I have hesitated so long before this notebook, because I have not yet managed to discover the exact day when I first met Maitreyi. In my notes from that year, I found nothing. Her name appears there much later, after I had left the sanatorium and had to move into the house of engineer Narendra Sen, in the Bhowanipore district. But that happened in 1929, and I had met Maitreyi at least ten months before that. And if I suffer somewhat as I begin this story, it is precisely because I do not know how to evoke her figure as she was then, and I cannot truly relive my astonishment, uncertainty, and the confusion of those first encounters.

I remember very vaguely that, seeing her once in the car, waiting in front of the "Oxford Book Stationary"—while her father, the engineer, and I were choosing books for the Christmas holidays—I felt a strange start, followed by a very surprising disdain. She seemed ugly to me—with her eyes too large and too black, her fleshy, turned lips, her strong breasts, like those of a Bengali maiden grown too full, like a fruit past its ripeness. When I was introduced to her and she brought her palms to her forehead in greeting, I suddenly saw her whole bare arm, and the color of her skin struck me: matte, brown, a brown unlike any I had ever seen before, as if made of clay and wax.

At that time, I was still living on Wellesley Street, at Ripon Mansion, and my roommate was Harold Carr, an employee at the "Army and Navy Stores," whose company I cultivated because he had a number of friendly families in Calcutta, where I too spent my evenings and with whose daughters I would go out weekly to dances. To this Harold I tried to describe—more for my own clarification than his—Maitreyi’s bare arm and the strangeness of that dark yellow, so disturbing, so little feminine, as if it belonged more to a goddess or a statue than to an Indian woman.

Harold was shaving in the standing mirror on his little table. I can still see the scenes: the teacups, his mauve pajamas stained with shoe polish (he had beaten the boy bloody for this incident, though he himself had dirtied them when he came back drunk one night from the Y.M.C.A. ball), some nickel coins on the unmade bed, and I, trying in vain to unclog my pipe with a twist of paper, rolling it until it thinned like a matchstick.

"Really, Allan, how can you like a Bengali girl? They’re disgusting. I was born here, in India, and I know them better than you. They’re dirty, believe me. And besides, there’s nothing to be done, not even love. That girl will never let you..."

never the hand... I listened to all this with an unspeakable delight, although Harold had not understood a thing of what I had told him and believed that, if I spoke