About the Book

There are things on this subcontinent-rituals, objects, gestures-that have existed for centuries but are now vulnerable, dying, at the edge of our lives. Extinctions catches them in movement, as they fade, as they set. It looks at them variously, through factual observation, or historical gaze, or a prose poem paying tribute. These are individual memories merged with the memories of a civilisation. Sometimes the two become one. The attempt is not only to look back but also to consider where we are. And so, Extinctions creates an encounter that lights up both the long enduring and the new. Following the ridge of regrets, fate, thoughts that came too late, a future appears, even of the past. Untamed, animate, time becomes many, and landscapes continue to be formed, not naming themselves yet, not conscious of being an island or a continent. On the blackened iron scales in the marketplace, a thousand years equals today.

About the Author

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life and Five Movements in Praise, and a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. She has also translated a selection of Tagore's fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories. Her work has been published in journals across the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, The Caravan and the Chinese Jintian. Mohanty is the founder-editor of the online literature journal Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers meet held in New Delhi.