On a rainy day in August 2007, Laura Savinska arrived in Mumbai under a singing contract with The Shalimar Hotel at Kemps Corner. For the singer, poet and voice trainer whose verses — many of which had been turned into songs — had made it to the Ukrainian radio and national television, it was like turning over a new leaf. And from having lost her luggage in transit to the noise of traffic that kept her up at night for months, things didn't come easy. Somewhere in the struggle to make it in an alien city, her ties with the pen got severed.

But once a writer, always a writer. When her transient stay in Mumbai became a permanent one and she picked up English during the training of her current profession as a life coach, she resumed writing — this time in English. "I was surrounded by people who spoke the language, and there came a point when I started thinking in English. Besides, from the time I wrote in Russian and Ukrainian to this shift in language, my outlook to life had changed, too," recalls Savinska, as she shares her journey, which is intricately linked with Thousand Thoughts, her book of lyrical poetry in Russian, Ukrainian and English, which releases at the Russian Culture for Science and Culture in Mumbai today.