Soul uninterrupted

Through pain, poetry and performance, NAVKIRAT SODHI tells her story of recovery and a love that dances along the way.

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I never knew how fast fire spreads. It started with a tea light along the driveway. As we were leaving a party, I felt heat at my ankles and in the time it took me to look down, the flames had reached my thighs. My instinct was to extinguish the fire with my hands or tear my skirt, but the fabric had disappeared, leaving in its stead melting skin. Animalistic, guttural howls escaped my throat as I tried to cut through the flames with an invisible sword. GG [fashion designer Gaurav Gupta] rushed in to help me and started shouting for water, and luckily, a guard nearby had a bucket-full kept aside for his air cooler. He splashed that on us from a distance. GG’s right hand was scorched and I remember thinking, “That's his sketching hand.”

Before the accident, I prided myself on being fiercely independent—physically, emotionally, spiritually. During the recovery months, I learnt that dependency is not weakness. In fact, the sharing of pain can lead to conjoined healing.

Time, too, changed meaning. As I swung between various dimensions—whether from heavy drugs, incomprehensible pain or deep meditation—I realised that time, as we understand it, is imaginary. All that matters is what you sculpt from it. Time in its larger form, where births and rebirths occur simultaneously, is too vast for us to grasp. All we can do is wonder and surrender.

The shift in my relationship with my reflection is ironic. When my body was physically whole, I experienced a kind of mental friction, a restlessness. Now, although my physical self has changed, my mind is at peace. It’s full of harmony, gratitude and the quiet conviction that I have more than enough. While my relationship with my body has in many ways been rewritten, the one thing I’ve reclaimed on my own terms is my lust for life.