In the introduction to Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Treasurer of Piggy Banks, poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra sums up the oeuvre of the poet and writer from Chhattisgarh: “A line of Shukla is like a line of Shukla. It ‘mirrors nothing’ but itself. Reading him can be disorienting, even vertiginous, like seeing Op art.” Shukla, who died on December 23 at the age of 88, occupied a singular place in Hindi — and Indian — literature, a writer whose work stood slightly apart from its moment, quietly undoing expectations about narrative and form, about what and whom great literature........

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