... invisibility was one of Bengali modernity's prerequisites and cardinal achievements. - Amit Chaudhuri

There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or "the substance called the mind", is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom ... but "more light, more space".

... the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt.