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The station master's wife is an ordinary, simple, homely woman. She has a number of children. She mostly remains limited to the responsibility of fulfilling her domestic duties and of catering to the needs of her husband and children. She has a tender heart for a stranger also if one is considerate and kind. For instance, she provides food ungrudgingly to Sarasa according to her taste and choice when the latter stays in the waiting room of the Malgudi railway station. She has a sense of regard and a feeling of attachment towards Sarasa as a result of the association that develops between station master's family and Commandant Sarasa. The human warmth lying in her heart wells up uncontrollably in her sentimental behaviour at the time of departure of Sarasa for Delhi. She is overwhelmed with sweet memories of Sarasa's period of stay. Her heart is overflowing with genuine feelings of humanity and hospitality. There is an allusion to Komal, a nurse in Matilda's, who resigns from her post and elopes with Dr. Rann to Rome or to some other undisclosed destination. She is one more victim added to Dr. Rann's armoury of inexhaustible debauchery. Moreover, there are numerous nebulous women from different parts of the world who have been victims of Dr. Rann's debauching and deceitful ways. They all end up as desperate, forsaken and ravished womenfolk.
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| Station Master's Wife |
Woman-man relationship projected in the present novel through the medium of Dr. Rann remains unprecedented as far as Narayan's other novels are concerned. Dr. Rann is an unrepentant lecher, cheat and ravisher of woman's honour irrespective of the suitability or unsuitability of her age. Women are no more than a plaything for him purely meant for the gratification of his heartless, inhuman voluptuousness and carnal desires. Cruising through Dr. Rann's callous, endless, insatiable lechery, one feels like raising a query aloud, As flies to wanton boys, are women to Dr. Rann? Conception of woman as the only means of satisfaction of man's sensuality is the product of a dehumanised, perverse mind. Dr. Rann's obsessive, untamed lechery is as threatening, poisonous and annihilating factor for human civilisation as the grass-like weed - the subject of his research study - is projected by him as a future menace to the very existence of all forms of life i.e. human, animal or vegetation on the earth planet.