Bengal Nights/La Nuit Bengali

7

Extracts from my diary of the following month:
We were alone, discussing manliness, Walt Whitman, Papini and the others. She has not read much but she listens. I know she likes me - she has told me so. She declared that she would give herself to a man - like Tagore's heroine - on the beach, at the start of a storm. Romantic nonsense?

My passion grows, a delicious mixture of romance, sensual­ity, companionship, devotion. When we are sitting next to each other on the rug, reading together, the slightest contact disturbs me. I feel that she too is troubled by it. Through literature, we communicate so much to each other. At times, we both sense that we desire each other.

A note added later:
Wrong. At that time, Maitreyi knew nothing of passion. She was taken up in the game, in the exquisite pleasure of a mock­ sensuality, not in sensuality itself. She had no idea what pas­sionate love meant.

Continuation of my diary :
First evening, first night in her room until eleven o'clock.
We were translating Tagore's "Balaka" and talking ... The engineer, back from a dinner in town, walked in on us. I, very calm, continued talking. Maitreyi lost her composure, snatched up the book and opened it. "We are studying Bengali," she said.
So, she knows how to lie?

Note added later:
No! How little I understood! She was not lying - she had simply forgotten that I had stayed with her to translate "Balaka". When she saw her father, she remembered. If some­one else had come in, she would have carried on with the conversation, but she could not speak in front of her father.
So she went back to the book.

Continuation of my diary :
Today I brought her an enormous bunch of lotus. She took them into her arms and thanked me: her face disappeared behind the flowers. I am  sure she loves me. She writes me poems and recites poetry to me all day long. I do not love her. I admire her. She disturbs me. Her body and her mind are overwhelming.

I have discovered a new trait in her personality. One evening, I was speaking to Lilu and threatened to repeat certain things she had just told me to Mantu.

Lilu simpered, "What could he do to me?"

"I've no idea," I replied "I have no experience of domestic quarrels."

"He will punish her, one way or another,'' Maitreyi declared, stressing the words "one way or another." She repeated the expression, laughing, when we were alone.

So she knows...? She also told me that she wants to give herself, in a moment of madness, intoxicated with love or with lyricism.

She tells me these things with an incredible candour. I would not have believed, at the beginning of our friendship, that she would ever confide in me in such a way.

Note added later:
In fact, Maitreyi was playing a game, nothing more. Lilu had explained marital love to her but she had understood nothing -she was merely repeating expressions which am used her.

Continuation of my journal:
Maitreyi, Lilu, Mantu and I went to a local cinema, to see an Indian film starring Himansural Ray. Maitreyi and I sat next to each other. We talked a lot. And how we laughed! But as we were leaving the auditorium, she had an hysterical fit and fainted. Why? The darkness, the subject of the film or an entirely physical upset brought about by our proximity? I know that she is incredibly sensual, whilst remaining quite pure. That is the miracle of the Indian woman. My Bengali friends have educated me on that: a young virgin becomes on her wedding night, it seems, a skilled and perfect lover.
Maitreyi has hinted at some romance with a beautiful young man, a Bengali studying in England. Does she really have to follow the idiotic itinerary of every mediocre sentimental attachment?"

Note added later:
She had simply wanted to banish from her mind experiences she had before she knew me and to let me know of her renun­ciation.

Continuation of my diary:
I brought her flowers again. She was angry because I also gave some to the others and to Mrs Sen. I think Mantu has noticed our intimacy: whenever we are alone, he interrupts us without ceremony and even if Maitreyi tells him we are having a "private talk", he insists on staying with us.