The tough times could not blow him away. Instead, they gave him the resilience and the confidence that later became the hallmark of his poetic output.

A bad omen, she thought. As it turned out, Akhtar was far from being a creeping, venomous creature. On the contrary, he was actually a victim of the snake of social consciousness that kept him restless till the very end of his life.

In his autobiography, Is Aba`ad Kharabey Mein, Akhtar has talked in some detail about the dream and the shock he felt when, years later, his mother narrated it to him.

His poem Tehlil revolves specifically around this episode and, written when he was in his 60s, is indicative of the impact it had on his psyche.

The child of a broken home, Akhtar spent considerable time at an orphanage, Yateem Khana Mou`eedul Islam, where he spent his boyhood years, which are arguably the most impressionable years of one`s life. From age 19 he was all on his own and completed his studies while having to eke out a living for himself.

Against this backdrop, his words in the preface to Naya Aahang, one of his several collections, do reflect the conflict that must have been raging inside him from an early age `What is my poetry? If I were to describe it in a few words, I will call it the agony of the human soul. It is this agony that has taken various forms of expression at various times, triggered by various events.`

The tough times, however, could not blow him away. Instead, they gave him the resilience and the confidence that later became the hallmark of his poetic output.

During his student life, he became a leading contender on the debating circuit, winning hands down at such major institutions as Aligarh and Lucknow universities. Once when he was declared the runner-up at a debating contest in Agra, he returned the trophy, telling the judges that the wrong decision had been made.

Poet Rifat Sarosh, writing in the famed literary journal Nigar a few years ago, recalled in detail a formal public debate held in Delhi in the mid-1940s between those of the older generation who had a conservative or conventional view of literature and the young progressives. Seniors included the likes of Nawab Sa`il Dehlavi, Pandit Tribhavan Nath and Shakil Badayuni, while the other side had, among others, Josh, Jazbi, Majaaz, Faiz, Rashid and Akhtar.

The debate was organised by Sajjad Zaheer and others who were in the vanguard of the Progressive Writers Movement. As described by Sarosh, the conservatives `would perhaps have totally vanquished the audience but for the power of Akhtarul Iman`s oratory, his rapier-sharp wit and his spellbinding debating style`. Akhtar, wrote Sarosh, `clearly managed to deflate the seniors`.

It was this mix of confidence and anguish that made Akhtar move along a path less travelled.

Though he started off with the traditional ghazal and also wrote short stories that were good enough to find space in such literary journals as Saqi, he soon became a rebel against traditional forms and subjects that defined the poetry of his times. He chose verses — both of the rhymed and free varieties — as his preferred form of expression.

Though he was a modernist in approach, he could not stay long with the Progressives either. Like Manto and others, he felt rather constrained by the `preaching` element of the specific ideology which, to him, was nothing but a dogma in itself.

Having left the traditionalist and progressive camps in quick succession, Akhtar chose the tricky sphere of symbolism to talk about contemporary issues of the time.

As is the nature of such expression, Akhtar`s poetry does not reveal its true meanings to the reader in a hurry. It calls for spending some time with it before one can be see the actual meaning emerge.

To Akhtar`s eternal credit, his diction and choice is mighty enough to keep the reader engrossed in trying to decipher the coded symbols. Having said that, his verses struggled to communicate with the masses and that was a lingering regret with Akhtar.

In his writings he can be seen repeatedly pleading the audience not to pass a verdict too quickly.

His autobiographical poem Aik Larka is an interesting case in point where he uses his own childhood existence as an alter ego to discuss his dreams and his sorrows.

The 62-verse composition took him as many as 18 years to finish and he was well within his right to expect the reader to spend at least 18 minutes on it before passing a verdict.

On March 9, 1996, Akhtar went to bed on return from his dialysis session. He never woke up.

It was at least an hour after his death that somebody realised that the greatest symbolist of Urdu poetry was no more. He had gone. The venom of the snake inside him had finally taken its toll.