When words began to leave Bashir Badr: A poet’s long goodbye

NEW DELHI: In 2008, during Hajj, Bashir Badr slipped away into the crowd while his wife, Rahat Badr, searched frantically until a Pakistani admirer recognised the celebrated poet and led him back to their Indian camp. Years later, the family recalled it as one of the earliest signs that the poet whose couplets crossed generations, borders and political divides—Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Awardee—was beginning to lose his sense of direction.Badr lived with a memory-loss disorder, vascular dementia, until he died in Bhopal on May 28 at 91. The nation mourned one of Urdu’s most beloved voices. For Badr however, the long process of farewell had begun years earlier, with diagnosis after a paralytic episode around 2010–11. “This was not ordinary forgetfulness,” Rahat told TOI. In the week after his passing, Rahat recalled, “The doctor explained, he would begin losing names, streets and poems.”While most patients ask whether it can be cured, Badr wanted to know from his neurologist how it would end. “He pulled his chair closer and asked, ‘How will it progress? What is the last stage?’” Instead of despair, Badr prepared. “He kept telling us not to lose courage.”His son Taiyeb told TOI his father had understood what lay ahead. “He consciously accelerated his pending work’s publication, organised his affairs, sorted out finances and prepared himself. He knew what was coming,” he said.Badr had already lived several remarkable lives. Born and raised in and around UP’s Faizabad, he began composing poetry as a child—family stories recall a six‑year‑old penning verses about ishq and being chided by his father employed at the police department’s accounts section. Before becoming an iconic Urdu voice, Badr worked in the police department after his father’s death, studied at AMU, completed a PhD and taught classes there drawing students from every department. His teaching was not limited to classrooms. Taiyeb remembers his father asking almost everyone he met—scholars, poets, shopkeepers, even autorickshawallahs—“Where did Urdu originate?” After hearing answers invoking Persian, Arabic or Mughal courts, Badr would say: “Urdu is the latest form of Sanskrit,” tracing linguistic continuities through Sanskrit, Prakrit, Braj and Awadhi to the Urdu spoken on the street. One of his most quoted couplets—“Dushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaish rahe, jab kabhi hum dost ho jaayen to sharminda na hon”—surfaced during exchanges between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after the 1972 Shimla Agreement. Decades later, in 2018, Congress‘s Mallikarjun Kharge quoted the same verse in Parliament; PM Modi replied with another Badr line: “Ji bahut chahta hai sach bolen, kya karein hausla nahin hota.” Criticising demonetisation, Rahul Gandhi invoked Badr’s “Log toot jaate hain ek ghar banane mein…” in 2016. An admirer of former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a frequent presence at his Mushairas, few Urdu poets moved so effortlessly between diplomacy, Parliament and the street.Yet while his verses spread, dementia reshaped daily life. At a mushaira in Bhopal around 2010, he repeated the same ghazal several times and increasingly relied on a diary while reciting. After someone showed him a recording, he watched it and refused to attend mushairas again. “He said,‘I’m a showman,’ delighted by his ability to hold an audience spellbound from the first couplet to the last,” Taiyeb recalled. For someone whose life revolved around words, language itself was beginning to slip away. He feared sympathy would replace admiration. “He did not want his final public image to be of a man struggling to perform,” Taiyeb told TOI. In the following years, Rahat immersed herself in medical literature, consulted specialists and adopted one rule above all: “Never remind him he had forgotten.” In his final years, he grew physically frail and noticeably thinner. Visitors, many expecting the commanding performer dominating packed mushairas from TV and YouTube, also needed to be prepared for a man whose body, as much as his memory, had been worn down by time. “If I didn’t explain the illness beforehand, I had to console them afterwards,” Taiyeb said.There were moments when the old Bashir Badr returned. After a bath and seated in a favourite chair, “mushaira mode” would switch on—the voice, smile and cadence briefly bringing the poet back. At other times hallucinations filled gaps left by memory: he sometimes mistook Rahat for a sister, believed he was somewhere in Pakistan at times, or called his son “bhaiya.” Trains and departures recurred in his imagination; when asked where he was going, he often replied, “Ghar ja raha hoon.”“Ghar” had particular resonance for a man who never fully returned to Meerut after the 1987 communal riots destroyed his house and many unpublished manuscripts. The loss left a deep mark that came with depression in following years and a lifelong dependence on prescription medicines. Slowly, dementia crept into the everyday. Once, he asked his wife to give him a job because he “knew Urdu and English very well”. Another time, he heard his own couplet and asked Taiyeb, “Bada achcha sher hai. Kisne likha?”The family learned to treasure such flashes. “Dementia affects memories, not identities,” Taiyeb said. Even in advanced stages, Badr retained warmth, curiosity and generosity—he made tea for guests so Rahat could talk, treated staff like family and gave a vegetable seller the same attention he would a cabinet minister. The poet who moved among politicians never belonged to a camp; he described himself simply as “a poet of love”. Taiyeb calls him a “liberal traditionalist”—rooted in culture but wary of rigid identities.In his final week the body began to surrender: his grip weakened, holding objects became hard and even a smile required effort. The decline was stark enough that family members could see it day by day.“For the first time, I felt he was ready to stop fighting,” Taiyeb said. After news of his death, social media filled with his verses, as calls and visitors flooded the family home. Badr often joked that his fame was only partly realised. “My wife complains I am too famous,” he once said. “Greater fame will come after I am gone,” a prediction proved uncannily true, says Rahat.A gifted chadar embroidered with 72 beloved couplets now lies where he rested; visitors still complain their favourite verses are missing. Even seventy‑two couplets, it seems, cannot contain Bashir Badr. To the end, whenever asked who he was, he answered without hesitation, “Main Hindustan aur Pakistan ka bada shayar hoon.” A great poet of India and Pakistan.