level.

Rama, the Brahmin hero, is a seeker of Truth both by birth and by vocation (a Brahmin is one who seeks Brahman, or the Absolute). As an Indian scholar in France, Rama is seeking Truth in the form of the missing link in the puzzle of India’s influence on the West. According to Rama, this missing link is the Albigensian heresy; he thinks that the Cathars were driven to heresy by the influence of Buddhism, which had left India. Rama’s quest for Truth is also manifested in his search for the ideal woman, because, in the Hindu tradition, the union of man and wife is symbolic of the union of man and God. The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is one such paradigmatic union, in which Shiva, the Absolute, the abstract, the ascetic, is wedded to Parvati, the human, the concrete, the possessor of the Earth. Another such union is that between the mythical Savithri and her husband, Satyavan (‘satya’ means ‘truth’). Savithri, through her devotion, restores her dead husband to life.

In keeping with these paradigms, Rama—the thinker, the meditator, the seeker of Truth—can only find fulfilment in a Parvati or a Savithri, who can bring him back to Earth by her devotion. Madeleine, however, who has given up her Catholicism for Buddhism, becomes an ascetic, renouncing the Earth, denying her body through abstinence and penance. Significantly, her union with Rama is barren; both their children are stillborn. Madeleine also regards Truth as something outside of herself, something that has to be striven for in order to be realized. Her dualism is the philosophical opposite of Rama’s non-dualism.