Cast Adrift in the Flood : MEMORIES OF RAIN, <i> By Sunetra Gupta (Grove Weidenfeld: $19.95; 198 pp.)</i>

In “Memories of Rain,” Sunetra Gupta’s breathtaking first novel, the unbidden emotions and associations of her characters’ memories have a more cumulative logic than reason and a stronger narrative force than plot. There are no epiphanies in this slim novel, just an array of memories that diffract and divulge the sorrows of a woman who has a job translating the complaints of Bangladeshi patients to London physicians but who cannot translate the “rain-swollen syllables” of her own emotions to her husband.

During the 1978 monsoon, when flooding rains poured into Calcutta, churning “parched fields into festering wounds,” 19-year old Moni met an impassioned drama student from England who had befriended her brother. After a restless romance, she and Anthony married, moved to London and had a child. Their lives have since been dimmed by the choices that once quickened their passion.

The 26-year-old Gupta pays tribute to Rabindranath Tagore, India’s poetic mahatma , by shaping her book around the four-part musical form that often underlay his novels, and by braiding her own elegant translations of Tagore’s songs into her story. Like a paper accordion, “Memories of Rain” slowly unfolds Moni’s last four days in London, exposing the soiled creases in her relationship with Anthony, the memories obscured by more recent events, and the silences and resentments that have been pleated into their 10-year marriage.

In poetic prose that corresponds beautifully to the demands of her novel, Gupta combines psychological realism with a clarion lyricism, depicting the sensual and sentimental with stylistic precision. Sentences sometimes stream through five or six pages at a time, the whipping rush of memory and narrative washing away conventional syntax and description. Dialogue from the past and present is not set apart on the page but incorporated into paragraphs that encompass the voices of Moni and Anthony and their shifting perspectives.

Gupta writes about the failure of marriage with remarkable compassion. Her depictions of love’s “penitent affection” rival some of the more intimate scenes of betrayal and sadness in books like Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When Anthony returns home to Moni after his first night with Anna, the woman who would become his mistress, he “spilled heavy, sweet tears upon the field of hair that stretched across his pillow, in the darkness he had listened for the heartbeats of their child while the lingering scent of Anna’s ivory flesh preyed upon sleep, and in his pain, he had reasoned that even if he had left (Moni) behind in the smoky Calcutta winters, he would have felt, even more sharply, that he was betraying their love, for he would not have tired of the memory of her eyes as quickly as he had become immune to their mystifying presence . . . “

Caught between regret and passion, Anthony stays with Moni. But Moni, who has since insulated herself from Anthony’s despair and allowed her own grief to wash over her in “mute waves,” can now choose neither reconciliation nor rebellion. Her only recourse is escape; she must steal away from the man who could not abandon her and their child, knowing that “she would never have recovered from his love” had she not once been engulfed by his passion.

Memory is more palpable than the present in “Memories of Rain.” Indeed, Gupta’s characters sometimes seem like shadows of themselves. Preoccupied with their own thoughts and worries, Anthony and Moni occasionally lapse into runic meditations (“This he knew, that he must cast the desire of the afternoon in dense abstraction, as time would have wrought from the supernatants of unrecorded recollection”), but the narrative balance is quickly restored by descriptions of countervailing precision.

Hoping that Anthony’s anguish over her impending departure won’t be diluted by relief, Moni remembers her bout with bronchitis during her first British winter. She had lain in bed, knowing that “if she should die now, he will clench in his crazed palms the forest of clothes that she would wear no more, bruise his lips upon the rough gold thread, drown his misery in the wail of tearing silk . . . . “ Now, years after Anthony’s first betrayal, his continuing affection is a punishing reminder that his desire for her has been muted.

Sunetra Gupta is steeped in a centuries-old literary tradition that found its richest expression in the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th Century and in the consummate voice of Tagore, and which has been sustained through the stories of contemporary Bengali writers like Manik Bandyopadhyay and Mahasveta Devi. Like her own quiet protagonist, Gupta is also drawn to Shakespeare, Keats and the Bronte sisters--indeed, to the whole of English Romanticism. But unlike Moni, who courses backward through memory, through the odes of Keats and the songs of Tagore, to return to the home in Calcutta she should never have left, Gupta is anything but Keats’ “foster child of silence and slow time.”