"Like Indira Ghandi and her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sudha Koul was born a Kashmiri Brahmin. The Hindus, though a tiny minority of Kashmir's population, lived in great harmony with Muslims, leading lives intertwined in the same cultural fabric. Kashmiris were isolated in their valley, called "Paradise on Earth" by Moghul emperor Jehangir, and enjoyed a culture so dissimilar to any other in India that they were largely unaffected by what was happening in the world around them.

In 1947, the year of Sudha's birth, the partition of India and Pakistan by the British and the first stirrings of fundamentalism in Kashmir ignited what would gradually become a religious and political inferno.".

"Sudha grew up immersed in the colorful legends and rituals of Kashmiri life, now imperiled for Hindus and Muslims. Her story is that of a lost Eden, full of the textures, tastes, and magical tales of a distant, at times contradictory world. Though she attends school faithfully, along with her Muslim girlfriends, completing her graduate education and becoming a magistrate, she looks forward to the marriage her parents will arrange for her.

She participates fully in the rites and rituals of Kashmiri culture and mourns her parting from her beloved valley when marriage takes her to the United States." "This is a memoir of a land now consumed by political and religious turmoil, a story of a girl's passage into maturity, marriage, and motherhood in the midst of an exquisite and fragile world that will never entirely be the same."--BOOK JACKET.