Roundabout | Days when poet was a hero and poetry the gospel truth
Our Chandigarh had its share of poets and there had been lyrical poets of the fame of Shiv Kumar Batalvi writing in Punjabi and Prem Warbortoni penning ghazals in Urdu with aplomb, calling out to his beloved to come to meet him in the Taj Mahal
Last Sunday, a WhatsApp message from senior poet-academician Satya Pal Sehgal read: “The heart breaks down: There was a poet called Kumar Vikal because there was a Sudarshana Devi.” And one is 19 again, fresh out of college in the journalism department, looking in awe at a tall, well-built, giant of a man his lips stained with the red of the paan and pockmarks sitting comfortably on his handsome face and flaying hair as he went around the campus often pillion-riding on some friend’s two-wheeler and calling out tipsy greetings to the renowned professors, including formidable Tara Chand Gupta who taught us reporting and feature writing, in a no-nonsense way. Besides, he had many young friends from the journalism and art fraternity, including art students Diwan Manna and Naresh Pandit.
The city and its poets
This maverick character was none other than the poet of Hindi from Punjab, Kumar Vikal, whom I have always liked to remember as the poet of the city with verses penned with his soul. Our Chandigarh had its share of poets and there had been lyrical poets of the fame of Shiv Kumar Batalvi writing in Punjabi and Prem Warbortoni penning ghazals in Urdu with aplomb, calling out to his beloved to come to meet him in the Taj Mahal. Of course, there was the well-loved Amitoj, setting his poems in the neon-lit city of Chandigarh. This Vikal Sahib had a superior dismissive air of his own, but once I chose the self-created beat of writing on this giant of a poet, whom Punjabi poet Surjit Patar addressed lovingly as “Shaer-e-azam”, decided to mentor me and later adopt me as a kid sister, for he had none. and he had also become my older brother’s drinking companion in the then dubious bars of the city’s Sector 17. His friend, my brother, died young and then he was a son to my mother and the ties lasted long and deep.
The poet’s wife
Before I run amuck with my memories and go out of context, it was Sudarshana Bhabhi, the poet’s wife, whom I was recalling and his great compliment to her in the obit line that Sehgal sent on Whatsapp. She passed away on Sunday after a tough battle with cancer, borne with a smile. The greatest strength of her relationship with the poet was that not only did she love him but also his poetry, his large circle of friends, and proteges- including professor Narendra Oberoi, his schoolmate in the Ludhiana days; poets Amitoj, Loknath, Gautam, Sehgal; contemporaries of his Jalandhar days like Suresh Seth and the writers and critics of the large Hindi belt including the doen of criticism Namwar Singh. Besides his chosen ones from their home on the Panjab University campus starting with the small flat in Block B, then moving to the spacious house with a little garden in Block C, was an open house to writers, friends and visitors one and all. And there for all of us was Sudharshana Bhabhi, her generosity and delicious cooking, besides her empathy to hear our sob tales.
Vikal had married late, much after his years as the printing supervisor of Lahore Book Shop in Ludhiana and later in Jalandhar. It was only in 1963, when he joined the Punjab University Publication Bureau, with a reasonably decent salary, that he thought of marriage which was finally arranged by his family, which had migrated from Rawalpindi to Ludhiana at the time of partition. Sudarshana was a girl of another migrant family of Gujrat, a town in Pakistan, to Kashmir and then settled down in Kalkaji in Delhi. She was educated and, since partition brought girls of conservative families too in the workforce, she was a tall good looking woman working as an office assistant and proudly cycling to and fro.
They made a fine couple, tall and handsome. Sudarshana once confided in me that she read his poems and fell in love with him. And her love and care were to last through thick and thin. In spite of his dependence on alcohol and wayward friends, she stood with him through thick and thin and loved us all too and welcomed us to her gracious home. She could recite from memory all that he had written and some that he had forgotten. For us the doors of their home remained open to us even when the poet had passed away. Sehgal has indeed summed it well, “There was a Kumar Vikal because there was a Sudarshana Devi.”
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