The summary of Rabindranath Tagore's story "Ek Ratri" (Once Upon a Night)

The narrator recalls his friendship with Surabala, a neighborhood girl, as a child. They played and went to school together, and their families were close. In the past, Surabala's mother would jokingly say that the two looked good together. The narrator felt a special bond with her even as a child and frequently exercised dominance over her, which she patiently accepted. The narrator's father, a landlord clerk, wanted his son to succeed in life. The narrator, however, fled to Kolkata at the age of fifteen, dreaming of a higher social status, inspired by a local boy who succeeded in doing so. He went to school and started participating in nationalist activities. He refused his father's marriage proposal to Surabala out of loyalty to the country. He found out later that Ramlachan Ray, a government lawyer, was the wife of Surabala. Because he was too preoccupied with his activism at the time, the narrator felt little. But when his father passed away, he had no choice but to drop out of college and work as an assistant teacher as a second master in a remote school in order to support his family. He found out there that Surabala and her husband lived nearby. When I saw her once more, I felt terrible, deep emotions. He began to be haunted by the memory of their closeness as children and what could have been, despite the fact that they never actually spoke to each other. As he imagined the life they might have shared, he felt an unshakeable sadness and loss. The narrator went outside to check on Surabala after leaving his house during a devastating storm and flood. He saw her in the dark on the bank of a pond—silent, far away, and impossible to approach. They stood apart in that profound moment, surrounded by floodwaters and unable to speak because they were overcome with emotions and the immutable passage of time.