A dark belligerent sea rises in anger
The night has a deadly mission I can see –

Gloom deepens to darkness, turns purple
I feel dark inside

They are here, they drive me
Dark shadows in my room

    She is mad.

    She has her brains in her heart or the heart in her head. She lives the experience twice. First when she actually lands in a situation and takes the full experience of life. The second, she she filters it, takes the essence in a poem and relives it. That is why for an actress, her first take is always her second take. So too with her poems. To play the role of a mad woman, she went all the way and lived with the women in an asylum. It was a very close brush with life, it bruised her mind and heart. And she bled poems.

A dagger pierces the gut and my sanity reels
Hurled in a corner, I live and re-live my life
Closing in on me, inch by deathly inch
Vicious spiteful beings
Hissing… hissing…

‘Black Wind’

    The role in the film became secondary, and the poem assimilated the firsthand experience of life in ‘Black Wind’.

    The intensity that she lives with is apparent in her lines. There is a desperation, exasperation. She dies a hundred times in an explosive moment of life. The liquid is thick as we swallow. She squeezes every experience into a black hole. The gravity is so heavy and intense that all the light she throws up, comes back to the star – the sun. She is the big sun. I wonder how she manages to live with a smile, that heartwarming smile.

One candle between us
And the world beyond. . .
. . .
Why is it . . . that i still wait
For someone ?

    Yet she doesn’t relax. She is keen and curious to find
‘another way of living life’. In a dense jungle hunting for an
insect, she wants to hunt moments in this vast wilderness of time.

    ‘Endless she roams, her inner wilderness’. She makes love with moments and then aborts them. I have known Deepti for decades now. She is an actress, a painter, a poet, and a human being who has the zeal and the courage to row through the sharp currents of life. She is serious about living.

    She follows where her aesthetics lead her, and lives life on her own terms, as she wants to. She looks too real, too practical, a total contrast to what she is… ‘Her dreams looking for the real, and her reality chasing a dream.’

  Gulzar