By Crispin Rodrigues

Aerial Roots
Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal
Rosetta Cultures (2025) / 100 pages / SGD 24

How does one capture a well-travelled life in poetry? For Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal, Aerial Roots represents a history of movement as she contemplates her experience moving from India to Singapore and yet also a certain stillness and meditative quality to what keeps her rooted to her origins.

As her sophomore collection, Aerial Roots refines more of the themes from her first collection, Between Sips of Masala Chai (2019). The themes of both geographical and cultural shifts with the pensive quality of her original collection remain. The extensive use of the ghazal form foregrounds these themes throughout the collection. As a repetitive form that recurs and unravels over the course of the poem, it is often used to demonstrate a desire to relook and retrace memory to find moments to sit and pause. Take a segment of her poem 'Roots' for example:

Hourly and month, i swallow my story,
            cracked and deboned; i revise my square roots.

Unheard, unsung, i bemoan my identity,
            words dotting pages unravel deep roots.

O Fledgling, adrift in borrowed waters,
            anchor and thrive, buoyed by lotus roots.

Here, the interplay between the types of roots traverses the childhood of "square roots" to the self-referential act of writing – "words dotting pages unravel deep roots". Here, Shilpa distils her life into moments of reflection. Through writing and being "adrift in borrowed waters", she gives advice and finds herself as the "fledgling" in the maqta of the ghazal, the subject and the object of a brilliant life lived.

The best poems in the collection draw upon such reflective moments, and harbours great love for growing in the shade of family and friends. One such poem 'Hopscotch' features the persona and her cousins playing together:

Under the bowery tamarind tree, a ring of cousins stands barefoot in the muddy compound. Summer sun does stunts on red-roofed houses. Didi's coconut-oiled black plaits shine a glossy marble. With sharp-edged tile, Didi draws a set of blocks on the grainy ground, demarcates houses, numbering one, two, until ten. Team play or go individual way? We scream, team! Dialect swirls in our agape mouths.

In the first part of the poem, the ring of cousins is compared to the house that they play in, especially when Didi's "plaits" look like "glossy marble". There is a sense of jocundity that is protected within the space, such that their family desires to play as a team rather than individually, almost as a way of saying that they desire to keep family together. The language is, in all essence, real, simple and honest – a slice of life that depicts unity and fragility in how family is respected and loved.

In connecting both memory, place and reflection, Shilpa sees herself in a greater lineage of poets from across the world. There is definitely inspiration from both her MA supervisors on the collection, Boey Kim Cheng and Desmond Kon, whose writing revolves around themes of place, memory and spirituality, but through many epigraphs of the poems, we see connections to Tagore, Blake, Bishop and Plath. This recognition of a history of poetry that surrounds the creation of her experiences roots her not only to memory, but also to literary tradition, which gives the poems credence to the rich history of literary symbols. Take her poem 'Loops of Infinity', which begins with an epigraph taken from Edwin Thumboo's 'The Banyan', which she follows up with a ghazal:

Ancestry of centuries lingers: shade of the banyan.
Unhurried time; dreams on a wishbone: shade of the banyan.

Mouthfuls of mystic light, loops of infinity, new
constellations and pathways, handmade over banyans.

Here, Shilpa places herself as the student sitting under the shade of her literary predecessors, drawing connections where Thumboo left off. Her use of the ghazal's repetition hums like an echo, a callback to these aerial roots of the poem's roots, where she attains her "[m]outhfuls of mystic light", a poetic syntax for looking at the banyan as a symbol for transcending beyond one's creative and spiritual limitations. There is a kind of beauty in honouring one's predecessors, which Shilpa does extremely well. The collection feels meditative in the gentle slowness of how these poems spread out to embrace its historical precedents.

If there is a major criticism of the collection, it is perhaps that it could be streamlined further. Shilpa's strongest poems are the ones that draw upon memories of childhood and how her predecessors fuel her creative spirit. However, the collection presents poems that move in a variety of directions, especially with the latter sections. There is a section called 'Disquiet', which is dedicated to war and hospitalisation amidst the Covid-19 period, which seems quite out of place when put together. As a reader, I wondered what the connections were rather than a mere disquieting register after sections on history. Perhaps these poems could have been left for another collection where larger themes surrounding the topic of war and/or disease could be expanded into a more coherent collection.

In addition, while I found the meditative tone quite consistent across the pieces, I did feel that some poems came across as more dispassionate when placed amidst the confessional nature of the poems about personal history. Take, for example, 'Night Calligrapher', which is an ekphrastic poem in response to Ong Kim Seng's Night Calligrapher. The poem aims to make sense of Ong's painting about a woman who visits a calligrapher. However, its attempt to enter the psyche of the Chinese woman ends up predictable as one of a poet's sensibility which feels quite cliched and distant:

She dares not speak about her dream
            yet to sail over the ocean. Maybe it will

sail to the coast, cling to the warm
            grainy sands, under the coconut and palm trees.

Maybe under one such tree,
            her Ah-Ma is waiting with hot congee.

With a sharp inhale of the dank air, she mumbles:

                 the scattered stars are flung wide in these city skies,
            I am still gathering their golden rays on outstretched palms.

Here, the poem combines a kind of idealisation of the woman's hopes that she will re-connect with her Ah-ma, who takes on the role of an ancestral spirit almost, using the symbolic nature of the trees as a conduit with ancestors amidst the chaotic development of the city. It seems to try really hard to employ some of the symbols that exist in the work, but it feels very different in tone and energy from the more personal poems that surround it. Perhaps, if the collection could be more focused, it would allow for a greater space for the rhythm of the personal poems to function as the heartbeat of the collection.

Shilpa's collection mirrors the trees that she pays homage to – beautifully and gracefully expanding, though at times the thick foliage prevents the roots from being truly visible. It is still a wonderful read, carrying a quiet grace to it, and evidence of a life well-lived so far.

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