But isn’t he the one who won a literary award from the Maharashtra State Literature and Cultural Board for his collection of poetry? Yes, but he is also the one serving life for uxoricide, the crime of killing one’s wife. Salunkhe has ready material in the wildly swinging polarities of his life that have swept him from being an activist to a prisoner to a feted poet. It’s the need to reconcile the prisoner and the poet in him that fuels his drive.
The small hands with which he pens moving verse are seared with burn marks from the time his wife burned to death. He was convicted for her murder and has served 10 years out of a likely 14-year life sentence in several jails across the state.
Often, while a spectacle erupts around him, Salunkhe must wonder if he is the same person who is so unfit for civilised company that he is kept behind bars. His award-winning collection of poetry is called Aatmazad, or the autumnal shedding of the soul. And it is the search for the ensuing spring that set him on the road to redemption.
"I always think how can something positive, something good, come out of the worst thing that could happen to you. People may knowingly, or unknowingly, do a horrible thing but is there anything I can do to make up for it?" he asks.
When he first went to jail, Salunkhe says he was consumed by suicidal thoughts. Later, he picked up a pen to start writing short poems to vent his creativity, though he had never written poetry before. Hidden under his bed, in his trunk and in the pockets of his personal clothes were short angst- and guilt-ridden poems that prison authorities often impounded during raids but which literary critics now call gems. His first collection of poetry was called Gajaadchya Kavita (Poems Behind Bars).
Dnyanpeeth award-winning Marathi poet Narayan Surve, who presented Salunkhe the award, says, "Being in jail seems to have brought out the humaneness that seeps through his poems."
Now, depressed housewives and prisoners around the state write to tell him how reading his poems gives them hope and allows them to be associated with good things too. Surve says Salunkhe has defied the mindset that poetry comes only out of the educated middle class. But reform, guilt and a painful shedding of the old self are recurring themes in his poetry. Not defence, or glorification.
His life withered away by a life sentence, guilt, stigma and loss, poetry gave Salunkhe a route to reconnect to the outside world and made him believe he could be another person; a better one. So could people around him.
He helped bring out a popular book of poetry by prisoner-poets from across the state, which has been translated into Malayalam. When he saw undertrials would buy crime thrillers on their way back from court, he fretted about what new plots might be getting sowed in their minds. Now there are piles of newsmagazines and literary fiction, handed down from friends, lying in his room for distribution as reading material for other inmates. He runs after-school classes for other inmates in the Paithan open jail near Aurangabad where he is lodged. It is the same jail where Gandhian freedom-fighter Sane Guruji (about whom Aatmazad is) was before independence.
Neela Satyanarayan, state principal home secretary and a poet herself, heard him recite his poetry at a state meet for prisoner poets and says, "He can be an example to others for keeping his creativity alive rather than his bitterness."
Salunkhe is now studying for a BA in psychology, something he dropped out of many years ago and wants to work to reform prison inmates and others after he has served his term. Sharing a cell with underworld gangsters like Chhota Rajan, Arun Gawli or Dawood Ibrahim’s gang, pickpockets and others turned criminals in a fit of rage has given him great insights into human behaviour. "I always tell people if you control your temper for 14 minutes you will be out of jail for 14 years," he says.
He’d know. He’ll never be free of the scars of the drunken domestic altercation, just a few minutes long, with his wife, 11 years ago. Poets and critics say Salunkhe’s experiences have imbued his poetry with rare emotion. But that doesn’t let him escape the strange prefix of prisoner-poet.
Salunkhe’s reed-thin, now 17-year-old daughter has lived most of her life without her parents, with cranky relatives and been branded a murderer’s child. He is estranged from some of his family and has no home to come back to. Now well taken care of, Nirmitee wants to be a lawyer. And not a vengeful one, hopes her father. Even though laying down the ghosts of so many years is hard.
Now visiting his village, while on parole from jail to collect his award, Salunkhe has been happily reclaimed as the man who’s brought creative recognition to a dusty farming community. But waking up to a life he thought he had lost is harder than he realised. Often, he breaks down when people say nice things about him. He seems lost while his old classmates talk about children, grandchildren and mosquito repellent; it’s a life he lived too long ago. He travels around collecting accolades before retreating into his sequestered jail life for four more years.
Now, more old men than a small village room can hold are asking Salunkhe to introduce them to the visiting reporters. He demurs smilingly. He is not sure who they are anymore. It seems like a lifetime since he lived here.
