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language, understood it and understood her in a way no one else could have done, by instinct and empathy. The act of translation brought us together as if we were sisters—or even as if we were one, two compatible halves of one writer.
    Of course there were instances—small stumbles—when I could not find the exact word or phrase. In Suvarna Devi's language, each word conjured a whole world; the English equivalent, I had to admit, did not. Cloud, thunder, rain. Forest and pool. Rooster and calf. How limited they sounded if they could not evoke the scene, its sounds and scents—images without shadows. Perhaps an adjective was needed. Or two, or three.
    I tried them out. In the original, adjectives were barely used, but I needed them to make up for what was lost in the translation. Of course I could see that restraint was called for, I had to hold fast. Not too fast, though. A middle way. A golden mean.
    I laughed out loud and struck my forehead with my hand to think of all the different strains and currents of my life and how they were coming into play. I had never felt such power, never
had
such power, such joy in power. Or such confusion.
    I stopped only when I became aware it was night outside, the crows silent, the street lights burning, the traffic thinning, its roar subsiding into a tired growl. The television set in my landlady's flat was turned on, the evening soap opera at full volume—and I hadn't even noticed it earlier.
    Pushing back my hair—as if I too had a pair of dark glasses perched up there, or a gleaming strand of distinguished white like Tara!—I got up, picked up my purse, went downstairs and crossed the street to the small shop where I sometimes bought essentials, a bar of soap or a packet of candles during a power breakdown. Tonight, though, I bought a packet of cigarettes—not the brand I had seen on Tara's desk and that I wanted but a cheaper one that the shopkeeper stocked. I had never bought cigarettes from him before and he gave me a strange look. He recognised me of course but I didn't care what he thought. This was something I was now discovering—that there were things about which I did not need to care. I recrossed the street with the packet in my purse, stepping aside just in time to avoid an autorickshaw that came careering round the corner, its driver singing at the top of his lungs with the joy of going home, free, at the end of a day's work. I almost could not restrain an impulse to join in before I went up the stairs to my room to see what the cigarettes could do for me, for my new career—Prema Joshi, translator.
    Smoking one was another matter, I admit, and not very successful. I was glad no one was there to observe how I doubled over, coughing, and stubbed out the obnoxious weed, in disappointment.
     
    The synopsis and the sample pages were quickly done. Perhaps a little too quickly, Prema worried, but found she really did not wish anything to slow or halt the momentum, and so she slipped them into a brown paper envelope and took them to be posted in the same flush of high excitement with which she had written them.
    Tara had her secretary call Prema—that was a disappointment, Prema had not expected to have to deal with an intermediary—to tell her to go ahead with the translation. So the first step had been taken, and Prema drew a deep breath, poised now on the brink of this new career.
    Her old career began to seem irksome. Her lectures became perfunctory; she no longer cared if they did not inspire her students with the same passion she felt for literature.
The Mill on the Floss, Emma, Persuasion
—what did they mean to these girls? She marked their papers impatiently, merely skimming them, not stopping to put right their grotesque errors and misrepresentations. She could not be bothered: every one of these girls would leave college to marry, bear children and, to everyone's huge relief, never read another book.
    All that mattered now was to do as fine a translation as