Poetry has wings of its own, you can’t dictate to it: Thadani

Poet, filmmaker, and actor Lavlin Thadani discusses her book and recalls her association with Amrita Pritam

The world knows of poet Amrita Pritam’s unfulfilled romance with poet and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi. Her famous relationship with artist Imroz is the stuff couple goals are made of. But it was actor, filmmaker, and poet Lavlin Thadani — younger to the former by close to four decades — that Pritam, one of a generation’s finest literary voices, called her soulmate.

Such was their relationship that the title of Thadani’s recent collection of poems — My Soul Flower — seems almost an allusion to her mentor. Except that “she was not my mentor,” Thadani corrects the assumption.

“When you’re a soulmate, you cannot be a mentor. Amritaji never told me what to write, how to go about it,” she says.

Pritam lived a few houses away from Thadani’s place in Delhi, and the two would bond over literature, philosophy, teachings of Osho, and the like. “The affection that I got from her, who was older to both my parents, was that she would feed me chapatis dripping with ghee…,” Thadani recalls with a fond chuckle.

Thadani has played the noted poet on the stage for years now, and she recalls that it happened by way of a strange co-incidence. “I got a call from a producer, and he said, ‘Would you play Amrita?’, and he had no clue at all that I knew her that well! I was about to decline that offer because I had twentyodd films to shoot at that time. But then, intuitively, I thought, ‘Why would this role have come to me had Amritaji not been involved in calling me? And I said yes at once. Then he asked me how much I would charge, and I said, ‘Not a penny’.”

The play has been performed on the stage for years now, and is based on Pritam’s autobiography, Raseedee Ticket. “A lot of people, especially in Punjab, and professors and academics, who knew her personally, would say that they would forget that it was Lavlin on the stage.”

Packed with poetic meditations on love and inner monologues on mundane objects, My Soul Flower concludes with a dialogue in verse between Thadani and Pritam. The poet recalls, “She was sitting up on her bed and I told her that I had written a poem, and she was very excited about it. And then I said, ‘Amritaji, would you answer this with a poem?’ and wrote four lines. She answered, and I wrote another four lines, sitting on the bed. And so it just started flowing.”

And spontaneity is the overarching condition for poetry, opines Thadani. “Poetry is something that you can’t dictate to. It’s not like writing a story or a novel. Poetry has wings of its own. If it comes to you, and you’re quick enough to jot it down, it happens. But if you miss the moment… it’s gone.”

My Soul Flower ends with the poet’s homage to Osho. Thadani was a student at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune when she first visited the spiritual guru’s ashram.

She recalls, “Amritaji, Imrozji and I all used to admire him for his revolutionary thoughts. He never said, ‘Follow me’. He empowered you to think differently, to come out of the shackles of the past, and be fresh about your approach towards life. He said, ‘You discover your own philosophy of life’.”