Main Jab Tak Aai Bahar is Gagan Gill’s fifth collection of poems. She established her poetic self with the publication of her first collection itself, Ek Din Lautegi Ladki (The Girl will Return One Day) published in 1983. It was unusual to publish an entire collection of poems around the theme of a girl’s journey. Gagan Gill has never claimed to be a feminist poet, but in the center of her poetic self, the journey of this female self is recognized as epistemologically valid. This self is rendered autonomous by this inner knowledge that she is just passing through this world and that this world is constituted intimately by pain. To a woman poet, this pain is produced concretely by the systems of patriarchy; to Gagan however, it’s metaphysical. She goes to the Buddha in her second collection, Andhere Mein Buddha (Buddha in Darkness, 1996), to understand the nature of human suffering. The desiring human self becomes her concern; the dimension of suffering acquires a new magnitude in her poems here. She stakes her own desire to be a mother, to have children, to have love. She finds a vast emptiness staring at her mockingly.
In her third collection of poems, Yah Akanksha Samay Nahin Hai (This is not the Time for Desire, 1998), and then in the fourth, Thapak Thapak Dil (Slowly My Heart, 2003), there is recognition of staying within more stoutly, perhaps stoically for the further deepening of the self in practice. In her majestic travelogue Awaak (Awestruck, before 2008), her journey acquires an outward manifestation of what it means to be staying within oneself. She travels to Ladakh and is wonderstruck by the majesty of the Self, one that seemed metaphysically illusive. This book was listed by the BBC as the best travelogue of the year. The Budha had come out pleading with her not to despair—look around, there is more to see and experience. But pain struck her again; there was no way out of it except understanding desire itself with a meditative caution.
The present collection, Main Jab Tak Aai Bahar (By the Time I came Out) is an account of the same inner journey when she finds that the world has become a bit more cruel. She is alert again. This time she engages the divinities (Devi, Ma, Prabhu, God) in conversation and asks why they fail to understand how much a human being can take to be alive; after all, they know more as they create this pain. In her poem, ‘Tumhe to Pata Hoga’ (‘You Would Know’), she invokes the divine: