Echoes of this question resonate in different regions of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The essay on Burma darkens as it proceeds. Aung San Suu Kyi in house arrest seemed to the author more ebullient than in freedom. There are more questions facing the country than can be answered easily. In contrast, the essay on Cambodia ends on an epiphanic note, celebrating the resilience of its people.
Dance becomes the metaphor for resistance to violence, the triumph of the human spirit.
Only a few girls were chosen for training in classical dance out of thousands who aspired to the privilege it conferred on their families. From the well-researched and beautifully documented report with which the book begins, we know that when King Sisowath of Cambodia took his entourage to Marseille in 1906, the people of France, including the great sculptor Rodin, had a chance to see their performance, and they went into raptures. Rodin's sketch of a Cambodian dancer is on the cover of this volume, and five other sketches appear inside. Yet the author uses dance as a symbol of the continuity of culture in Cambodia and a harbinger of its rebirth after devastation. To me, it is not these symbols, but the acutely observed human details in their ordinariness, beauty, incongruity or horror that make the book remarkable and of course the lithe prose in which these details are recorded.