When their secret romance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade from their home. They were also, as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. "We were two good exhibits in his museum," Devi writes. Proud of her intelligence, Maitreyi Devi's father had provided her with a fine and, for that time, remarkably liberal education - and encouraged his brilliant foreign student, Eliade, to study with her. In part a counter to Eliade's fantasies, the book is also a moving account of a first love fraught with cultural tensions, of false starts and lasting regrets. More than forty years passed before Devi read Bengal Nights, the novel Eliade had fashioned out of their encounter, only to find small details and phrases, even her given name, bringing back episodes and feelings she had spent decades trying to forget. Precocious, a poet, a philosopher's daughter, Maitreyi Devi was sixteen years old in 1930 when Mircea Eliade came to Calcutta to study with her father.
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