An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayana Murthy book review

(Clockwise from right) Rohan Murty, Narayana Murthy, Akshata Murty, Sudha Murty, and Sunanda Kulkarni (Sudha Murty's sister), at the Padma Awards ceremony in April 2023.

If you can't imagine Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy aged 30, jobless and hopelessly in love, then Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest book, An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayana Murthy, can help.

Juggernaut; Rs 799

Picture this: It's early 1977. Murthy is struggling to keep his first venture, Softronics, afloat. Every few days, he must travel from Pune to Mumbai for precious minutes of computer time. He knows he's bleeding money, and will have to shut shop soon. At this time, he's been 'seeing' Sudha for about three years. When they started dating, though, he had a steady job. Not a particularly well-paying one. But he felt he was about to hit rock bottom. He tries to distance himself from Sudha and fails miserably.

Just as he's thinking it's better to let her go her way, he proposes marriage to Sudha: "'I'm no hero - just a short man with a squint and thick eyeglasses and no job'," Murthy tells Sudha one day as they returning from dinner in the Pune cantonment area. "'You, on the other hand, are beautiful and smart. But I love you, and that gives me the courage to ask this. Will you marry me?'"

This quote from Divakaruni's book is just one example of how the book unpacks the extraordinary lives of Sudha and Narayana Murthy in technicolor detail. It's like watching a movie, though there aren't even any photos of the couple in the book apart from the one on the cover (an unusual choice in this day and age when biographies often come with lots of photos, typically bunched together in the middle of the book, to help transport readers to a different time and place).

To extend the movie paradigm: if An Uncommon Love were a film - like the Bollywood films that Sudha Murty loved to watch, even taking Murthy along on their many dates in Pune - it would be a bildungsroman. A coming-of-age film, in which incidents and conversations are all selected and funneled to show the characters' growth. To this effect, Divakaruni selects events from the couple's lives carefully.

Here's an example: Murthy is hitchhiking across Europe in the early 1970s. On the way to Bulgaria's capital Sofia, he starts talking to a woman on the train. She's returning from meeting her husband in another part of the USSR. Because of a state rule, the couple are forced to live apart. Next thing he knows, he's been dragged off the train, and locked up in a room. It's bitingly cold and he's unsure of what has happened. Days later, he's released but not before being told that being Indian - a friendly country to the Soviets then - saved his hide. The incident is another nail in the coffin of his Nehruvian Socialist ideals as Murthy sees the benefits of "compassionate capitalism".

Here's another: Sudha Murty is the only girl in her engineering class in college. The other students are relentless in making her life miserable. There's girls' toilet in college. The odds are stacked against her. But she persists. Works hard, gets good grades, helps the same classmates with studies, finally makes friends. Then she becomes the first woman on the shop floor at a TELCO factory in Pune, and the cycle repeats. The men don't want her touching the heavy machinery or even attending festivals with them. Again, the resistance to women in engineering strengthens her resolve to stay put. She's strong-willed, unafraid and hates being told what girls can and can't do.

And because Divakaruni's book is an uncommon biography - not of a person, but of a relationship - it unpacks these incidents in an unusual way too. Often Sudha Murty asks Narayana Murthy a question, and he responds. This, for example, is how readers find out about Murthy's relationship with his father Rama Rao who was never satisfied with how well Murthy did at school and always expected more from him. There's a touching description also of how Murthy's love of Western Classical Music stems from a memory of his father taking him to a friend's place to listen to music on the radio once.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

But the most exciting, and riveting, passages revolve around the couple themselves. Readers find out much about the famous couple - how they met and connected over their love of books, how Murthy's first meeting with Sudha Murty's father was a terrible fail (he wore a red shirt and suddenly felt rebellious when asked how he planned on supporting Sudha and their family), how Sudha's brother vouched for Murthy being "basically a human computer" and just right for Sudha, their Rs 800 wedding and why relatives worried about marrying on the other side of the Tungabhadra river, why the couple cut their honeymoon short, why Sudha Murty decided against going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology even though she wept on the stairs of MIT, how she injected positive thinking and ideas to turn things around for Murthy when they looked bleak, her difficult pregnancies, how she started writing, how he got busier and busier with work and Sudha made it work with help from extended family, why Murthy regrets not letting Sudha join Infosys all those years ago...

To be sure, startup couples are often interviewed together now, to understand how they influenced each other and the business. Typically, these interviews are not book-length. The interviewer doesn't know the subjects. There is a distance and a level of formality. Here, Divakaruni - who has known the Murthys socially for 40 years through Sudha's brother - almost disappears from the narration.

Sudha asks the questions in the book, as she once did in life. And as the couple discover each other during their courtship and marriage in the book, so do the readers. It's a more intimate reading - as the couple open up to each other, sharing even the painful memories and poor choices they made.

There's a fair bit to marvel at in the lives of Sudha and Narayana Murthy. And there's a fair bit to love about the way Divakaruni's book unpacks this. At the end of 339 pages, one is left with three observations. This isn't like other books you've read about Infosys and the rise of India's IT industry. This isn't like most biographies. And this book does a good job of explaining how the Murthys think, and why they seem to live so simply today in spite of their massive wealth.