In 1959, he published ‘The Cat’ in The Chelsea Review (New York). This story would later be expanded into his novel, The Cat and Shakespeare (1965). In 1960, twenty-two years after Kanthapura, Rao’s masterpiece, The Serpent and the Rope, was published. About ten years later, Comrade Kirillov (1970) came out in English, although it had appeared earlier in a French translation, Le Comrade Kirillov (1965). That year, Rao moved permanently to the United States, when he was invited to be a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-A). Also in 1965, he married Katherine Jones, an American stage actress. They had a son, Christopher Rama. Rao divided his time between the United States, France and India until his retirement from the University of Texas in 1980.

At UT-A, Rao was a legendary teacher, lecturing to very large classes. His pedagogy was most unusual. He was known to come to class and announce, ‘Ask me a question, any question you like.’ The class took off from such a challenge. I asked him once, ‘What if you didn’t know the answer?’ He replied, ‘I meditated on my guru; the answer would come.’ He also cultivated, over the years, friendships with writers, scholars, poets and a variety of influential people. These included the great proto-Indo-European linguist and machine translation pioneer Winfred P. Lehmann, who had invited him to UT-A; physical scientist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine; and theoretical physicist E.C. George Sudarshan. All of them worked on the same campus, as did other famous subcontinental novelists, including G.V. Desani and Zulfikar Ghose. Rao was also acquainted with a number of extraordinary personalities, including E.M. Forster, Albert Camus, J. Krishnamurti, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Woodrow Wilson and Indira Gandhi, all of whom he corresponded with and wrote about.

In 1986, after his divorce with Katherine, Rao married Susan, who is today the custodian of his incredible legacy. His third wife, Susan, many years younger, served and tended to him more devotedly than any Hindu wife I know. Her kitchen in their small apartment always smelt of herbs. Everything served at her table was organically grown and, of course, vegetarian. The only exceptions were some rich desserts specially ordered from a shop nearby or some south Indian food brought from a restaurant.