Through these spare poems, Sharmistha Mohanty weaves together, inseparably, the contemporary and the almost primal. The result is a singular voice, new and old at the same time. In its oral quality, in its questioning and assertion, in its vigour and vulnerability, it seems to be uttering anew what was once collective, and perhaps still is, under the surface. The poems in The Gods Came Afterwards are a calling out, far beyond the personal, through an unusually pared down English language and a long Indic heritage.