A novel, but without the core around which it usually revolves. A person, but not the one who inhabits Russian literature. India, but not the one we expect. Love and burning intimacy, but through them - the desire for something else. Complex intellectual optics with reckless openness, like in childhood. A paradise of metaphors, symphonic writing with an elusive change of registers. Jungles, tigers, elephants, extreme experiences, Buddhist caves, life with hermits, a Sanskrit garden, trance mysteries, a meeting with the king of forest tribes, Sufi speech whirling between West and East, but through this romantic exoticism - the path to the source, a shimmering kinship with the world . A world that began and began to move from the smile of Shakti. This path is dramatic and wonderful. An odyssey of writing, sailing where words are shunned. Sergei Solovyov is a poet, one of the brightest representatives of metarealism. Born in Kyiv, lives in Munich, and has been traveling around India for the last 17 years. The author’s prose is classified as so-called intensive writing, in which “the text draws you in - and then the meanings and associations branch out, expand - and the reading pauses by itself, and you want to place a bookmark not between the pages, but between the sentences. Or between words” (A. Ulanov). “Shakti’s Smile,” while remaining a separate book, forms a kind of trilogy with the story “Amorth” (2005) and the novel “Adam’s Bridge” (2013).