Deeplakshmi Saikia is a research scholar from Tezpur, Assam, India. She is currently enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research is a visual and ethnographic study of the Assamese neo-Vaishnavite manuscript paintings. Her fields of interest include religion, cultural studies, manuscript studies, and the history of Assam. Always an insatiable reader of books, she finds it amusing that eventually her Ph.D. research also ended up delving into pre-modern books. She believes books and the written word act as powerful and important records of events, experiences, thoughts, ideas and feelings. And sometimes, fiction is realer than reality.