India, April 11 -- There are marriages that end quietly, leaving behind only private wreckage. And there are marriages that end and become literature.

Rajendra Yadav and Mannu Bhandari were once the most luminous literary couple of Hindi letters, partners in life, participants in the New Story movement, inhabitants of the same restless intellectual climate. Their separation, after thirty-five years of marriage, was widely known. What was not known, at least not fully, was how each of them would later write that marriage into memory, into language, into history.

With Echoes of My Past (Mud-Mudke Dekhta Hoon) and This Too Is a Story (Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi), translated into English by Poonam Saxena and published by Penguin Random House, we are...