Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother. Longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she ultimately must confront the tensions between romantic love, her art and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.

Dreams collide with reality, modernity with antiquity, and myth with identity in the 12 arresting stories of A HOUSE IS A BODY. In “Earthly Pleasures,” a young painter living alone in San Francisco begins a secret romance with one of India’s biggest celebrities, and desire and ego are laid bare. In “A Simple Composition,” a husband’s professional crisis leads to his wife’s discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy. And in the title story, an exhausted mother watches, hypnotized by fear, as a California wildfire approaches her home. Set in the United States and India, they reveal small but intense moments of beauty, pain and power that contain the world.