Rahul Sankrityayan Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Rahul Sankrityayan, it is not your travel literature nor Leningrad Univ. professorship
That interests me,
Neither your scholarship nor your language learning,
What it actually stuns me is this that
You forgot even your child bride
Whom you married long, long ago

And a truant, you had been away, away from home for so long
Just like a nomad, a gipsy traveling far,
Far off
And years away from home,
Forgot you even your Indian wife
With whom rounded you around the hold fire
For seven rounds
That you would not betray her
And betrayed you, forgot you

But away from, married you a Mongolian and left you far off
To come to India,
A mendicant wandering and moving out on pilgrimages,
Passing days in the company of sadhus
In the Himalayan domains
And sometimes trespassing too
To learn and experience through
And monastic learning did he get,
Travels schooled him

And finally settled you in Darjeeling to opt for a Nepali,
Taking the teaching assignment at some Lankan university,
A scholar like the Hindi poet Nagarjuna
You had a wandering nature of your,
Learnt you taking to company,
Living on alms,
Visiting across, sometimes trespassing far
Into the domains,
Which they lie beyond,
As the case is Kipling’s novel, Kim,
But whatever do you, you should not have forgotten
Your first child-wife.