Turning pain into poetry

Blood clots derailed Dr Angelee Deodhar's career as a successful eye surgeon, but she has gone on to become an internationally recognised haiku poet, says Payal Khurana

Three lines can say so much. That's what Dr Angelee Deodhar discovered when she turned to haiku - small unrhymed three - line poetry of Japanese origin-over a decade ago. For the 58-year-old, an ophthalmologist, these three lines helped channel her energy after she was diagnosed with a serious problem in her lungs.

Today, haiku leaves Dr Deodhar little time to worry about her health. A member of several haiku societies in the US, Canada and Japan, she has been invited to many haiku conferences over the past five years, including the Second International Haiku Pacific Rim Conference in Ogaki, Japan, that she attended last year. Future plans include visits to Romania, Austria, Slovenia and Bulgaria.

Thirteen years ago, though, poetry was the furthest thing from Dr Deodhar's mind. On a hot summer day in Amritsar, she suddenly developed a fever. The eye surgeon was first nervous and then scared. "Precious time was lost as the initial tests turned out to be inconclusive," she remembers. Finally, Deodhar was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary thrombo-embolism. Blood clots (emboli) from the veins in her legs were going to her lungs and obstructing the blood vessels (pulmonary arteries) there. Its repercussions ranged from death of lung tissues to acute heart failure and sudden death.

Her treatment began in the hospital in Chandigarh where her husband, rheumatologist Dr Shridhar Deodhar, worked at the time. The next three years passed in a blur as Deodhar was shifted from one hospital to another. Her husband took charge of the home and the responsibility of bringing up their nine-year-old son Ananth. "Even when she was going through a hard time, she was always smiling," he recalls. "I have never seen her with a long face." Subsequently, she had to travel to the US for treatment. "It was a devastating time for all of us," says Dr Deodhar, adding, "Ananth was admitted to a boarding school as I did not know if I would ever return."

She did return, but with the knowledge that she would have to stay on medication for the rest of her life, although her condition was no longer acute - after ten surgeries, doctors had assured she didn't need more. It forced her to re-examine her life. With her body not able to take the rigours of her medical career, Dr Deodhar decided to quit her job, the hardest decision of her life.

At crossroads, she turned to the written word, her childhood love, for succour. Dr Deodhar remembered long winter evenings spent in Kasauli, surrounded by books and nature, and days of writing poetry at Lawrence School, Sanawar. She started writing her own diary, letters to friends and poems. One day, she read about haiku in a magazine and was intrigued by its form. As she started searching for more material, she stumbled upon the work of William J Higginson, an American writer, publisher and editor of Haiku Magazine. She wrote to him, and he responded by sending her his Haiku Handbook as a gift. It prompted her to start writing haiku.

"Rumours of war
Up into a darkening sky
- a child's newsprint kite"

The above lines won her third prize at the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award in the US two years ago. "She brings a new voice and a new continent into the growing community of poets writing haiku in English," says Higginson, her mentor. For Deodhar, haiku has brought new hope. "There was a time when I didn't know whether I would survive," she says. "I got a chance to be with my son, to see so many springs."

"Another spring
just enough breath
for the dandelion"


What is haiku?

Haiku is unrhymed poetry of Japanese origin. It is usually written in three lines and has fewer than 17 syllables. The term haiku was created by the modern critic and haijin (haiku poet) Masaoka Shiki. Traditional Japanese haiku consisted of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 units which generally corresponded to syllables. They also contained a special 'season' word, the kigo, descriptive of the season in which the haiku was set. Some say that a haiku must also combine two different images, be written in present tense, have a focus on description and have a pause (the kireji or 'cutting word') at the end of either the first or second line. All such rules are based in the Japanese literary tradition and are habitually broken by most poets, especially when adapted for other languages.

The haijin writes about a moment in time, a brief experience that stands out. The traditional haiku poet usually focused on nature, although modern poets may have the urban setting as their venue. The four great Japanese masters of the haiku form are generally thought to be Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. More recent well-known authors and poets who have written haiku include Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Dag Hammarskjöld, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Wright. In 1995, the scifaiku (science fiction haiku) form was invented by Tom Brinck! Rabindranath Tagore was the first to bring haiku to India in 1916. Some Indian poetry journals have been publishing haiku in English, Hindi and several regional languages. However, there's no Indian haiku society or organisation in existence.



Featured in Harmony Magazine
June 2005