Rabindranath Tagore 
Chokher Bali 

The literature of the new age seeks not to narrate a sequence of events, but to reveal the secrets of the heart. Such is the narrative mode of Chokher Bali’ — Rabindranath Tagore, Preface to Chokher Bali Chokher Bali explores the forbidden emotions unleashed when a beautiful young widow enters the seemingly harmonious world of a newly married couple. This path-breaking novel by Rabindranath Tagore weaves a tangled web of relationships between the pampered and self-centred Mahendra, his innocent, childlike bride Asha, their staunch friend Bihari, and the wily, seductive Binodini, whose arrival transforms the lives of all concerned. Radha Chakravarty’s translation brings the world of Tagore’s fiction to life, in lucid, idiomatic prose.