Sunil Gangopadhyay was the foremost of Bengal’s angry but romantic young poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout his writing life, he wrote a continuous sequence of love poems addressed to a mythical woman named Neera. These poems became the mantra of two generations of young women and men. From ardent, sexually charged verses of early infatuation, through the demanding and sensual rhythms of a full-blown relationship, to the mellowing middle-age memories of romance, the Neera poems are a pulsating testimony to the cycle of passion, desire, and, inevitably, unrequited longing.

This is a selection of the most stunning of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Neera poems, most of them translated for the first time, and as capable as ever of sparking off a hundred love affairs when recited aloud.