![\"When](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-131544185,imgsize-33288,width-400,height-225,resizemode-72\/-.jpg\" "\\"Bashir")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nNEW 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\u2014Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Awardee\u2014was beginning to lose his sense of direction.<\/p>\n The chadar with 72 of Bashir Badr’s verses gifted to him by one of his admirers is now resting where the poet rested before his death. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s most beloved voices. For Badr however, the long process of farewell had begun years earlier, with diagnosis after a paralytic episode around 2010\u201311. \u201cThis was not ordinary forgetfulness,\u201d Rahat told TOI. In the week after his passing, Rahat recalled, \u201cThe doctor explained, he would begin losing names, streets and poems.\u201d<\/p>\n Bashir Badr with his family – wife and son.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While most patients ask whether it can be cured, Badr wanted to know from his neurologist how it would end. \u201cHe pulled his chair closer and asked, \u2018How will it progress? What is the last stage?\u2019\u201d Instead of despair, Badr prepared. \u201cHe kept telling us not to lose courage.\u201dHis son Taiyeb told TOI his father had understood what lay ahead. \u201cHe consciously accelerated his pending work\u2019s publication, organised his affairs, sorted out finances and prepared himself. He knew what was coming,\u201d he said.Badr had already lived several remarkable lives. Born and raised in and around UP\u2019s Faizabad, he began composing poetry as a child\u2014family stories recall a six\u2011year\u2011old penning verses about ishq and being chided by his father employed at the police department\u2019s accounts section. Before becoming an iconic Urdu voice, Badr worked in the police department after his father\u2019s death, studied at AMU, completed a PhD and taught classes there drawing students from every department. <\/p>\n Bashir Badr with Atal Bihari Vajpayee<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His teaching was not limited to classrooms. Taiyeb remembers his father asking almost everyone he met\u2014scholars, poets, shopkeepers, even autorickshawallahs\u2014\u201cWhere did Urdu originate?\u201d After hearing answers invoking Persian, Arabic or Mughal courts, Badr would say: \u201cUrdu is the latest form of Sanskrit,\u201d tracing linguistic continuities through Sanskrit, Prakrit, Braj and Awadhi to the Urdu spoken on the street. One of his most quoted couplets\u2014\u201cDushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaish rahe, jab kabhi hum dost ho jaayen to sharminda na hon\u201d\u2014surfaced during exchanges between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after the 1972 Shimla Agreement. Decades later, in 2018, Congress\u2018s Mallikarjun Kharge quoted the same verse in Parliament; PM Modi replied with another Badr line: \u201cJi bahut chahta hai sach bolen, kya karein hausla nahin hota.\u201d Criticising demonetisation, Rahul Gandhi<\/a> invoked Badr\u2019s \u201cLog toot jaate hain ek ghar banane mein\u2026\u201d 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. \u201cHe said,\u2018I\u2019m a showman,\u2019 delighted by his ability to hold an audience spellbound from the first couplet to the last,\u201d Taiyeb recalled. For someone whose life revolved around words, language itself was beginning to slip away. He feared sympathy would replace admiration. \u201cHe did not want his final public image to be of a man struggling to perform,\u201d Taiyeb told TOI. In the following years, Rahat immersed herself in medical literature, consulted specialists and adopted one rule above all: \u201cNever remind him he had forgotten.\u201d 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. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t explain the illness beforehand, I had to console them afterwards,\u201d Taiyeb said.There were moments when the old Bashir Badr returned. After a bath and seated in a favourite chair, \u201cmushaira mode\u201d would switch on\u2014the 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 \u201cbhaiya.\u201d Trains and departures recurred in his imagination; when asked where he was going, he often replied, \u201cGhar ja raha hoon.\u201d\u201cGhar\u201d 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 \u201cknew Urdu and English very well\u201d. Another time, he heard his own couplet and asked Taiyeb, \u201cBada achcha sher hai. Kisne likha?\u201dThe family learned to treasure such flashes. \u201cDementia affects memories, not identities,\u201d Taiyeb said. Even in advanced stages, Badr retained warmth, curiosity and generosity\u2014he 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 \u201ca poet of love\u201d. Taiyeb calls him a \u201cliberal traditionalist\u201d\u2014rooted 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.\u201cFor the first time, I felt he was ready to stop fighting,\u201d 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. \u201cMy wife complains I am too famous,\u201d he once said. \u201cGreater fame will come after I am gone,\u201d 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\u2011two couplets, it seems, cannot contain Bashir Badr. To the end, whenever asked who he was, he answered without hesitation, \u201cMain Hindustan aur Pakistan ka bada shayar hoon.\u201d A great poet of India and Pakistan.<\/div>\n![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/photo\/msid-131544201\/.jpg\" "\\"The")
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