India, Dec. 24 -- In the death of Vinod Kumar Shukla, the world of literature has lost an unusual writer. Vinod was a major poet and a major novelist in Hindi. The centre of his writing was the non-heroic life of ordinary human beings, the everydayness of it. He never took the path of mythology or history. A writer of the simple and stubborn present, with almost no echoes of the past, his was an imagination that pushed the real until it verged on becoming surreal. His poetry had elements of narrativity, his fiction had resonances of the poetic. He did all this and more, spending his life and career largely in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, almost on the margins of the Hindi belt.

In his daily dealings, Vinod was a person of few words. In the comp...