Between Pai’s house and Nair’s is a wall over which Nair leaps every time he visits Pai. The wall is an important symbol because it represents the division between illusion and Truth, or duality and non-duality, or the relative and the Absolute. Nair crosses it easily, but Pai has never gone across. Towards the end of the novel, following Nair’s cat, Pai accidentally crosses the wall. Like the lucky hunter, he, too, is vouchsafed a divine vision: For the first time, Pai sees the whole universe as a unity of sense, meaning and existence.

The novel ends with Pai’s spiritual as well as material fulfilment, having partially realized his lifelong ambition of owning a three-storey house. The Cat and Shakespeare, although not as ambitious as Kanthapura, is as successful on its own terms. The novel is an elaborate puzzle, which the author challenges the reader to solve; a solution is not only possible at all levels, but is completely satisfying as well. The way to the Absolute here is not karma yoga or jnana yoga of the two previous novels, but bhakti yoga, or the path of devotion. The seeker recognizes himself as dependent on divine grace for his salvation and surrenders himself to the Benevolent Mother like a trusting kitten.

Comrade Kirillov, published in English in 1976, is generally recognized as Rao’s least ambitious novel; it is clearly a minor work compared to its three illustrious predecessors. Formally, it is an extended vyakti-chitra, or character sketch, a popular genre in Indian regional literature. The main story, narrated by one ‘R.’, standing perhaps for Rao himself, is a mere ninety-three pages in large type, to which are appended twenty-seven pages of the diary of Kirillov’s wife, Irene, and a concluding seven pages by the narrator; the effect is of a slight, sketchy novella. Kirillov, alias Padmanabha Iyer, leaves India for California to propagate theosophy but, after a period of disillusionment, becomes a communist.

From California, he moves to London, where, marrying a Czech immigrant, Irene, he settles down to the life of an expatriate intellectual. Like Rao’s other protagonists, Kirillov starts as a seeker of Truth, but after becoming a communist, he is increasingly revealed by the narrator to be caught in a system that curtails his access to Truth. Thus, Kirillov continuously rationalizes the major events in the world to suit his perspective. Nevertheless, following a visit to India several years after he has left, he realizes that his communism is only a thin upper layer in an essentially Indian psyche. Irene also recognizes in her diary that he is almost biologically an Indian Brahmin, and only intellectually a Marxist. By the end of the book, Kirillov is shown to be a man of contradictions: attacking and worshipping Gandhi simultaneously, deeply loving traditional India but campaigning for a communist revolution, reciting Sanskrit shlokas but professing communism.