Perhaps the most celebrated episode is his fascination for Gurbaksh Singh's daughter who left for the US and married someone else. This episode was to prefigure numerous other partings that would serve as material to distill into poems. When he went to look for her in her hometown, he heard the news of her death and wrote his eulogy Meena. He met a girl named Meena at a fair in Baijnath, near the town of Jammu in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Even today, the old folks in the village remember that ‘patwari's son’ was known as a sheedai (obsessed) and a malang (wanderer). At other times he would be found watching with fascination the tricks of snake charmers or absorbed in listening to the singings of raas-daharis (a folk verse-play based on religious songs). Many times his father would have to search for him, finding him lying down under the trees at the banks of Bassantar nala, local irrigation canal or near a mandir (temple) on the south side of the village. He was known for his peculiar habit of wandering around in the village and its surroundings alone. By all accounts, Shiv had a happy and carefree childhood.

Shiv was exposed to the 'ramlila' (a dramatised version of Hindu mythological epic) at an early age, and it is to be expected that he received what was later to become his instinctive understanding of drama from these early performances.

As a child Shiv is said to have been fascinated by birds and rugged, thorny plants on the Punjabi landscape. After the partitionof India, his family moved to Batala from Pakistan. Shiv's father was a Patwari (a collector) by the name of Pandit Krishan Gopal.

Shiv kumar batalvi books in punjabi