Sanjeev Gupta
Santosh Shonek aka Toshi a native of Gali Malhotrian, Jammu, presently settled in Durham USA, has published two collections of her poems: Windows to My Heart and Remembering My Spirit.
Youngest child of Lala Dina Nath Mahajan of Electric Department, Toshi married Romesh Shonek. She has a daughter Gita and a son Shishir. Every year she visits Jammu considering it a pilgrimage to the city of her birth: The City of Temples.
All her poems reflect an in-depth study of Indian philosophy and a love for her Mother Land. Longing for her home gets manifest when she in lights of Miami she sees earthen lamps sequenced between sky and sea ” Like ornate borders of silk saree” Home-coming makes her think how did Rama and Sita feel when they came back to Ayodhya after fourteen years of exile. Following few poems give us a glimpse of poetry of Santosh Shonek nee Santosh Mahajan.
Does a writer create poetry or poetry comes out as a compulsion? Is it an extinction of personality or expression of the same? Such questions rise before any critic as he goes through the poems of Santosh Shonek. Some poems in particular have a dominant element of personal experience. In the new world of ours, hardly do we bother about branches of the great banyan called family tree. Such facts may be available in some revenue records or registers of pandas of Haridwar and other centres of pilgrimage in India. But Toshi has successfully placed before her readers a large canvas where colours get mixed up, where names of branches matter a naught, it is the shady banyan which is important for existence and human civilization has not been able to root it out.
Every note of her poetry is musical. Mainly it saddens the reader’s heart. In fact the lines are audible more than being readable. However, it is the power of harmony that strings fine chords of the musical instrument called heart. These are the heart throbs one can feel, sympathise with and end up with an ecstasy-with eyes closed-providing an insight into one’s mind and soul. Are the notes nostalgic? No; Toshi makes the reader feel that she is standing before us, amid us.
Santosh literally means patience. She knows that she is a girl named Patience. She goes on to explain, Patience also means satisfaction, contentment, a source of means of enjoyment and fulfillment of need or want. Where exactly lies the appeal of the poems penned by Santosh Shonek? Her poems inspire a saddened reader to get a light of hope, of inspiration.
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