In Search of ... my bride

From Raja Rao’s (a sort of) introduction (this is reproduced in his The Meaning of India) to The Policeman and the Rose:

… These stories were written mainly in France, and at the time when Valéry and Gide dominated the literary universe. A south-Indian brahmin, nineteen, spoon-fed on English, with just enough Sanskrit to know I knew so little, with an indiscrete education in Kannada, my mother-tongue, the French literary scene overpowered me. If I wanted to write, the problem was, what should be the language of expression, an what my structural models – Sanskrit contained the vastest riches of any, both in terms of style and word-wealth, and the most natural to my needs, yet it was beyond my competence to use. To marry Sanskrit and Gide in Kannada, and go further, would have demanded an immense stretch of time, and I was despairingly impatient. French, only next to Sanskrit, seemed the language most befitting my demands, but then it’s like a harp (or vina); its delicacy needed an excellence of instinct and knowledge that seemed well-nigh terrifying. English remained the one language, with its great tradition (if only of Shakespeare) and its unexplored riches, capable of catalyzing my impulses, and giving them a near native sound and structure. “I will not write like the English,” I was to write in an introduction to Kanthapura, “I can only write as an Indian.” I will have to write my English, yet English after all – and how soon we forget this – is an Indo-Aryan tongue. Thus to stretch the English idiom to suit my needs seemed heroic enough for my urgentmost demands…. So why not Sanskritic (or if you will, Indian) English?

… Thus both in terms of language and of structure, I had to find my way, whatever the results. And I continued the adventure in lone desperation. I was now truly in search of – my bride…

-----------------------------------------------------

When I read the above, I wondered (and pondered) at his search of my bride. Raja Rao himself threw a light on it in one of his articles on – guess what - words.

The word is alive. It is alive in the sense in which a caterpillar, a starling,
a hippopotamus is, or like vriksha (tree), spanda (pulsation), ishvara (god)
are. The word has membranes. It is palpitant, breathful. The word has
self-existence. For each word has, first a noumenal, then a cosmological, and
finally, a phonemological reality.

Then he quotes a Sanskrit sloka:

Many a man who sees does not discover the word.

And many a man who hears does not hear it.

Yet for another it reveals itself like

A radiant bride to her husband.