Dr Nidhi Kansal’s A Rainbow in My Eyes: 

A Rainbow of Love, Loss and Resilience

Akram Sidiqui

( Reviewer)

Book: A Rainbow In My Eyes

Genre: A collection of Poetry 

Author: Dr Nidhi Kansal 

The author of this book - Dr. Nidhi  Kansal is known to me from the times ,when the social media platform "Facebook" was in quite nacience. It was most probably 2009, when a simple friend request turned into a bond of selfless friendship and ultimately into a belief  that is beyond expression.

As much as I have known Nidhi ,she is too bold and I have never seen her wearing a mask to her pen. In many of her poems, she has expressed male tartauff lying behind the false love wows, too brazenly.

 Her book “A Rainbow in My Eyes" belongs, in many ways, to the category of books that coax a reader to read more and more in a single go. It is not merely a collection of poems but it is an intense personal conversation between love and loss, longing and acceptance, memory and forgetting, desire and dignity. Spread across hundred and fourteen poems, the collection travels through several shades of the human heart and keeps moving repeatedly from tenderness to anguish and from anguish towards a hard-earned sense of self. 

The title itself is perhaps the most tempting tool and appropriate doorway into the book. A rainbow, as we all know, is never born in an entirely clear sky. It needs rain, sunlight and the right angle of light.This all comes true of the poems in the book.The colours in Nidhi's poetic world emerge largely from clouds of separation, disappointment, loneliness, desire and emotional turbulence. Yet darkness is not all to be allowed to have the final word. Somewhere beneath the volumes of grief expressed there remains a stubborn colour of hope.

The opening poems immediately establish the emotional territory of the collection. 

In most of the poems, the beloved is not merely a person here, sometimes, he becomes the sun, moon, home, prayer, music and sometimes even an extension of the poet's own existence.

“My Dear soulmate, I was born to love you

I'm your moon, you're my sun

The sky is ours to glow

As love within us grows.”

These opening lines from the poem " My Dear Soulmate" reveal the fundamental grammar of Nidhi's love poetry. For her, love is not a casual emotional arrangement but a total cosmic affair. Here the  beloved and the lover become celestial bodies, each deriving meaning from the other's presence.There seems something deliberately innocent about this imagery, almost childlike in its faith in permanence.The poet is not interested in explaining love scientifically or philosophically but she wants to surrender her own self  to it.

While reading further ,the collection gradually makes us understand that such complete surrender carries a price and the price is never less than life itself.

One of the most striking things about this collection is the manner in which the book changes its emotional temperature.The early poems dream of togetherness while as  the later poems begin to instill into a reader what happens when that togetherness starts slipping away. 

But poems like ,When Love Became an Unfinished Story, The Day I Erased You, Even After the Last Wound, Last Seen and the like form something like an extended elegy to a relationship that refuses to disappear even after it has ended. While it also makes the reader contemplate and feel the quiet devastation, when Love Becomes an Unfinished Story.

As a reader ,I still feel the piercing power of one of the strongest metaphors used in the book, it is "The unfinished letter becomes the unfinished relationship.” 

One thing is quite clear in the book that there is no dramatic closure, no satisfying explanation, no final sentence which can put the heart at rest. Yes, what is finally left, is the unbearable territory of what could have been. This, I feel, is perhaps one of the most painful forms of grief where not losing what was, but losing the possibility of what might have become, makes one stand on toes.

The poet herself recognises this later in the same poem:

“Not peace.

Not closure.

Not forgetting.

Just acceptance

the silent courage

to love what was,

to grieve what wasn't.”

It is here where her poetry becomes more mature. The author is no longer demanding that the past be erased. She is not even asking for conventional closure. She arrives at something quieter and far more difficult decision and that is acceptance in totality. This movement is truly important because the book is not ultimately all about heartbreak. It is actually about what heartbreak does to a human being and how that human being slowly learns to live with the pestering scars.

Here one thing is really noteworthy, it is about the digital vocabulary of contemporary relationships, which unusually makes a prominent place in the collection. 

Poems like , Last Seen: The Graveyard of Us, 900 + Missed Calls, Blue Ticks on WhatsApp, Fifth Day of Silence and other poems bring love into the age of smartphones and read receipts. This is the author's undying prowess and one of the collection's more interesting features.The poet, while making use of her prowess, takes something as ordinary and technologically mundane as a WhatsApp status and turns it very aptly into an emotional landscape.

“You stopped reaching for me.

Stopped choosing me.

Stopped making space for me

in your crowded world.”

The simplicity exercised here is deliberate because no complicated metaphor has been used here. The wound comes directly from the everyday vocabulary of abandonment. In contrast, in the good old days, a lover would wait for a letter or a telephone call but here the lover would wait for a blue tick, a typing notification, a Last Seen etc etc. And the fact is amply evident that technology has changed the mechanics of waiting, but has not changed the loneliness of the person who waits.

While taking loneliness to the next level the author has given it almost a physical shape in the poem "The Room That Knows My Name".

“These walls have memorized my breathing.

They have seen my knees meet the floor,

heard my courage crack in soft places,

watched me stitch myself together

with shaking hands and borrowed hope.”

It is here where Nidhi's poetry moves beyond romantic love and begins speaking about the private architecture of suffering.The room becomes a witness. It is witness to what the outside world does not know. One thing is amply clear that  during the day, the speaker performs strength while at night, she allows herself to become vulnerable. 

The poem's final admission “I am trying” is perhaps more powerful than any declaration of victory. It tells us that survival is sometimes not heroic in appearance but at times it simply means getting through another evening.

However, the collection's emotional epicentre is not confined to personal relationships, but most of the times the poet turns outward and speaks about women, dignity, social judgement and the particular loneliness of a woman who has been pushed outside the accepted boundaries of society. Here the author has tried to convey a paradox to the readers. It is that despite being born of a Woman, this society is very much  blind to Her Tears.

“A separated woman walks.

Under countless staring eyes

Eyes that judge,

Eyes that hunt,

Eyes that wait

To tear her apart.”

This while going upstream refuses to romanticise the condition of a separated woman. Instead, it examines the social gaze that follows her.The woman is judged not merely for what has happened to her, but for having survived it. In the ending lines of the poem The author has strongly fathomed out the depths of a woman by saying;

“Wounded, but not weak.

Broken, but not erased.

She carries the weight

Of a cruel society

And still breathes hope.”

In another verse,The poet does not pretend that independence eliminates longing. It acknowledges the contradiction. A woman can know her worth and still ache for companionship. She can choose freedom and still feel the weight of solitude.That emotional honesty saves the poem from becoming merely declarative.

"No one can define my worth,

Or pin my value to a lover's whim.

Yet, oh, the heart beats heavy.”

The same inward journey reaches its most beautiful expression in the poem "The Apology I Owed the Mirror." Here the poet stops addressing the absent lover and begins addressing herself.

“You are enough.

You are worthy.

And most importantly

Your existence matters,

Every single day.”

This is perhaps one of the most important turns in the entire collection. The author has openly come up with the courage and strength a woman has, despite repeatedly asking another person to stay with her ,eventually becomes self reliant and learns to stay with herself.The mirror, which once reflected inadequacy, becomes a witness to reconciliation and invigoration.

And then comes the title poem," A Rainbow in My Eyes" it  gathers many of these strands into one imaginative space.The poet has succeeded aptly in creating a dream-world where she can escape the limitations of reality and construct a place where emotions are respected:

“With a rainbow in my eyes, I rise, I embrace,

In the world of my dreams, I've found my true place.”

The rainbow therefore becomes more than a romantic image. It literally becomes an assertion of identity, which represents many facets existing inside one person and the person is the lover himself, the wounded woman, the dreamer, the daughter, the poet, the survivor. The book's title is consequently not about seeing a beautiful world but  it is about learning to create colour even when the world outside refuses to provide it.

Dr. Nidhi's poetry also contains one more expressable dimension that should not be overlooked. It is sensuality.The latter part of the collection becomes considerably more uninhibited, with poems such as "The Lyrics of Yours Are the Lyrics of Mine, Hugging You Fills Me With Unbound Love, Volcano of Love, My First Kiss, We Are the Creature of Romantic Desires and The Platonic Love. Here is the stuff I talked about in the beginning: Nidhi being too bold and unequivocally strong never wears a mask to her pen. She writes about physical attraction without trying to disguise it behind excessive euphemism. In this respect, the collection becomes a record of desire as much as it is a record of heartbreak.

It is here where sensuality becomes almost musical:

“The lyrics of yours are the lyrics of mine,

Woven in whispers, stitched in time,

A shared melody echoing in the silence.”

The language here is softer and more lyrical. The two lovers become one composition. Breath becomes rhythm, heartbeat becomes chorus and embrace becomes the canopy. It is love imagined not merely as emotion but as a shared language.

There is also a striking contrast between these sensuous poems and the deeply wounded poems that precede them.That contrast makes the collection feel more human. Real relationships are rarely made of one emotion. Love can be tender and angry, spiritual and physical, devotional and possessive, hopeful and destructive. Nidhi allows all these contradictions to coexist.

The geographical and cultural landscape of Kashmir enters the collection most powerfully as the poem "When the Valley Forgot How to Sing" with its Kashmir centric laments. Besides laments ,hope and prayers have too been expressed in the very poem;

“May the valley smile again.

May children inherit songs instead of sorrow.

May peace become more than a dream.

And may Kashmir, at last,

remember how to sing.”

Though the closing lines seem to be too simple, their simplicity is actually  their strength. After so much romantic longing in the book, the poet's longing finally expands beyond the self. 

And perhaps that is where the collection "Rainbow in My Eyes" finally arrives.

Santosh Bakaya- a leading literary figure , in her foreword, aptly identifies the book's movement from love to loss and finally to acceptance, while as George Jacob describes the poems as emerging from lived experience, reflection, love, longing, loss, resilience and self-discovery.Their observations are borne out by the poems themselves.

The collection is therefore best read not as a single love story but as a map of an emotional life. It begins with the intoxicating certainty of being loved, travels through the bewilderment of distance and rejection, enters the dark rooms of loneliness, confronts social judgement, discovers sensuality, remembers Kashmir's collective wounds and finally turns towards self-respect. It is the evidence that storms have passed through the poet's sky and yet have failed to erase her colours.

And perhaps the most beautiful thing about the book is that the poet does not finally ask us to forget her pain. She asks us to understand it. She wants her poems to become companions to those who have waited, loved, lost, desired, endured and still found enough courage to begin another morning.

That is why" A Rainbow in My Eyes" is truly behind the final page even. It does not leave behind the silence of an empty book. It leaves behind a heartbeat—wounded, romantic, restless, sometimes angry, sometimes playful, but still beating.....

Writer can be reached at sidiquirayan@gmail.com