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
