These are the bare facts that underlie these two first-person narratives, yet much of the fascination of reading them comes from their construction into two distinctive accounts. When the affair was discovered by the girl's father, the young European was summarily expelled from the house and forbidden all contact with her. In 1930, a young 23-year old European man came to live with a cultured Bengali family in Calcutta and soon became involved with the family's 16-year-old daughter. But there had been an earlier convergence of the authors' lives more than 60 years ago. The divergent histories of the two books have now converged with the simultaneous publication of their English translations. The young author of Bengal Nights, Mircea Eliade, went on to become an internationally renowned and much-published scholar the writer of It Does Not Die, Maitreyi Devi, was 60, a famous poet and public figure in India when her book was published. It Does Not Die first appeared in Bengali in 1974. ONE IS called a "novel," the other a "romance." Bengal Nights was originally written in 1933 in Romanian, subsequently published in French in 1950, and made into the film, Les Nuits Bengali, in 1987.
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