One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

In the American film Paterson, the hero, played by Adam Driver, is a city bus driver who writes poetry, earnestly jotting down the lines in a notebook.

In Delhi, there is a man as striking as that film actor. Plus, Pawan Kumar Tomar too drives a city bus, with the Delhi Transport Corporation. And he too writes poetry, earnestly jotting down the lines in a notebook. His poems have appeared in the poetry anthology Aaj ke Hindi Kavi (Contemporary Hindi Poets). Indeed, his notebook rests openly on the dashboard beside the steering wheel, a blue-ink pen tucked into its lined pages, ready for use during breaks.

“As I drive, my mind concentrates on the road,” Pawan says, seated in his empty bus parked at South Delhi’s Sri Nivaspuri Depot. The midday summer light is ramming ruthlessly into the wide glass windows, heating up the air-conditioned interiors. “But even as I drive and totally concentrate on the road, certain words and certain lines keep passing through my mind.”

Pawan speaks in beautiful Hindi. He grew up in a UP village, where his most enduring childhood memories are of listening to old film songs on the radio at night. He was drawn less to the playback singers than to the lyricists; writers such as Majrooh Sultanpuri, Neeraj, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri. He would also faithfully tune in to Vividh Bharati broadcasts featuring Kaka Hathrasi’s comic verses. These writers shaped him, he says. He speaks of their ability to choose precise words to convey precise emotions, and to weave lines into bolts of melody.

While Pawan would always write poems, he became more disciplined in 2018, when he began posting them on Facebook. There, readers responded with thoughtful feedback. That pushed him to start studying grammar, metre and the technical aspects of verse. Indeed, social media transformed Pawan’s writing life. He particularly credits a Bhopal poet named Salim Sarmad, whom he has never met outside the internet. “Every time I post something, I ask him for criticism.” Pawan also became a regular at the bimonthly poetry gatherings at Central Delhi’s Ghalib Academy, where he would recite his work from the podium, and listen to fellow poets in their turn at the podium.

Spending eight hours daily on Delhi roads, the poet’s work shift as a DTC bus driver starts about five in the morning. The job obviously helps him support his family; he lives with wife and two children in East Delhi’s Maujpur. Driving the city bus also enables him, he says, to observe life at its rawest. Silently encountering a vast cross-section of humanity every day during his time behind the steering wheel, Pawan witnesses kindness, deceit, innocence, impatience, thievery and exhaustion of us Delhiwale. All of this, he says, enters his consciousness. And somewhere along the way, fragments of these moments rearrange themselves into verse. “You see, I keep moving, and something keeps happening.”

[This is the 627th portrait of Mission Delhi project]