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 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.