<div>Precocious, a poet, a philosopher's daughter, Maitreyi Devi was sixteen <br>years old in 1930 when Mircea Eliade came to Calcutta to study with her <br>father. More than forty years passed before Devi read <i>Bengal </i><br><i>Nights</i>, the novel Eliade had fashioned out of their encounter, only <br>to find small details and phrases, even her given name, bringing back <br>episodes and feelings she had spent decades trying to forget. <i>It </i><br><i>Does Not Die</i> is Devi's response. In part a counter to Eliade's <br>fantasies, the book is also a moving account of a first love fraught <br>with cultural tensions, of false starts and lasting regrets.<br><br>Proud of her intelligence, Maitreyi Devi's father had provided her <br>with a fine and, for that time, remarkably liberal education -- and <br>encouraged his brilliant foreign student, Eliade, to study with her. <br>"We were two good exhibits in his museum," Devi writes. They were also, <br>as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. When their secret <br>romance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade from <br>their home. <br><br>Against a rich backdrop of life in an upper-caste Hindu household, <br>Devi powerfully recreates the confusion of an over-educated child <br>simultaneously confronting sex and the differences, not only between <br>European and Indian cultures, but also between her mother's and father's <br>view of what was right. Amid a tangle of misunderstandings, between a <br>European man and an Indian girl, between student and teacher, husband <br>and wife, father and daughter, she describes a romance unfolding in the <br>face of cultural differences but finally succumbing to cultural <br>constraints. On its own, <i>It Does Not Die</i> is a fascinating story <br>of cultural conflict and thwarted love. Read together with Eliade's <br><i>Bengal Nights</i>, Devi's "romance" is a powerful study of what <br>happens when the oppositions between innocence and experience, <br>enchantment and disillusion, and cultural difference and colonial <br>arrogance collide. <br><br>Maitreyi Devi (1914-1990) was a poet and lecturer, founder of the <br>Council for the Promotion of Communal Harmony in 1964 and vice-president <br>of the All-India Women's Coordinating Council. Her first book of verse <br>appeared when she was sixteen, with a preface by Rabindranath Tagore. <br>Her publications include four volumes of poetry, eight works on Tagore, <br>and numerous books on travel, philosophy, and social reform.<br><br>"In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love. . . . Taken together they provide an unusually touching story of young love unable to prevail against an opposition whose strength was tragically buttressed by the uncertainties of a cultural divide."--Isabel Colegate, <i>New York Times Book Review</i><br><br>"Recreates, with extraordinary vividness, the 16-year-old in love that she had been. . . . Maitreyi is entirely, disarmingly open about her emotions. . . . An impassioned plea for truth."--Anita Desai, <i>New Republic</i><br><br>"Something between a reunion and a duel. Together they detonate the classic bipolarities: East-West, life-art, woman-man."--Richard Eder, <i>New York Newsday</i><br><br>"One good confession deserves another. . . . Both books gracefully trace the authors' doomed love affair and its emotional aftermath."--Nina Mehta, <i>Chicago Tribune</i><br><br><br></div>