Could you tell us a bit about where you draw inspiration as a poet? Does your work as a physician and activist influence your poetry, or do you see poetry as a refuge from the other work that you do?

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My inspiration comes from my lived experiences which include witnessing the world and its waves thrashing or lapping on me. It is both ways. Being in the highly privileged position of a physician and activist for the disabled and the fragile ecosystem, poetry is both a refuge and a result of what moves me. This poem is a refuge, a grief shelter which propelled me emotionally towards some light in my dark grief. I quote Cyril Connolly: 'While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.'​

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The title of the poem 'From my room in Nocelle' seems to begin from a spontaneous moment, perhaps a moment in which the poem came to you. At the same time, there is a sense of nostalgia that floods the piece. I would be interested in hearing more about your writing process. Do you have awareness when a poem is taking shape in a moment of living? Or does the process of writing feel more like sifting through the debris of lived experience to find a luminous thread?

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That is a question which makes me pause. I love that. Thank you. For me, poems mostly take shape in moments of living but do not always form on paper immediately, though often I will type a line or few lines in my document of nascent poems. Sometimes these moments of living involve reading a poem that strikes a chord, especially if they relate to parental loss or illness and sometimes to social injustice. I have a folder where I will save these poems or some phrases to help me when I am flailing around to accurately form my feelings on paper and construct a poem from those lines typed soon after or during an experience. I am a pen and paper drafter mostly. I was staying in this bed-and-breakfast in Nocelle on the Amalfi coast and attending a Zoom workshop on triptychs. It was spring and rain pattered outside as dusk darkened and the ocean became one with sky far below my window. I was grieving my father’s loss and started to write this poem during the workshop where a poem was read mentioning a child’s ashes in the ocean. Click.

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There’s a thread of longing that weaves through your poem, it pulls together disparate geographies, closes the distance between the 'I' and the 'you'. The poem ends with the unlocked door of the home. Could you speak more to the idea of home, and your relationship to it?

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Home to me is any room with a desk, my pen set pouch, my journals and scrap paper on clipboard for first drafts, and my parents with me. A bag of figs or nuts makes it comfy. It could be anywhere on habitable earth. My parents are the subject of my hybrid memoir(s) in progress. I carry their photograph to place in my room when I travel. Reading greases my creativity and Libby, the app on my phone, takes care of that generally.

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How does your poem speak to the possibility of an otherwise, however you might define it?

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I am a Sikh. We immerse remains into any mass of flowing water.  A daughter yearns for what could have been otherwise – perhaps better doctors to prolong her father’s life so they could be traveling together now. She longs to chat with her dad about this new part of Italy they did not visit on their trip here together nineteen summers ago. She chances upon a grieving mother’s work which creates a path to imagining her father is here in the sea at the bottom of this cliff below her, with her. This places good literature on the highest pedestal. Could a mortal ask for more?