Yuyutsu R D Sharma

Kathmandu

The news of eminent poet Shiva Adhikary’s death came from a friend, Shailendra Sakar. The day Shailendra returned from his year-long sojourn from the United States, Sakar thought of visiting Shiva Adhikary to share highlights of his stay in America and to tell Shiva that he would be invited to the States next year to attend a meeting of famous Nepalis.

Shiva was that kind of an amicable and warm-hearted guy. We all sought his company to confide our missions and plans in him. He ruled us because of his strict, vegetarian, and teetotaler type of superior health conscious lifestyle. Death is the last thing that we would have thought of in connection to him.

As Shailendra made his way to Shiva’s residence, someone told him it’s too late. Shiva had already been taken to Aryaghat for cremation.

Cold winter air rushed forcefully as Sakar narrated the incident to me on the phone. It was the first chill this winter. Adhikary’s demise came as a shock, not because he died too early of liver cancer but because he had become an integral part of our so-called eternally creative life on earth. We presumed he would naturally lead a perfectly energetic life and ardently continue to play the role he had played these past three decades — that of a rebel poet-journalist.

But his death at the age of 50 showed cracks in our faith in permanence of our creative ventures. So much so that I delayed shifting this time to my residence for some time and opted to stay with my in-laws, knowing this time he wouldn’t come out of a lane to grab my arm and say, “Kaviharu!”

On the edge of Suruchi Tol, in New Baneshwor for more than a decade I have lived as his neighbour and friend. During the Panchayat era in a bleak little office of ‘Deshanter’ weekly I had first seen him sitting in a small chair in a sparsely furnished room, a kind of rebel journalist prototype that Om Puri plays in Indian cinema. He had just reviewed one of my books and his mild soft-spoken behaviour made me wonder if he was the man behind those fiery columns that raise a formidable finger at ruthless demons and despots.

Of course I had little interest in his journalistic pieces. Besides his right-wing leaning, he primarily remained a profound poet to me. I had published one of his poems in ‘Pratik’ then. What he had said in the first meeting moved me. “The Himal that the tourists see is nothing to us. Since my childhood I have known the Himals as a commonplace object. In fact in my childhood I had to pee facing the naked magnificence of Himals.”

Surprisingly, his last collection of poems remained centered on Himal. Named ‘Himal ko Haalchaal’ it weaves an intricate web of exquisite images to evoke the life lived in the Himalayas of Nepal. Only four months ago at White Lotus Bookshop we had arranged a colloquium on his book. Shiva had the audacity to acknowledge my influence on his poetry. He told of how in our company he had to de-Sanskritise his language and extend the area of his content, rejecting the stereotyped theme.

“Shiva had Sanskrit background,” says Shailendra Sakar. “But his poems in the last phase of his life had become extremely sensual. Shiva remains a fearlessly bold journalist and highly poignant poet.”

“Shiva’s Himal poems are deeply rooted in Nepali culture edged with provincial flavour,” says Grehnath Paudel, editor of the book. Straw mats, tattered clothes, worn-out shoes, hungry huts, and frostbitten toes — all these remain central to his poetry. In his poems Sagarmatha, the king of the mountains, eats the fingers of the mountain climber, Temba. A foreign handicapped tourist becomes complete on climbing the same Himal. Paradoxically, the same Himal disfigures physically fit Nepalis by eating his toes or fingers. Pasang, the daughter of the mountains, unlike Western tourists, disappears in the alpine wilderness of the same Himal. It keeps leisurely watching tourists come and go. It keeps changing its face lured by the click of their camera.

In Shiva’s poetry Himal emerges as a child, becomes young and grows old. And one day tired with the boredom of the cycles of life Himal dies.

Reach the author at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com