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A flash from Tara's dark glasses, approving, encouraging. So Prema goes on: 'And isn't the translation—the publication of the translation—a way of preventing it from—ah, loss? And proving it exists to, to—the public?'

'What public are you addressing?' The pudgy man adopts a more belligerent tone now that he has found the person at whom he can direct it. 'The English-speaking world?' he asks rhetorically. 'The international public? Why? Doesn't it already have a readership here?'

'Isn't it—isn't it important,' Prema flusters on as if she were one of her own students being interrogated, 'to make it more widely known?'

'To whom is it important? To the writer? To the reader? To what readers? Here in Hindustan? Or in the West? Employing a Western language indicates your wish to win a Western audience, does it not?'

Tara, sitting forward, tapping impatiently on the tabletop: 'I would like to inform you that a press such as mine—'

Prema sits back in relief, letting Tara take over.

'—aims to reveal the writer to a wider public here in India too. Writing that so far has not been accessible to them. Because I, and my colleagues, believe it is our mission—'

'Ha!' the pudgy man explodes with sarcasm. Now that he is on his feet, with a captive microphone, nothing will make him give it up or sit down. 'Who needs to have this revealed to them? The English speakers in this country? Why? Why are you catering to them? Why not to the speakers of the many native languages of our country?'

Laughter and applause, both approving.

Tara, very upright and fierce: 'If there are publishers in those languages willing to commission translations, as I have done into English, where are they and why are they not coming forward? They are needed, certainly.' Looking around with raised eyebrows, arousing approving murmurs, she repeats, 'Where are they?'

Prema, in gratitude, turning to convey her appreciation to Tara. Argument has erupted. Terms proliferate that indicate the large number of academics in the audience: Subaltern. Discourse. Reify. Validate.

Prema crouches low, fearing some of them will be flung at her. Wasn't 'subaltern' a military term? She feels like the lowliest of students in her class instead of its leader and hopes none of them is present to observe her shame. Where has she been all this time, reading Jane Austen with them, and George Eliot? What has she been doing, talking of Victorian England and its mores? What has stalled her and kept her from joining the current that is now surging past, leaving her helplessly clinging to the raft of The Mill on the Floss, the rock of Pride and Prejudice?

The chapters of the promised novel began to come in during the course of that summer, in large Manila envelopes that were always torn around the edges and had to be held together with string. They looked as if they had travelled a long and dusty road and suffered many misadventures along the way—and they probably had. At first I fell upon them as soon as I returned from work and found them lying upon the doormat, then immediately settled down to read them. But quite soon I found myself disappointed and dismayed by what I read.

Instead of the artless charm and the liveliness of the short stories, the novel seemed by contrast slow, almost sluggish, as it followed the fortunes of one family from grandparents to parents to children in a not very interesting town—in fact, very like the dusty, ramshackle one where I had first come across Suvarna Devi's work. I found myself growing increasingly impatient with the noble, suffering grandparents, the quarrelling parents, the drifting children, all of whom seemed to follow predictable paths under the effects of changing circumstances: an increase in wealth followed by a dispersal of property, higher education foundering in lost opportunities—and too many births, marriages and deaths. Stories recounted, time and time again, in different ways, all over the world.

Perhaps Suvarna Devi did not read very much herself, and was