'It has healed me': Actress and dancer Sandhya Mridul on her first poetry book

Mridul counts figures such as Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Leonard Cohen and actor Robin Williams as her inspirations. Pic/Getty Images

I'm feeling like a lovely, bright, blue butterfly right now," Sandhya Mridul tells us over the phone from her home in Gurgaon. What has stimulated this metamorphosis in the actress and dancer, who became well-known for Zee TV's Koshish-Ek Aashaa which aired in the early 2000s, and then for her performances in films like Saathiya, Page 3 and Angry Indian Goddesses, is a process that she charts in Untamed, her debut collection of poems, brought out by independent publishing house Readomania.

Through a total of 172 poems that speak with courage and candour about heartbreak, desire, loss, separation, despair, and hope, Mridul records a process of healing, a process of letting go of things that were holding her back. "You go through experiences and become a shut person where you don't allow anything in," she says, "because you're not discerning enough to know what's good or bad. This book has been absolute catharsis for me. It has healed me, opened me up, and released a lot of resistance from my system… I feel like a new person. It has taken some sort of restlessness out of me. It was a heart opening exercise."

While speaking of figures such as Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, and Leonard Cohen as inspirations, it is comedian and actor Robin Williams, she says, who has been one of her heroes - his famous words about the saddest people trying their hardest to make others happy resonating greatly. "People used to tell me that I was funny," shares Mridul, a descriptor that became limiting after a while. "I only accepted that side of me. I never wanted to accept the sad side. It was there, but I was ashamed of it. The expectations from me were too high because I was a lively, fun, bold, bindaas girl, and there was no place for me to be sad. People would say, ‘Hey Sandy, not you, ya!'" Figures like Williams, she says, inspired her to own her vulnerability and be okay with it, and "break the image that people had created of me and that I had created of myself as a one-dimensional creature who was only bubbly. And I felt like a cheat because I wasn't. There was a lot inside me that I was not addressing."

Mridul's debut poetry collection is made up of 172 poems. Pic/Getty Images

The other inspiration, Mridul tells us, was her brother whom she lost in 2021."Pankaj bhaiya was a brilliant poet who used the name ‘sifr', which means ‘zero' in Arabic, where it all begins," says Mridul. "He wrote in Urdu and English, and was one of my favourite poets. He owned his sadness with such courage. It really broke my heart to see Bhaiya, whom I looked up to in pain, but his words were just stunning. His is the book I want to publish next."

Calling herself "a cursive person" who prefers putting pen to paper, Mridul has dabbled in writing over the years but it was during the pandemic, at a time when she was locked in and alone, that things gained momentum. "I would rush through my chores and then sit with my diary and fill its blank pages," she recalls. A habit of journaling, spurred on by American author Julia Cameron's 1992 self-help book The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, also encouraged her to write everything down. "I think because of my journaling, the dam just burst. And then poetry started coming to me," she shares, describing an organic, uninhibited way in which it has flowed from her. "…Just a flood of feelings/Filling pages, taking space… The body purging and pulsing/My whole being crumbling. /I'm rising, I'm falling/ And breaking and building. /All on a piece of paper," writes Mridul in Paper Tiger, which stood out to this writer for its powerful rendering of the process of bringing words to life. "Poetry has always had my heart," admits Mridul. "I would be lying down and something would come to me, and I would just get up and start writing it. It was never an effort."

Mridul, who as a child wanted to be Helen when she grew up, still loves her dual artistic passions of dance and acting. Writing on the other hand, she says, has felt less like a creative pursuit and more like a means to a deeper connection with herself. "I feel like I've been sitting on a fence for a very long time. And now I've crossed over. What writing has given me, nothing else has. It has been my saviour. It has given me a very rooted person. It's given me a me that is new. And I don't feel like a fake anymore. I don't feel like I'm playing a part all the time. I feel absolutely liberated."

The poems which were written sporadically over four years initially amounted to over 300 pieces. It was the task of compiling them that drove home for the poet the growth that she had managed in that time. "The editing process was interesting because [initially] I wanted to throw out something that I was not resonating with anymore. But then I realised that that's the whole journey. I may not be the person who wrote that poem that year, but I went through that…I realised how dark I felt then, how broken I felt. I saw that whole thing before my eyes. And that's what this book is actually - that entire journey in words."