This chapter focuses on a specific theme in Raja Rao's fiction that has received little critical attention, the recurring figure of the missing mother. It is remarkable that in Rao's novels many of his protagonists are either orphans or unfortunate witnesses of their mother's death at some point of the stories. In Kanthapura (1938) for instance, the protagonist Moorthy witnesses his mother's death owing to his infringement of caste jurisdiction within the village of Kanthapura; in The Serpent and the Rope (1960) Ramaswamy calls himself “an orphan” (6) while in The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) albeit no clear indication of Ramakrishna Pai's mother is given in the novel, he is obsessed with his metaphysical pondering on the figure of a Mother Cat; in Comrade Kirillov (1976), the third person narrator informs the reader that “Kirillov's mother, now long and happily dead, had an indeterminate name” (59) while in The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) the protagonist Sivarama laments that “with my mother's death, I was alone” (6).