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Nagaraj's mother is a homely, ordinary and tradition abiding woman. She is modest and follows the code of decency prevalent in a middle-class society. She sleeps on the floor while her husband occupies the teak-wood four-poster which fills the space in the same room. But when their son Gopu and Nagaraj go up to the college stage, she maintains the decorum by going out in the second courtyard to sleep in summer and in cooler season by sleeping in the hall. She maintains this separation from her husband in accordance with a norm of decency required in a traditional Indian middle-class family.
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| Nagaraj's mother |
After the death of her husband, her decline starts. Before his death, she looks all resplendent with ornaments and good-looking dress. Some call her showy and vain who wants to impress them with her diamonds and brocade. But on her husband's death in consonance with the custom and convention of widowhood, she gives up all those old gaudy dresses and jewellery. Now, she remains clad in a white simple sari without lace and diamond. In her previous days, neighbours remark, She's like Goddess Lakshmi and rules the family like a queen. But, all that grandeur and radiance is gone now. Nagaraj tries to console her mother and advisees her to go in and take some rest.
She feels worse at Gopu's aggressive haste in getting the ancestral property partitioned between two brothers. Gopu insists on getting the whole landed property, garden and cattle-stock in the village and leaves the whole Kabir Street house to the share of Nagaraj. Gopu departs for the village alongwith his wife, Charu and his son, Tim. The breaking-up of the family renders another jolt to her. She is moved to tears at Gopu's departure and questions, "Was this all Inecessary?" Nagaraj is also overwhelmed and requests his elder brother to leave Tim with them but the latter refuses to do so. Her innate belief in the Hindu traditional social institution of joint family system receives a rude shock.
Nagaraj's mother is religious-minded and visits the temple daily in the evening. During her old age nearing eighty or ninety, she remains very restless all the time. In her dotage, she looks frail and wasp-like and hobbles about the house with a staff in her hand. Sita has to take great care of her since she fears that she may fall down and get injured. Moreover, she is always pestering Sita with questions and enquiries. After Tim's return to Kabir Street residence, she does not live long. She stumbles over and falls down during her perambulation through the vast acreage of the house and gets her hip-bone fractured. She is bed-ridden and Tim is always by her side. Ultimately, she dies. The void created by the mother's death is described thus:
"Without his mother's presence, which seems to have had the effect, unnoticed all these years, of filling all space, the house seemed to have become suddenly ast and cavernous."
Typical of an affectionate mother, she calls Nagaraj by his childhood name "Nagu" while he has turned past fifty years old. In a caring, tender-hearted motherly way, she bothers about small conveniences of her son even in her extreme old age. She asks the adult Nagaraj to take his bath in time so that the hot water may not get cooled. Her affectionate nature is typical of Narayan's all old ladies. She leaves an indelible impression of her affectionate nature on Nagaraj and his wife, Sita. After her death, Nagaraj gets a bromide enlargement of his mother out of an early group photo with the photographer Jayaraj's help. He hangs it up prominently in the hall. He festoons it with flowers every morning standing on a stool to reach it. The undying attachment between the mother and her younger son, thus, gets immortalised. Sita, too, feels forlorn after her mother-in-law's death. She pinchingly realizes her isolation in the absence of the old lady. She feels occasional "stabs of regret" at the memories of her rudeness to her mother-in-law in recent days out of her petulance caused by the latter's growing restlessness and her perpetual rambling about in the vastly sprawling house with a ceaseless hurling of questions directed towards Sita.