‘What terrible jest is fate engaged in? I meet Kamala and Nalinaksha meets Hemnalini – this is like a novel and that too, a badly-written one. Such contradictory matchmaking is possible only for an uncaring writer like destiny – it conjures up events that the timid novelist dare not write in his imagined stories.’
After a boat wreck overturns his life, Ramesh Chandra Chowdhury mistakes young Kamala for his newly wedded bride. The y move away from Calcutta to start a domestic life together, even as Ramesh is unable to forget Hemnalini, whom he was always in love with, but could not marry. Meanwhile, Hemnalini must steel her heart, whilst her hypochondriac father and hot-headed brother seek grooms for her. When Nalinaksha, a serene and influential doctor, enters the scene, fate decides to rock the boats again.
Initially serialized in Bangadarshan magazine between 1903 and 1904 and then published as a novel in 1906, Noukadoobi was Tagore’s exercise in psychoanalytical probing of an ensemble cast of characters, to reveal not just their individual pains and passions, but also the collective consciousness of the society of the period. Narrated in warm tones that reveal the tenderness of everyday life and translated gracefully by Arunava Sinha, here is a story about love and sacrifice, faith and resilience that is timeless.