Nibedita, a renowned artist, discovered herself in the interlude period, the second part of her narrative. She experienced the power of Healing Art, working with Special Needs people, spinal injury, abused children, and visually challenged. She says that it rehabilitated her, was her rebirth. We are republishing her story in Different Truths. It appeared in The Punch, on July 1, 2015. 

I uprooted myself from the earth where I belonged. Moved into a new city. Painting was shelved forever. I ventured into a new world in every sense. Delhi accepted me wholeheartedly and I can’t tell when I became one with it. 

Rehabilitation of Special Needs people was an altogether new area and I started off my career working with spinal injured patients at a very renowned organisation in Delhi. Talking to them about life post injury was a revelation. Creative Art Therapy wasn’t common in India in the Nineties. I started doing Creative Art Therapy with the spinal injured patients. Although this is a highly professional area, yet I forayed into it purely based on my own sensibility and sensitivity. 

Eventually, my personal studies and research on the subject took me a long way. My work led me into newer domains of understanding, and I voluntarily worked with orphaned and abused children in my spare time. Learning Braille and working with the visually impaired people was the most positive step taken at that point of time. I started working as a full time professional with visually challenged children at the National Association for the Blind. 

My Rebirth: A New Understanding 

Working in the rehabilitation sector essentially rehabilitated me. I was reborn with yet another new understanding about life. 

Nevertheless, memories of a home lost in transit came back like a leitmotif. My brothers missed me immensely, I missed them even more! 

I tried painting but couldn’t. Only a couple of them surfaced at one point of time and others kept sinking deeper and deeper every time I held a brush and I wondered when I would be able to paint again. 

Blue Earth: 2, a watercolour was inspired by the serenity of a visually impaired girl. Her inner eye makes her feel and see beyond the structure. The bird-shaped hair depicts a retreat from the ordinary. 

The other significant work during this non-productive period is Blue Earth 1. A reflection of my own self-rising above the concrete façade and pining for the unmixed serenity of my hometown Kharagpur, this is in mixed media on paper. 

Shift from Painting to Writing 

Delhi could not inspire me enough to paint, but I did start writing, eventually. I wrote poetry and letters addressed to me. It was not difficult to understand that both poetry and the letters were eruptions of the coagulated instincts due to repeated concussions. 

Reading my poetry at several public readings did make me happy to some extent, but no one knew that I paint too. 

The year 2001 arrived as a significant year. Work-based research on deaf and blind people took me to Germany… 

The year 2001 arrived as a significant year. Work-based research on deaf and blind people took me to Germany, in 2001. Two solo exhibitions were arranged in Germany by a well-wisher in the same year. And a chance meeting with a seafarer, in 2001, made us mates forever. I resigned from my job to go sailing with my husband. 

Phase Two: Sailed for Months 

I sailed for months in the deep sea on huge oil tankers. I was suddenly part of a vast expanse of unending blue! My concrete calendar vanished into the ever-flowing azure. All directions, dates and hours dissolved into a monochrome blue. It was anachronism, a phase lifted from nowhere and fitted into a jigsaw puzzle.

I journeyed in and out. Watched numerous shades of blue merging into one another effortlessly. Countless hours went by. It was ecstatic. 

The communion was deep. Each restless chord was being slowly turned into a harmony that resonated with the cosmic rhythm. I watched the sea minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour in slow-motion, then suddenly flowing with it into a moon-lit magnificence with shooting stars hitting the fluorescent dark like shrapnel at arm’s length! As I passed into an infinite joy, I became aware of a living nature inside me, reveling in the glory of a deep communion. 

The blue that I had known and carried along all my life, dissolved into the fathomless blue of the ocean and sky. Awestruck and enthralled I stood at the bridge-wing with waves opening an altogether new Odyssey. In the continuous integration and disintegration of waves I experienced the ephemeral and the eternal entwine inseparably. All those moments of internal darkness when the loss seemed insurmountable, the sea steered me on through rough stormy nights when the only meaning of destination was the morning light … 

My Ecstasy 

Blue Earth 3 done in mixed media expresses my ecstasy on being exposed to the bare nature. 

It was like the peace that I had once experienced long ago! But here mornings were bathed in fresh red, and evenings were vermilion over an emerald mirror. Seagulls cried and circled the distant mast, while I sat on the sill of an airtight porthole trying to imagine whether their calls are as sweet as the cuckoos at home.

Republished with permission of The Punch. My Journey: Seeing Inside (thepunchmagazine.com)

 (To be continued)  

Paintings by the author

Nibedita Sen

Kolkata-born Nibedita Sen is a painter and a bilingual writer and a seafarer. She has worked with the visually impaired as a resource-person and a rehabilitation-counsellor and worked as a creative Art Therapist with spinal injured people and sexually abused, disadvantaged children. Her paintings have been showcased in prestigious galleries in India and abroad. She has travelled widely and has written for newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies in India and abroad. She stays in Delhi.

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