This collection of nineteen short stories breathes new life into the inner make-up of the people of Northeast India, the Nagas in particular. The stories are bound together with a strong sense of attachment to the mountains, of a oneness with them. The Nagas have lived in them for centuries. From the advent of Christianity in the latter part of the 19th century to the present times, the stories cover a span of one hundred years and more. The arrival of the Japanese in a small village during the Second World War: a woman battling amnesia: a truck driver coping with loneliness: a man crossing over into Burma: children visiting their mother for the last time, lying on her death bed. These are stories of ordinary people and their lives: stories often left untold: stories swept away in the cross currents of political upheavals. Modernisation is portrayed as no more than the growth of new skin cells: the falling away of dead skin. Violence has little or no role in this process of re-juvenation. Changed reactions to familiar phenomena rise from change of alignments within.