Mandalas of Time by Malashri Lal

Mandala of Time is a luminous testament to Malashri Lal’s poetic vision—where personal memory meets mythic consciousness, and lyrical expression bridges the temporal with the timeless. Drawing from a richly cosmopolitan life and deeply rooted in India’s cultural imagination, Lal’s poems traverse epic landscapes, evoke archetypal women like Sita and Radha, and meander through European castles and rivers that whisper ancient music.

What makes this collection exceptional is its deft interweaving of rebellion with reverence, heartbreak with hope, and tradition with self-invention. The poetic self in these pages is both observer and participant—curating a mandala of images, emotions, and insights shaped by a woman’s lived realities and her inherited myths.

Lal’s language is both lush and precise, enriched with metonymy and movement, anchored in places like Rajasthan and Bengal, yet never confined by geography. Her verse pulses with change and contemplative grace, making Mandalas of Time a rare confluence of the philosophic and the sensual. This is poetry that lingers—on the tongue, in the mind, and in the soul.