The Dark Abode is a collage presentation of South Asian feminist novelist Sarojini Sahoo's novel and American poet and painter Ed Baker's 23 sketches, which deal with terrorism that people often face from micro- to macrosphere.

[1] The novel begins with questioning the mere physicality of the man-woman relationship but then transports the reader into the higher planes of platonic love.

The central character of the novel is Kuki, a Hindu woman from India who falls (and then rises) in love with a Muslim artist from Pakistan.

Sahoo subtly balances these two roles and at the same time, highlights the superiority of a wife in a pragmatic world.

Uma is a symbol of many noble traditional (Hindu) virtues: fertility, marital felicity, spousal devotion, asceticism and power.

Beautiful and (benignly) powerful, she is also known as Shakti, Parvati (consort of Shiva), Ambika, Annapurna, Bhairavi, Candi, Gauri, Durga, Jagadmata (Mother of the World), Kali, Kanyakumari, Kumari, painter Mahadevi, and Shyama.

[8] The novel was first published in Oriya in 2005 from Time Pass Publication, Bhubaneswar under the title Gambhiri Ghara and in 2007, it was translated into Bengali by Dilwar Hossain and Morshed Shafiul Hossain as Mithya Gerosthali (ISBN 984-404-287-9) and was published from Bangladesh by Anupam Prakashani, Dhaka.

[9] In 2011, the Hindi translation of the novel was published under the banner of Rajpal & Sons, Delhi with title Band Kamra (ISBN 978-81-7028-954-8).