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Setting sun inspires Mississauga poet and artist

August 09, 2010
Jim Wilkes

Mississauga poet and artist Meena Chopra writes in three languages -- English, Hindi and Urdu. She says the sunsets she sees from the windows of her Mississauga home remind her of her childhood in northern India. Her abstract painting Fireball is in background.

JIM WILKES/TORONTO STAR

When Meena Chopra gazes at sunsets from the window of her Mississauga home, she's transported back to her childhood in northern India.
For the internationally acclaimed poet and artist, it's inspiration that has filled countless pages and canvases with colourful words and images.
“It was strange when I came to Canada in 2004, I started getting connected to my childhood,” said Chopra, 53. “Canada is so beautiful, such wide spaces, such out-of-the-world sunsets.
“It touched my creative spirit,” she said. “It's the same sun, the same beauty that nature gives to all of us.

“I was born in Nainital, a very beautiful hillside area in northern India. But I spent many years in New Delhi, which is very vibrant, but very crowded. There is a lot of art and culture, but it is very noisy.”
In India, she wrote poetry in English, but after coming to Canada and reconnecting with her roots, she soon was writing mainly in Hindi and Urdu.
“It was a very strange thing that happened to me,” she explained. “It is all subconscious. It's not at a conscious level; it's very difficult to explain what was happening to me, but poetry came — and in my native language.
“It gives me great inner satisfaction.”
She has published four volumes in three languages and is working on a fifth. As difficult as it is to translate her Hindi and Urdu poems into English, they've all been translated into German for the market there.
Chopra is married to Bhupinder Virdi, publisher of the entertainment newspaper StarBuzz, aimed at the GTA's south Asian community. The couple has an adult daughter who is finishing university in Waterloo.
She runs an after-school mentoring program for students, is a founder of Cross Currents, an Indo-Canadian arts organization and has organized the Beyond Boundaries arts festivals in Mississauga.
But it is her fascination with the setting sun that has been the inspiration for many of her poems and paintings.
“I write about freedom,” she said. “I try to find the inner sun and outer sun.”
A loose translation of one of her Hindi poems begins:
The immenseness of the sky, the glory of the setting sun
Its ever-changing colours and unlimited expanse
Stills my nature
Glimpses of the setting sun from childhood dissolve
Into hues of the sun on this beautiful country to which I now belong
Creating a new sunshine that melts in me and flows out
My past becomes one with my present
The rising sun of the east blends into the setting sun of the west

Chopra’s husband is Sikh and she is a Punjabi Hindu by birth.
“But humanity and art is my religion,” she said. “It is what connects you to people.
“It is from where life streams into the world. In search of our so-called God, it gets our inner selves out.”
Chopra eschews the bindi, a traditional decorative red dot painted on the forehead.
Instead, she paints a bold black snake figure in its place. Like the bold images of her paintings, it has become what she calls her “artistic signature.
“It is me,” she said. “It is a part of who I am.”