Note:

• Title means "Nights at Serampore".
• First published in July 1940 in the collection Secretul doctorului Honigberger, Socec, Bucharest.
• The text of this story ends with the date : 1939.

Synopsis: This partly autobiographic story tells how the narrator / author and two of his friends got mysteriously lost on the road between Serampore and Calcutta. Whereas it usually took them but a few minutes by car from Serampore to the main road, they rode much longer, stopped in the middle of an unknown jungle, heard a feminine voice scream and call for help and, blundering through the forest, fell upon a house whose owner was the husband of the murdered woman. They later discovered this scene belonged to the past, and had passed into the local folklore. The narrator tries to account for this adventure by tantric magic, a spell cast on them by a scholar, Suren Bose, they met on the way, although some details remain unexplained : the chauffeur and domestics, for instance, all claim nobody left the house. Some time later, a swami in Tibet reveals to him that all explanations are vain, for everything is an illusion. All depends on how you consider things. As a proof, he takes him back immediately to the same scene.

• Mircea Eliade spent three years (1928-1931) in Calcutta, where he prepared his thesis on yoga. His strongly nationalist feelings at the time might explain the mention of a "Suren Bose", a possible allusion to Subhash Chandra Bose (1897-~1945), aka Netaji, an Indian nationalist leader who eventually founded the SS Freies Indien Legion of Nazi inspiration, and the Indian National Army.