Re-imagining S.L.Bhyrappa's "Nayi Neralu" in the light of An Apocryphal Ramayan

The theme of re-incarnation is explored in "Nayi Neralu." A village Brahmin family comprising an elderly couple & a widowed daughter-in-law, get news that their son has re-incarnated in a nearby village. They get him home & the mother is overjoyed. But he is 20 years younger than the widow/wife of his supposed earlier birth. Nevertheless, they live together & the widow gets pregnant & gets ostracized.

Here one can recall an apocryphal version of Uttara Kanda (itself not ascribed to Valmiki) where the two unfulfiiled desires of Ravana were fulfilled when he was reborn as Lava & Khumbakarna as Kusha. These were to be loved by Sita & to defeat Rama. Here romantic love was transformed into maternal love of Sita for her twins. Also when Rama came in search of the horse, the twins were believed to have defeated him.

In "Nayi Neralu", even though the mother  may accept the re-incarnated son, it does not follow that the widow should accept him as her husband, as there is no natural DNA link like mother/son. Changing the Gothra of the bride during marriage is just paperwork to facilitate absorption into the groom's family. The ridiculousness of this is brought out if they divorce. Does the wife get back her father's Gothra?

So an alternate reading would have been to accept the re-incarnated man as an (adopted) son of the widow (justified by the age difference) whereby he can continue being a member of the family & may be get him married to a similarly aged girl.

Even the most romantic French, as shown by their films, have accepted maternal love as being stronger than romantic love many times, even when the child is adopted (no common DNA.) So there would have been little problem to the widow to convert the conjugal love, which she had for her dead husband, to maternal love for the re-incarnated one.