The English TeacherThe English Teacher is the third in the trilogy that began with Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. This novel dedicated to Narayan's wife Rajam is not only autobiographical but also touching in its intensity of feeling. The story is a series of experiences in Krishna's life: some joyful, some painful; and his journey towards achieving inner peace and personal development, in the traditional Indian sense. About the AuthorRasipuram, Krishnaswami Narayanaswami, or RK Narayan as he is widely known, was born during the British colonial rule in India. In her obituary Barbara Crosette writes of Narayan and Malgudi thus: "In the 1930s, he (RK Narayan) created a city in southern India that he called Malgudi and populated it with characters who could be fussy, cunning, harmless rebels or philosophical - but which have always been believable. Mr. Narayan returned again and again to Malgudi in many of his 34 novels and hundreds of short stories. His books accurately portray an India that hovers between the immutably rural and the new industrial and that is still full of individualistic and often eccentric personalities reminiscent of his imagined universe. This novel is however more autobiographical than others. It recounts Narayan's happy days with his wife Rajam, who died after contracting typhus .He loved her sincerely and truly, and after her death Narayan fell into a period of "darkness" and was obsessed with the thought of communicating with her. One of the obvious facts that meets the reader's eye is the restraint with which the couple married woman expresses her love, so different from the demonstrative love seen today both in real life and in the media. Dialogues Krishna, the central character of the novel, is an English teacher at the same college he attended as an undergraduate. Krishna's wife Susila is with her parents, a few kilometers away, having recently given birth to their daughter Leela. (It is Indian custom for a pregnant mother to stay with her own mother, and the midwife still takes precedence over the hospital, doctor or nurse.) At the beginning of the story we see a very nervous and anxious Krishna awaiting the arrival of his wife and daughter in Malgudi where he teaches English at Albert Mission College. His visions of the misfortunes that could befall mother and son during the train journey are almost comical to the point of absurdity..