Geeta Chhabra’s early mentor was one of India’s most acclaimed poets, Nissim Ezekiel, and although the Emirati settings of her poems are very different from those of his Mumbai-centered verse, they sometimes view the external world from a similar vantage point, since their primary perspective is that of a spectator. In Ezekiel’s ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’, he assumes the persona of the poem’s title… In Chhabra’s ‘In the Garden’, she too is a watcher, a meditative observer…

PROFESSOR JOHN THIEME
University of East Anglia, U.K