The trivial fear has left me, but I am suffering from exhaustion. My whole life seems to have slipped from my grasp—I sit here with empty hands. I wrote to Sergei—‘I feel as though I am sitting on the shore of the sea of time, holding an embarkation card, but the ship never comes. How long must I wait, brother? I cannot die without seeing him.’

I received a letter from Sumita. She writes—

‘For several days after receiving your letter, I was so overwhelmed that I could not think of what to write. I spoke with Sergei; that day I said, truth is stranger than fiction! When the author wrote that novel, did he know that the truth of the future would surpass even the imagination of the present? I withdraw all the objections I had against that book. To tell the truth, the ending of the novel is tragic, but today’s tragedy is even greater. The hand of life’s artist is far more skillful than ours…’

Sumita wrote further, ‘If you will forgive my presumption, I would like to say one thing—you wrote that this feeling is so overwhelming that even your Rabindranath Tagore is swept away, but is it not Rabindranath Tagore himself, seated within your heart, who is urging you to acknowledge the truth?’

On sleepless nights, I speak with Sergei—Sergei, truly, from where did you rise up from the depths and turn my life upside down? The wound that had been covered for forty years, while I lived in peace and happiness, now its lid has been removed. Now the bleeding will not stop, my bed and pillow are soaked in blood, the sky of my sleepless nights has turned blood red—

I look and see my husband sitting on the bed, gazing at me—there are tears in his eyes—“Will you not tell me what has happened to you?”

I must tell him. For a long time, my friends have been urging me, tell him. All my friends respect and love my husband. They have always said he will try, with great sympathy, to ease your sorrow. But I hesitate. I think, will it not hurt him? What right do I have to cause him pain? Can it be anything but pain? In our thirty-eight years of married life, the existence of this person has never touched him, not even for a moment, he does not even know his name—will this unseen, unknown person suddenly emerge from some cave, like a mass of coiled smoke becoming a giant the moment the bottle’s mouth is opened? He has no connection to this household, no one around me has ever seen a trace of him, for forty-three years I have not seen him, and yet, can that childhood memory become so real today as to shake the foundation of our long-standing home? Can he bear this? Thinking all this, I have not spoken. Not to hide anything: my mind is in no state to conceal. The real