I’m feeling like a lovely, bright, blue butterfly right now,” Sandhya Mridul tells us over the phone from her home in Gurgaon. What has stimulated this metamorphosis in the actress and dancer, who became well-known for Zee TV’s Koshish-Ek Aashaa which aired in the early 2000s, and then for her performances in films like Saathiya, Page 3 and Angry Indian Goddesses, is a process that she charts in Untamed, her debut collection of poems, brought out by independent publishing house Readomania. 

Through a total of 172 poems that speak with courage and candour about heartbreak, desire, loss, separation, despair, and hope, Mridul records a process of healing, a process of letting go of things that were holding her back. “You go through experiences and become a shut person where you don’t allow anything in,” she says, “because you’re not discerning enough to know what’s good or bad. This book has been absolute catharsis for me. It has healed me, opened me up, and released a lot of resistance from my system… I feel like a new person. It has taken some sort of restlessness out of me. It was a heart opening exercise.”