Navkirat Sodhi on survival, surrender and the poetry of starting over after a life-changing accident

I never knew how fast fire spreads. It started with a tea light along the driveway. As we were leaving a party, I felt heat at my ankles and in the time it took me to look down, the flames had reached my thighs. My instinct was to extinguish the fire with my hands or tear my skirt, but the fabric had disappeared, leaving in its stead melting skin. Animalistic, guttural howls escaped my throat as I tried to cut through the flames with an invisible sword. GG [fashion designer Gaurav Gupta] rushed in to help me and started shouting for water, and luckily, a guard nearby had a bucket-full kept aside for his air cooler. He splashed that on us from a distance. GG’s right hand was scorched and I remember thinking, “That’s his sketching hand.”

Navkirat Sodhi—photographed here before her accident—is an artist who weaves poetry through fashion, performance and visual storytelling

The Navkirat Sodhi I was before the accident prided herself on being fiercely independent–physically, emotionally and spiritually. During the recovery months, I learnt that dependency is not weakness. In fact, the sharing of pain can lead to conjoined healing. Time, too, changed meaning. As I swung between various dimensions—whether from heavy drugs, incomprehensible pain or deep meditation—I realised that time, as we understand it, is imaginary. All that matters is what you sculpt from it. Time in its larger form, where births and rebirths occur simultaneously, is too vast for us to grasp. All we can do is wonder and surrender.