A tax collector billeted in an abandoned Mughal palace begins to hear the women who lived there three hundred years ago-and that is the least strange thing in this collection. Tagore was the first non-European to take the Nobel, founded a school where lessons were held under the trees, and renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre. These stories hold his Bengal: rivers, ruins, and the fruit-seller from Kabul who cannot forget his daughter. Fifty-seven plates, from Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat Mata to Dickens engravings by Phiz and Cruikshank, gather the many worlds these Bengali tales move between.
