Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant, uses her ardor for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and tree-ism and capitalism.

Espying Through The Third Eye

Visual: Souparno Banerjee

At fifty-nine, the lines on my face and body read as tattoos of aging

As a sign that life has played itself out on my anatomy, wholly, thoroughly

My frame is a perforation of needle-jabs

A brittle commotion of calligraphy honeycombed into contours, craters and ravines

A bodywork that the world sees as the archetypal crone

As a wise woman mostly, a swan in the sunlight

But sometimes, as a sinister form, like steel wrapped in silk

But I say my body has no language of form, time or space

I am the maiden, mother and the crone, wise and sinister

A kaleidoscope of realities in one whole

Ruling the realm of the heaven, earth and underworld

Joining the past, present and the future in a sacred continuity

Shining as pure light, in all colors, its singleness un-scattered, yet with no hue

And surging like a river uninterrupted in its headwater, channel and mouth

My spirituality that began at the groin, has ascended up my back, and returned to my navel

Throwing useful conceptual techniques like space, time, age, action and inaction, good and bad, beautiful and ugly into a spin

Combining terror, beauty and knowledge instead while also dissolving fear and regret

This in its knowing that natural events balance themselves by seeking their opposites

And that all life is destruction and healing, a mix of youth and aging, both at the same time, and then over and over again

I now look within and keep my 36,000 Indian gods and goddess alive inside

I gather water, fire and light and bring them to a single point

I mutate into the moon above water that sits with the universe, yet in solitude

Contemplating silence, the subtle in its life, perfectly, effortlessly

Aware that the process of balance is at the heart of all healing