About the Book: Five Movements in Praise A book as vast as the world, as light as breath, as passionate as love, as humble as prayer. Sharmistha Mohanty has written an enchanting book, profound and delicate, a book to which I feel particularly close: life as a journey, to discover oneself and others; the journey as an immersion into a different time, intoa present that widens out to embrace the world. A journey in which the self rediscovers the most authentic truth about itself, becoming truly anonymous or concretely universal rather than vainly subjective, as the self always is when it loves, roams, when it watches the shadow descending into the valleys, the ruins of ancient cities and the garbage of modern ones. A lucid and relentless book. About the Author: Sharmistha Mohanty Sharmistha Mohanty is a clear and present example of the writer as caver, her work a descent into rock in pursuit of a shape half known and calling. Its not surprising that her touchstone is the great temple at Ellora. Her reader moves with something of the excitement of the soldier who discovered that series of caves when out hunting, but the authors stance is that of the first sculptor as he paused on the volcanic outcrop to imagine his way down into the living rock. An artists work has always been to chip away in a mineral darkness, but Mohanty brings to what might have turned an abstract project (the uncovering of a design fully formed in the head), a private tenderness, as she discovers image after image of a love whose emblem is the sexless caress, of lovers leaning out into nothing, of strangers meeting and touching in a mausoleum or in a painted forest. Reviews ?Sharmistha Mohanty is remarkable above all for her determination to shift narrative away from the easy urgencies of Western fiction towards a text that hovers between the contemplative and the hypnotic, sculpting extended landscapes of feeling from the quiet friction between realism and myth.