These lines of a classic English poet were neatly entered in my diary of sayings. As a sixteen-year-old, I had my own little diary of sayings that were as preciously guarded as adults guard their reputations.

Another saying went like this:

It was also at the age of sixteen, that in the 3 am confession hours (which would occur in winter nights at exam time when four or five of us college mates would attempt to study through the night, wrapped up in quilts, drinking endless cups of coffee) that my answer to ‘if God was to grant you one wish in the world what would you ask for?, was this: “I would wish to get inside every single living being in the world — human, plant, animal — for a full five minutes, and become them, and feel what it’s like to be (them).”

A year prior to that I had quietly ‘let’ my ‘school best friends’ walk on ahead in a forest in Simla, and as soon as I could hear their voices getting distant, I quickly sank on my knees on the pine needles, fists clenched, head bent, eyes tightly shut and whispered desperately into the cold mist of the forest, “Please, please, please dear God or whoever or whatever is up there… please tell me what I am here for, please tell me what to do, what am I meant to do, how am I to live this life…” 

Twenty seconds later, I ran to join my friends, I was in a daze. What had I just done? What made me do what I had done back there in the forest?

Clearly, for me, a young adulthood had ‘love’ and ‘what am I meant for’ at the core of my being!

Two and a half decades later, at the time that I am researching the women bhakti and mystic poets for my play on Lal Ded, I find it interesting that Lal Ded gives up the space of home and marriage at the age of seventeen years to heed the mystic calling. That Andal is sixteen years of age when she declares there is to be no one else other than The Lord.

I then recall my dramatic, passionate and desperate, albeit secret, plea to the forest of so many years ago. It is even today a keen recall: that mad desire to merge and become one with the damp earth, to become it’s particular smell, to become the forest, the trees, the blue of a sky, to evaporate into the fragrance of pine needles and to die — die, die — if only I could die and become one with everything around me. Every cell in my body was exploding with the desire to melt and flow into the Universe...

And when I had whispered ‘Please tell me how to live this life….’ 

Who was this other that I had addressed? 

What presence had bent over me from above the tall pine trees to touch its face to my face…

I didn’t even know what I wanted… All I knew was that I was seeking .

It was not until I performed Laura in the play Kaanch Ghar at the age of 19 that the forest revealed the path I was seeking.

I am on stage and the world begins to flow through me and in me, and I have no need to go anywhere. 

Warm wonderful tendril-like conduits of energy, firm and strong and gentle, emerge from ‘me’, grow quickly in all directions. There are seven hundred and twenty tendrils because there are seven hundred and twenty people in the auditorium and each one of my seven hundred and twenty conduits make a simple clean connect to each person out there — like the many branches of a beautiful tree in the forest connecting to other branches of other trees.

I am in the forest, but this time the presence and I are one. I am no longer pleading to be let in. I am in. 

And I have never felt so in love. Yes, this is Love. It has to be love — when you want nothing, you are completely in this moment and all desire ceases. And you are overwhelmed with gratitude. You are once again kneeling on the forest floor. But this time you are not whispering ‘please tell me what I am to do in this life…’ 

This time you are whispering, ‘Yes yes yes…thank you…for everything everything everything…’

The world finally made sense and I knew that I am meant to act, to live my life acting. I will die a thousand times and be reborn a thousand times in this one life…and each birth will be a revelation and a grace, but, only if I make myself worthy of it.

And what does it mean, this ‘making myself worthy of it’?

It means, (as I understood it to mean), that I do not own the ‘talent’ I am celebrated for. It is a tree that grows in my garden and I am to nurture it, and tend to it and ensure that I allow it to grow by being extremely watchful that the fungus of anger, pride, malice, envy, greed, hate, arrogance do not find a place to nest. I poke into the finest crevices in its skin and weed out any little vermin before it can find a nesting space…else the destruction of the tree will be swift, the grace, I fear, will be withdrawn to disappear once again into the forest. I will be on the outside once again…

The act of theatre/film performance for an actress/actor and the preparation towards it is shamanistic. Indeed it means making your body, your instinctual, intellectual and emotional terrains vulnerable and open to accepting the spirit of the written word, the spirit of the writer, the director’s worldview, and his/her aesthetic that my body of the shaman will manifest. So every time the ghata has to be emptied so that it has the space to be filled.

And yet this is not a random act. It is not an act of possession or induced hypnosis of the self.

It is a careful, deeply explored, sifting of the material — the text, the director’s vision, my own feelings, thoughts, attitudes, pre-conceptions, prejudices and it is a ruthless sifting.

Not the tiniest pebble will be allowed to remain in the grain that will be ground to create the flour that will make my performance…the performance, I should say.

What role then, does real life play in crafting the art of the actress?

‘Real emotions’,? ‘Real love?’

The human imagination is powerful and it begins to work overtime, from the first stirrings it runs the whole trajectory of what life will be ‘forever’…

The imagination does not function, however, without an aesthetic construct — an aesthetic construct of time, space and the beloved placed carefully in it, is crucial.

A careful moment-to-moment construct of that which has to be, will be, must be..

Have I not kissed the lips of the beloved a million times, months before we actually kissed for the first time?

Have I not already walked with him, our bodies touching, every path in this world, even if I know I never will be able to?

Have I not seen one of us dying before the other one does, and whispered that ‘I will never be able to love another’ even though we know we may well be far away from each other when we die, and have we not loved before to make the ‘I will never love another…’ redundant?

Which is why I discovered at a very early stage in my personal life that in real life, the most foolish combination of three words on which lives are hinged or tacked together, is ‘I love you’. 

Foolish, meaningless, and completely empty of possibilities.

Its utterance is somehow false, desperate and, ultimately, full of fear. It also carries within it a demand for the reciprocation of the same three words.

(Modern parenting is full of the utterance of these words between parents and children…)

Between lovers, it is the absolute proof of the existence of everything but love, the beginning of the end of what was pregnant with life between two people, up to this point of its utterance.

(In most vernacular utterances, in all great poetry, I doubt if there is anything similar to this sterile ‘…I love….you/ him/her).

Where do you go from the utterance of the words ‘l Iove you’? 

To the marriage registrar? To a flat/bungalow/ apartment/with your joint names on the name plate? To a joint bank account? To everything that is a symbol of love realised/accomplished/achieved and REAL… an architectural construct in three dimensional time and space and where the imagination will often no longer be allowed to enter, where the aesthetic necessary between two people is gradually done away with in the desire for solid material proof of — Love!

Clearly in life, the ‘daily’ life we live everyday, a relationship (any relationship) cannot be independent of the aesthetic principle — the principle of elegance between two people without which the materiality of life together is a trap.

In my work as an actress, (unfortunately for those who romanticize the moments that actor’s create, as a true experience of a real life moment) the real often lacks an aesthetic, and therefore, eventually, does not become the bridge that will automatically take me across from the banal to the sublime, from real life to the reel life. 

Even as a very young actress, I intuitively understood that the space within me from where I have to develop the character has to be an empty space… free even of a me…free of pre-conceived agendas.

I am not a woman or a man or an agenda driven by the ideas of sexuality/gender/personal experiences — while everything is allowed to exist, they will be de-personalized in the crafting of the performance….

The craft of acting allows me to experience what is fearlessly truthful, and, therefore, deeply real:

It has changed my ideas of what love is.

I understand now, (that even in real life) love is water in the palm of your hand. Try closing your fist around it to keep it in your possession…

Try freezing it, it will melt and disappear the moment you close your palm around it.

Try bottling it to sip it occasionally, an evaporation still takes place, the level of water in the bottle drops.

The ruthless sifting of my ‘self’ to honour the aesthetics of my craft allows me to understand that in real life if love were to be experienced not as proven fact but instead as the rain, I could soak in it; if it was the mist, I could inhale it; if it was the sea, I could ride the waves, be submerged in the waters and, yes, sometimes, be mercilessly thrown onto the sand — and with my skin bruised and burning still plunge back into the sea… 

So, if you were to ask me, does love unrealized in real life find its way into your creative, inspired work, I can confidently say no, it does not… not unless there was present in it already the quality of elegance that was intrinsic to that which was between the two of us.

In which case was it not already a work of art?

In the actors’ life, over time, the real and the reel cannot be spiritually separated. If lived in separation, both become a lie. The actor is unfortunately the only musician who is the instrument and the player of that instrument herself. (I fear becoming The Portrait of Dorian Grey).

My craft as an actress warns me immediately when I go off the path (whether in real life or in acting) — ‘you missed the turn that was to lead to the forest’, a voice will whisper.