“It’s the way of the world, new in place of the old, but still, all those trees and plants and vegetables and flowers, so good and lush and kind somehow.”

“And you mustn’t forget to include Kay in your all-round felicitations; for you don’t need to take my word for it, you can find internal evidence in the book itself that but for her there would have been no seventh book.”

“What do you want from a poem? Do you go to poems for facts and information, or do you seek out poems because they express singular observations in unpredictable language, stir the imagination, open up possibilities?”

The narrative follows a dance teacher whose lessons in Bharatanatyam intertwine with the narrator’s growing understanding of the Tamil struggle for liberation.