Eyesore (चोखेर बाली)

First serialised in Bengali as Chokher Bali in 1902, Eyesore is Rabindranath Tagore's first true psychological novel — a study of four people drawn into an emotional entanglement that none of them know how to escape. Mahendra, the doted-on only son; Asha, his sheltered wife; Vihari, his loyal friend; and Binodini, the young widow whose intelligence and longing have nowhere to go. Tagore lays open the inner life of each with a precision that English-language fiction would not match for years. This is the 1914 translation by Surendranath Tagore, the author's nephew, first printed across twelve issues of The Modern Review in Calcutta. The title — a rendering of Chokher Bali, literally a grain of sand in the eye — is the name Asha and Binodini playfully give each other before everything begins to come apart.