Chokher Bali

Tagore elaborately records early twentieth-century Bengali society through his central character, a rebellious widow who wants to live a life of her own. Tagore said about the novel, I have always regretted the ending'. 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.