New Delhi, Feb. 15 -- It is relatively rare to come across two major writer-spouses covering the end of their marriage in separate memoirs. Two recent memoirs-in-translation by Poonam Saxena deliver exactly this: Echoes of My Past (Mud Mud Ke Dekhta Hoon) by Rajendra Yadav (1929-2013) and This Too Is a Story (Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi) by Mannu Bhandari (1931-2021), both published by Penguin Random House India. From 1959 to 1994, Yadav and Bhandari were married to each other even as they grew into major figures in the Hindi literary world.

Prolific short story writers in the 1960s and 1970s, they were both regarded as leading lights of the modernist Nayi Kahani (new story) movement alongside Kamleshwar, Mohan Rakesh and Nirmal Verma, their middl...