When the Time Is Right

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A grand family saga set in Calcutta during the last two decades of British rule, this is Bengali maestro Buddhadeva Bose’s greatest novel‘How strange this life was for women—they were born only to go away, and that was their way of getting everything in life.’ Of Rajen Mitra’s five lovely daughters, it is the youngest—the beautiful, intelligent Swati—who is the apple of her father’s eye. As she grows from an impetuous, spirited child to a lonely young woman, Swati is witness to the upheavals and joys of the Mitra family even as the country slides towards the promise of independence and the inevitability of war.Anxious to ensure that his daughters find suitable husbands, Rajen-babu realizes it is only a matter of time before his favourite child too must leave home. While the boorish entrepreneur Prabir Majumdar decides that she will make him a fitting wife, Swati finds herself increasingly drawn to Satyen, the young professor who introduces her to a world of books and the heady poetry of Tagore and Coleridge. First published in Bengali as Tithidore in 1949, When the Time Is Right is a moving tale of a family and a nation.

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Buddhadeva Bose (1908–74) was one of the most versatile Bengali writers of the twentieth century. His works include novels, plays, poems and short stories. His Moner Moto Meye (My Kind of Girl) has been published in nine languages. Raat Bhorey Brishti (It Rained All Night), banned when it was first published in 1967, went on to become a best-seller. Bose received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967 and the Padma Bhushan in 1970, and was posthumously honoured with the Rabindra Puraskar in 1974.Arunava Sinha is an award-winning translator of classic and contemporary fiction. His published translations include Sankar’s Chowringhee and The Middleman, Buddhadeva Bose’s My Kind of Girl, Dibyendu Palit’s Illicit, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s There Was No One at the Bus Stop and a collection of Banaphool’s short stories What Really Happened. Born and educated in Kolkata, he now lives in New Delhi.