India, Feb. 13 -- As a child of 10, Lakshmipriya Devi remembers her heart pounding every time there was a knock on the front door.

"We didn't know if the person on the other side was someone trying to hide from the army or someone coming to extort and threaten us," she says. The memory remains so visceral that, decades later, her voice shakes when she talks about it.

Not wanting this to be the only world their child knew, Devi's parents admitted her to a boarding school in New Delhi, far from Imphal, and from the insurgency, ethnic violence and State overreach that still plague their beloved Manipur.

By the time she left, though, Devi - who would never really live in Manipur again - was taking something indelible with her: stories, of ...