A BOX OF PAIN

Sometimes, the mind needs food to get back on the creative path. A slight trigger is enough to do so. I have been going through a rough patch, for the past few months, and felt that nothing will work anymore. The darkness around amplified and smothered the soul to wander in a hole.Weaned myself away from the cacophony of gregarious milieu and wilted into a silence. Maybe this silence rang out the inner bells of my wandering soul. I immersed myself in reading and watching documentaries.

I started by reading an autobiography" A DROP IN THE OCEAN" of a prolific Dogri poet Padma Sachdev.A Padmashri and a Sahitya Academy awardee. What a journey she had! She left me spell-bound . A journey filled with hardships of losing one's parent at a young age, the agony of partition ,a broken marriage, displacement, fighting against a terminal disease,ostracised by the community for being daring enough to divorce her spouse. Amazing portrayal of an audacious personality indeed.

                                           
                                                                Image from Google

I found a linear connection with her autobiography. The parallels were indeed jaw dropping, considering the topography of her existence and myself. We come from two different worlds. She a mountain lass and I a sea urchin.The most important bond, which I felt connected us was the passion for words. Words weaved in sync when the heart gets wounded at a loss of dear ones or lost love. When autumn cries foul and the melancholy exalt into a suppressed groan.Her poetry brought out the ethos to the forefront with a force which I didn't know how to reckon with.

Her autobiography helped me to understand that  life can be cruel, and creativity still survives despite all the odds.One's existence is not measured in riches, when words build the bridges on the wounded soul.It is the flow of acceptance of all that comes in our way, which makes us what we are.

Box of Pain by Padma Sachdev

This head

That you see on my shoulders

Is not my head

It's a box of pain

It jingles like a jingle box

Pain moves in it round and round

Smoke rises

It smells

Like the smell of a pyre.

There are other pains too

Several of them

Some of memories

Some of secrets

That cannot be kept

Nor thrown away

Some pains of today

Some of yesterday.

But

There is another pain also

Which doesn't make a sound

Which is only there

This pain is of that suffering

Which I do not share with you any more.

Translated from Dogri by Shivnath

I am participating in write tribe festival of words #4