Capturing moments of life

THE afternoon clouds have parted and heavy showers make Singapore Sports Hub look like a giant bowl floating in a shallow silvery lake.

I get out of the Stadium MRT station, admiring its architectural curves. I am here to meet Dr Uma Trilok, a bilingual writer from India, who is visiting Singapore for the launch of her anthology of poems, Moments.

My phone rings. It's Dr Trilok, informing me she is waiting for me in a cafe in Kallang Wave Mall.

Minutes later, I locate her at the mall. She is sitting near the edge of the cafe, holding her mobile phone in one hand, her long hair parted in the middle, and a pair of eye-glasses sitting on top of her head. Her Punjabi face lights up with a smile when she spots me.

We formally introduce ourselves, and soon find out that we are fellow Delhiwallas.

She was born in Ludhiana and schooled in a convent in the hills of Shimla and Dehradun.

After decades of teaching, she now divides her time between Delhi and Singapore. Her only daughter Saumya is a faculty member at the Singapore Management University (SMU).

Dr Trilok is a bilingual poet, accomplished in Hindi and English, a novelist, short-story writer and an academic. She has a doctorate in education management from Delhi University. Besides being an administrator, she was a principal of a postgraduate college and has taught at various universities, including the Punjab University and Delhi University.

I ask her when her poetic journey started.

"I did not decide to be a poet," she tells me, "it was poetry that took me in." While teaching in Delhi, she slowly morphed from a trained kathak dancer and Indian classical vocalist singing for All India Radio into a poet.

Over steaming cups of coffee in Delhi's famous Coffee House, she grew bolder in her poetic endeavours, supported by master poets such as Rakshat Puri and Keshav Malik.

Dr Trilok, like a true friend, has paid homage to Puri and Malik in her anthology, Moments. She longingly remembers the moments that helped her find her poetic soul in the company of Delhi's famous poets.

"I can't resist writing about my personal contact with Rakshat and Keshav, when we used to meet at the Coffee House to recite poems to each other every Saturday forenoon," she writes in her introductory note of Moments. She especially remembers two poems that recall those moments, like this one:

Poetry meet

At the coffee house

As a young poet

I read hesitatingly

Not for those who are listening

But for a response or a reaction

From Keshav Malik.

After publishing three collections of poetry, she hit upon a story that turned into a very successful book, and brought her fame.

It was her work Amrita Imroz - A Love Story, published in three languages simultaneously by Penguin Books, India. Over time, this bestseller was translated into six more languages.

The book is about the love story between Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam and her artist lover and life-long companion Imroz.

"It was the result of 10 years of my friendship with Amrita," Dr Trilok reveals. She also acknowledges the debt to her mentor and guru, Renoo Nirula, in making the book a publishing success.

After the success of that book, she has continued to write both prose and poetry.

Some of her works include In The Times Of Love And Longing, Us Paar, Dibiya Chandi Ki, Khayalon Ke Saaye, Teesra Bindu and Of Autumn Roses. Woh Nahi Padhta Meri Kavita was another great hit, she adds.

She has also done a play, Zindagi Ke Canvas Se, in which she used the Pahadi language. The play was honoured with the Sahitya Kala Akademi Award.

Dr Trilok will be releasing Moments at SMU on March 21. Edited by her, this book is a collection of poems written by six poets (including herself) from different parts of the world: Shubh Schiesser, Sara Carson-Smith, Nibedita Sen, Roopank Chaudhary and Amitabh Mitra. Hailing from the US, South Africa, Singapore, Ireland and India, they have expressed beauty, sound, rhythm, rhyme, inner emotions and sentiments, in their own individual ways and styles in the poems.

"This anthology is an effort to take the reader to create his own "moments" of joy, sorrow, love, beauty, relevance, laughter, hope, trust and much more," she says.

Award-winning writer and poet Jeet Thayil has hailed the anthology as a piece of work that "represents a community, separated by the sea and connected too - in familial ways - by the unlikely histories of a shared English language".

As our meeting comes to an end, we exchange books. She signs a copy of Moments for me. I give her one of my own books as a "writerly" gesture.

tabla@sph.com.sg