The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  3

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  There is a small hen sparrow exercising her unfledged wings on Manjula Padmanabhan’s lawn. The sparrow arrived in the writer’s life in traumatic circumstances; since then, she’s been nursed back to health, had her cage expanded, been taken on holiday, and rejoices in the name of Catsmeat.

  If you can imagine the mind of someone who says she has no maternal urges, who has spent the last weeks nevertheless attending to the needs of a small bird, and who will cackle as she tells you that the bird’s dubbed feline fodder, you’re getting closer to understanding Padmanabhan.

  She’s keen to see what Agni, the fusion place at the Park Hotel in Connaught Place, is like, so that’s where we head after saying our farewells to Catsmeat (also known, in deference to more sensitive friends, as Birdie Num-Num).

  Agni can make you feel deeply schizophrenic: by night, it’s a crowded bar; by day it pretends it’s a sleepy coffee shop. It’s a good place to take an author and illustrator who can execute shifts between professions, genres and styles with the best of them.

  At fifty-one, Padmanabhan has one of the most interesting CVs in the world of Indian literature in English: it includes plays (Harvest, Lights Out, The Gujarat Monologues), a comic strip (Suki), a travel memoir (Getting There), two collections of short stories (Hot Death, Cold Soup and the recently released Kleptomania) and the first in a children’s book series (Mouse Attack), and that’s not even mentioning her work as an illustrator.

  We order luridly coloured mocktails as we discuss how she got here when her original plans included (a) being an IFS officer, like her father, and (b) committing suicide at the age of thirty since that was, in the young Padmanabhan’s opinion, the point from which most people’s lives go irretrievably downhill.

  It was only when her father retired in India that Padmanabhan sought an alternative to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), belatedly realizing that she might not live up to the standards of propriety required of a government officer. She joined the staff of a small magazine called Parsiana. It was printed at the same place in Ballard Estate that had hosted Debonair; the office proper was in the Parsi Lying-In Hospital; it was ‘a little community magazine, sparky and sweet’ with very high standards set by its editor, Jehangir Patel; and Padmanabhan learned in short order to do everything: she illustrated, she wrote, she read page proofs.

  ‘The germinal period is Parsiana,’ she says, digging into mini-kulchas with tomato chutney-salsa while trying to explain her multipronged career, ‘it explains everything.’

  Back in India after a childhood spent everywhere and nowhere, she’d seen herself as irrevocably, unintentionally different. ‘I didn’t belong back in India, but I didn’t belong anywhere else either, and that’s a strange place to be, a sad place to be.’

  It shows in her work, but typically, as an asset. ‘I am not rooted in any tradition. I write about things that don’t require a special tradition—they tend to be fundamental. They deal with the body—everyone has one—or very basic emotions, basic motivations. I take what everyone already knows, and then I push it a little bit further.’

  Language wasn’t one of the areas she worried about. ‘I can’t even understand what it would be like to not have English. Those of us who are writing in English are not borrowing a language, it is our language—but we are hybrids. I’m aware that being a hybrid, I don’t have access to any deep roots, and I don’t care. I live in an era where I don’t suffer, which is unusual. In any other era, anyone marginal suffered; hybrids were always the first to suffer.’

  Perhaps that’s where her empathy for the marginal, alien figure comes from: the young girl in ‘Betrayal’ from Kleptomania whose insecurities leave her open to being used; the family in Harvest whose poverty makes organlegging a seductive option, the albino mouse in Mouse Attack. Padmanabhan met the original albino, a rat, in 1984, on the day Indira Gandhi was shot. She was in a photo studio when she saw a small white shape darting around.

  ‘I said to the man, you have a white rat just behind you. And he said, oh yeah, that’s our rat.’ Someone had told him he could use the albino rat to scare away ordinary rats.

  ‘It is normal for animal groups to ostracize an albino. That was how Mouse Attack arose. I kept thinking about this unfortunate rat—it seemed okay, but it would have been born in a laboratory, and I was wondering, what could its life be?’

  When we tuck into gilauti kebabs and Goan prawn curry, both well executed with just a touch of fusion foreignness, I’m thinking that if she’d stuck to the original plan, we’d never have had any of this. No Harvest, very few stories, no ambitious children’s book series, no Suki, no Padmanabhan. No Getting There, in fact, in which she first wrote about the joys of exiting stage left once life gets too boring. ‘I had planned when I was seventeen to die at thirty—it seemed that everything started packing up after that, your body, your mind—and I deeply meant it,’ she says.

  ‘I think I knew a year before my thirtieth birthday that I wouldn’t do it. Suicide had to be not painful, and I had not reached a point of solvency where I could afford an attractive suicide. That was a trivial reason. The true reason was that by thirty, I had a worth that I didn’t have when I was seventeen. I did not want to die. At seventeen, I had done nothing with my life; I was nobody; if I died it would make no difference to anyone at all. But at thirty I felt it would. That was a revelation, I’d actually got somewhere, I’d actually achieved something, I had a reason for staying alive.’

  Thinking about checking out was a good thing, Padmanabhan explains kindly, sensing that at thirty (my age at the time of the interview), I’m vulnerable to her special brand of logic.

  ‘It instilled in me a tremendous sense of direction: I wanted to be great and famous and very rich. I wanted to have brilliant affairs and to be a philanthropist. And at thirty, I was nowhere! I had not had any great affairs, I was not rich and I was not happy; the only thing I had at thirty was a sense of value for myself that I had not had at seventeen.’

  She mentions, casually, that she remained deeply miserable until she turned forty-two. It’s an interesting number: Douglas Adams used it as the answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Why was it so important, I ask her; what changed at forty-two?

  She takes a beat. ‘It was the Onassis Award. Or maybe it was the hysterectomy. I forget which came first.’

  Padmanabhan welcomed both. The hysterectomy relieved her of a long-standing discomfort with the essentials of being a woman. (She stopped calling herself a feminist when she realized that she enjoyed very little about being female; she is now married, and has no children by choice.)

  She was the first recipient of the cash-rich Onassis Award for her play, Harvest; the sudden influx of money changed her life. It freed her from the struggle, often desperate, never enabling, to earn a living. But it also became a marker in more uncomfortable ways.

  ‘In the Indian milieu, you will not be noticed for the creative work you’re doing today unless somebody from abroad notices you. And then your own media says, “Aha! You are exciting!” The disillusionment was to realize that six years of Suki had no impact compared to that one news event of Harvest. I don’t want to be whining but it’s a repeating cycle of sadness, that we can’t seem to be interested in ourselves for ourselves. There has to be some exterior cachet. It’s not like people said about Harvest, wow, what a great play. They only ever said, wow, what a lot of money.’

  A decade on from Harvest, the inescapable economics of publishing still rule her life. Even prize money doesn’t last forever.

  Dessert arrives; an apple jalebi for me with rabri on the side, chocolate cake for Padmanabhan. It provides a small dose of sweetness in a swell of bitter resignation about today’s publishing world. ‘They don’t publish books as favours to authors. And if the author’s work is not supported by readers, sadly, no more work. It’s been a bad thing for me that I am unwilling to
stump for my own books; it may mean that there won’t be more books. Being “famous” is not of any consequence to me now. But I certainly want to be rich because that’s the only way I can continue to support my writing.’

  There won’t be any more books? I’m still reeling at that, even while we’re discussing the joys of Myst and Riven, games that the technophile part of Padmanabhan loved being immersed in a few years ago.

  ‘It is the booklover’s absolute metaphor—you open a book, you put your hand on that first page and you are in this other world. It is such a fantastic analogy of what happens through literature, through books. It is that which engages you in a book, that immersion.’

  Immersion; that’s what her work has always provided, that’s why I’m a Padmanabhan junkie, hooked on my next fix.

  However, life after fifty continues to surprise, as a post-prandial call testifies. Catsmeat now has a companion; an injured pigeon handed over to Manjula Padmanabhan, Medicine Woman, by a friend. It doesn’t have a name yet. But it will, it will.

  (Based on an interview from 2004. Manjula Padmanabhan published Kleptomania (2004), a collection of short stories and Escape (2008), a dystopian novel about a country with no women except for one. The sequel to Escape, The Island of Lost Girls, was published in 2015.)

  4

  Khushwant Singh

  What do smart sardars and UFOs have in common?

  You hear a lot about them but no one’s actually met one.

  —Politically incorrect joke found on the Internet

  I don’t know where you’d go to meet a UFO, but the polar opposite of the conventional sardar joke used to live in Sujan Singh Park. Make an appointment, dodge a clowder of friendly cats, eyeball the legendary sign that advises you not to ring doorbell if you don’t have the said appointment, and spend an hour with Khushwant Singh. Who is—as the old joke has it—still ‘a surd among intellectuals, an intellectual among surds’.

  Khushwant Singh, at the age of ninety, has more books behind him than the number of new author Delhi has birthed in the course of a year. (Ask him, and he’ll respond with his trademark line: ‘Any rubbish I write gets published.’) The Library of Congress logged ninety-nine books about or by Khushwant—and this was in 2002, before he added more (he’s lost count himself). ‘[This] would inevitably be my last book, my swansong penned in the evening of my life,’ he wrote at the age of eighty-seven, in the Prologue to his autobiography, Truth, Love & a Little Malice, ‘I am fast running out of writer’s ink.’

  Three years later, he told Outlook, ‘No one has yet invented a condom for the writer’s pen.’ His most recent novel, Burial At Sea, is simultaneously receiving its last rites from reviewers and making the best-seller charts courtesy his fans. He has finished revising his monumental History of the Sikhs, a collection of short stories is due out, he’s contemplating another novel—and that’s not counting the bits and pieces that feed the awesome Khushwant industry.

  His two weekly columns draw postcards by the hundreds and are syndicated in over twelve different Indian languages. I’ve seen tired army jawans reading it near the Indo-China border: ‘Dekh, Sardarji kya keh raha hai.’ Years later, on a trip to Kanyakumari, the stall owners on the beach discuss his column in Malayalam. I ask the taxi driver to translate. ‘They like the Banta Singh jokes very much.’ There is no better homage to Khushwant than to start off a profile on him with the genre of joke he dragged out of the racist closet and made an art form.

  The remarkably prolific career of India’s best-known and most beloved sardar began with a book that stopped dead after five pages or so. It was called Sheilla, because he thought that two ‘l’s sounded more impressive than one, and he scribbled the title in bold, flowing letters across the front of the notebook. ‘You put your name on it,’ he says wryly, ‘and hoped it would be in all the bookstores.’ Sheilla never saw the light of day. His second attempt featured a train that arrived in a small village in Punjab during Partition, bearing a terrible cargo. Train to Pakistan was first published in 1956; it has never been out of print in India. The village in the novel, Mano Majra, was modelled on Hadali, where Khushwant grew up.

  Suketu Mehta, scriptwriter and author, recalls a visit he made to Khushwant’s house with director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. ‘Khushwant tells us about being stopped at the Dubai airport, where many of the ground staff are Pakistanis. He is the only first class passenger, and comes off the plane first. The Pakistani immigration officer opens his passport, and asks him to wait. Khushwant watches the other passengers leave, anger rising within him. Finally the officer beckons to him. Khushwant says: “So you found only one Sikh to harass?” The officer points to Khushwant’s passport. “I noticed you were born in Hadali, Sardarji. I’m also from Hadali. How could I permit someone from my village to stay in a hotel? You’re coming home with me.’”

  *

  Visitors testify that the standards of hospitality in his household remain Hadali-high—provided you respect his limits. Khushwant maintains an iron schedule. He’s up by 5 a.m. and straight to work—‘No wasting of time on prayers or anything, my only wasteful hobby is crossword puzzles.’ Then he compiles material for his columns (‘I slog for them—two a week, and I never miss a deadline’), edits, writes, strolls around the garden, and entertains a regulated stream of guests until 9 p.m., when he summarily throws everyone out. Bapsi Sidhwa showed up late after she’d sent him the manuscript of The Crow Eaters: ‘He saw me get out of the taxi and look around confusedly. He clapped his hands to draw my attention and shouted: “You are exactly an hour late. But I forgive you because you have written a first-class book.’’’

  In between, he answers mail. Says Manjula Padmanabhan, ‘I am told that he answers everyone, even if it’s only with a line on a postcard. I love that story. That tells me more about him than all the tasteless anecdotes that have occasionally trailed his name.’ And it’s true. He politely turns away authors who want him to read their manuscripts—even so, he has three to peruse at present; gleefully collects the abusive letters (‘I challenge you to read this one out loud,’ he says of a postcard where the writer packs a wealth of anatomically impossible suggestions); and offers advice, quotations, commentary to the rest.

  Sure, the man and the legend are inextricable, even enduring. But what of the work? That’s what a writer leaves behind him; that’s what will outlast the anecdotes, the warmth, the controversies, the ‘dirty old man’ tag. Don’t knock the ‘dirty old man’ business; I still remember the fifty-year-old man who announced drunkenly at a party after Company of Women came out: ‘Khushwant writes for ME! He knows what I am GOING through! He is in the skin of the north Indian MALE!’ Suketu Mehta offers, ‘As a teenager, I read Khushwant’s novels for the dirty bits. [They] were terrific, and very rooted—the rustic Punjabi sex in Train to Pakistan must have gotten an entire generation through college. It was a revelation at the time, because the other dirty bits we had access to occured in English gardens and Parisian bordellos; here was sex we could identify with, had a hope of enjoying in our own lifetimes, in our own fields. It was only later that I realized there was real and lasting literary value to the book. But perhaps that’s how many of us were first exposed to the great masters, such as Lawrence—through the dirty bits.’

  Amit Chaudhuri suggests that with the rise of Indian writing in English, Khushwant Singh, never taken seriously as a political commentator, was reinvented as ‘a sort of national literary mandarin. He’d started out as a quite ordinary and unmemorable critic, in the English language, of Punjabi and Urdu writing; now, in his avatar as not only Indian English novelist, but as editor and columnist, his advocacy of Indian writing in English was extreme, and at times absurdly generous. In a dormant literary culture as lacking in generosity as ours was, and is, especially in the Anglophone world, any sign of unprejudiced or unjaundiced receptivity is welcome.’

  But Chaudhuri sees in Khushwant’s tendency to praise writers in exaggerated terms a symptom of a deeper malaise:
‘Singh [in the past] has deemed that Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy are “Nobel-prize material”, as if the Nobel Prize were . . . something you could put on your CV. It’s another instance of the (always upwardly mobile or aspirant) familial language with which we’ve come to speak of culture, books, or writers in India, as we do of our children or our children’s prospective spouses—as safe or unsafe investments.’

  And Khushwant Singh’s absence from two of the better-known anthologies of recent times—Salman Rushdie’s controversial Mirrorwork and Amit Chaudhuri’s own anthology of modern Indian literature—is telling.

  Subtract the joke books, the compilations, the flotsam and jetsam, and you’re left with far less than you might expect for a writer who’s been working for over five decades. (This approach has its risks, as Pankaj Mishra gently points out: ‘We are expected to consider our writers as very serious people doing only very serious things. Otherwise it would be easy to see Khushwant Singh as a writer who can do many things well—even things that are probably not worth doing at all, like the joke books.’)

  The work that Khushwant would most like to be remembered by is his definitive history of the Sikhs—into its sixth edition now. ‘I was determined to do that,’ he says. He names Train to Pakistan as the novel he thinks will continue to last, calls his short stories ‘underrated’, but singles out I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, his second novel, for comment. ‘It’s a better book.’ He’s phlegmatic about The Company of Women and Burial at Sea: elsewhere, he’s said that he never made great literary claims for the former. ‘They sell,’ is what he says. ‘They get panned, but they sell.’

  ‘I toast his individuality,’ says Manjula Padmanabhan, ‘He is a good middle-of-the-road writer. If there were many more of him, India could justifiably claim a healthy literary world. Sadly, there are so few of him, and so very many beneath him, that he is forced to occupy a higher status than he would if our literary milieu were a little more balanced. He is at least coherent, easy to read, mildly amusing and (oh rare! oh unusual!) literate in the old sense—meaning, he has actually read and enjoyed the classics.’