A novel, but without the core around which it usually spins. A person, but not the one who has lived in 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, as in childhood, openness. A paradise of metaphors, symphonic writing with an elusive change of registers. Jungles, tigers, elephants, extreme experiences, Buddhist caves, life with hermits, Sanskrit garden, trance mysteries, meeting with the king of forest tribes, Sufi whirling of speech between the West and the East, but through this romantic exoticism — the way to the source, shimmering kinship with the world. A world that began and was set in motion by Shakti's smile. This path is dramatic and wonderful. An odyssey of writing, sailing to where words are shunned. Sergey Solovyov is a poet, one of the brightest representatives of metarealism. Born in Kiev, lives in Munich, has been traveling in India for the last 17 years. The author's prose is attributed to the so-called intensive writing, in which "the text drags on — and then the meanings and associations branch out, expand — and reading stops by itself, and you want to place a bookmark not between pages, but between sentences. Or between the words" (A. Ulanov). "Shakti's Smile", remaining a separate book, makes up a kind of trilogy with the novella "Amort" (2005) and the novel "Adam's Bridge" (2013).