BENGALURU: Poems written by Sangita Nambiar deal with emotions that people are fascinated by but shy away from – hate, betrayal and jealousy. There is even one on forbidden love. The debutant-author conveys the emotions effectively.
Illustrations for the book, From Within the Brink, are predominantly done in black and white with red to highlight any idea. They have been done by The Circus, a Hyderabad-based creative studio, and add charm to the poems.
Sangita’s poems also touch on dark phases of a person’s life that he or she had buried long ago. “It will not scare you anymore if you make peace with it,” says Sangita.
In her poem Hate The True Healer, she asks her readers to let hate take control of them and let it eat them bit by bit till nothing remains and thus exorcise it out of their body leaving behind a whole new sensation of nothingness. “A state of being called indifference, that untouchable purity,” she writes in her book.
“My son liked this poem because he was going through something that had developed hate inside him. Anyone who is going through the same emotion will relate to it,” she says adding that, “Physical scars can be healed but scars left on our souls change us emotionally.”
The stories are picked from the lives of people she sees everyday, the ones that have left a mark in her life.
“Some of them are stories of my own encounters with life. Even the ones that I see on social media are dealt with in the book,” she says.
Her poem Acid Love delves with the pain and agony that a victim of an acid attack goes through and how the attacker feels victorious and escapes as she breathes her last.
Abusive relationships, break-up, stalkers, obsessive behaviour and betrayal are some of the other topics she has covered.
A reader can’t stop at one. The book will keep you hooked until you read the last one in it.
She has kept her approach to the subjects simple. “I want poems to sound simple so that everyone can read them,” she says. She started with creative writing 20 years ago, with copy writing.
While she has penned 50 poems, for the book, she has filtered them down to the ones that her family members, her friends and the people whom she shared her work with could relate to. “There are about 30 poems in the book. I wrote about things that matter to me. Later I realsied that some of them made sense only to me. That is when I filtered them and picked the ones that everyone could relate to. They should be able to read it in the bus, at the dentist’s clinic or anywhere they are stuck,” she says.
Ask her about the one that she liked most, she points at fourth one in the list of her 30 poems, that is An affair to remember.
“That is because it was the first one I wrote and I feel I have written about emotions in a nicer way. I feel satisfied when I think of it. Others who have read the book also liked the same poem. Many others liked Forest Fire. People in their 40s found Taboo Love more interesting,” she says.
The book took her about seven months to complete. It is currently available in hard copy and can soon be read over Kindle.