by Karan Thapar
Normally, Chief Igoh was a man given to much laughter. He would respond to the silliest of jokes with a long and exaggerated guffaw. On this occasion, however, he sat like a large, solid rock behind an imposing desk and refused to return my greeting when I walked into his office.
‘Karan,’ he began in a solemn voice, ‘we had great hopes when you came but you’ve let us down. You’re Indian, we’re Nigerian, and we thought you would understand us. But I have to say I’m disappointed.’
‘Why?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘Because you’re as bad as the bloody British!’
‘Chief Igoh,’ I said unthinkingly, ‘given that I work for a British paper that has to be a compliment.’
Chief Igoh wasn’t amused. ‘Why do I have to wake up and find out from you that my Foreign Office is on fire? Do you have nothing better to report?’
I tried to explain how this had happened but I soon realized he wasn’t listening. So, when it was clear that the chief had finished, I politely but quietly got up and left.
After a week or so I flew out of Lagos for London and onwards to Delhi for my first long vacation in eighteen months. That’s roughly how long I had been at my first job. A few days later, I got a call from Charlie.
‘They’ve withdrawn your accreditation, which means they’ve effectively expelled you. They say you’re welcome back in a private capacity to collect your belongings, but I’ve ruled that out. We’ll have your things packed and returned to London. When you finish your holiday, I’ll find something else for you to do.’
Thus ended my first and only stint as a foreign correspondent. What I didn’t know at the time was that this would make it possible for me to join television and start a journey on a very different journalistic path.
4
MY WIFE, NISHA
S
ome of the best things in my life have happened by accident or, at any rate, unpredictably. My marriage was one of them. You could almost say that I was a guest who came over for a night and stayed forever!
It all started in October 1980, when I needed to spend a few days in London before moving to Lagos as The Times’s correspondent. I had an offer to stay with a dear friend, Vaneeta Saroop, but at the last minute, her landlady turned up and Vaneeta arranged for me to spend the first night with two sisters, friends of hers, living in the basement flat of her building.
So, with two large and bulging suitcases, I arrived at the front door of Nisha and Gita Meneses’ flat. Gita, the elder sister, agreed to give me a bed for the night and put me up in Nisha’s room without telling her.
Shortly after arriving, I showered and left for work. That evening when I returned, I could hear the sisters quarrelling. ‘The next time you have a guest, give him your room,’ I heard Nisha say. ‘How dare you turf me out of mine!’
‘Shush. He can hear you.’
Gita’s attempts to silence her sister were unsuccessful and there was little doubt that I was the cause of the problem. Nisha wasn’t at all pleased to see me.
For reasons I no longer remember, this unpropitious start was rapidly forgotten. In fact, even after Vaneeta’s landlady left, I continued to stay with the Meneses sisters. At the time we were just friends in our carefree mid-twenties.
It was a holiday in London six months later that changed the relationship between Nisha and me. This time, Nisha invited me to stay and when I arrived, I found Gita away and the two of us on our own. Four weeks later, I proposed and Nisha said she’d give her answer in a few weeks’ time.
Back in Lagos, I got caught in a swirl of political developments that seemed to threaten Nigeria’s Second Republic. The Shagari government had lost its parliamentary majority and serious questions were being asked about the president’s ability to handle this precarious situation. Many people thought his future looked bleak.
So when the phone rang late one night and Nisha began with the words ‘Do you remember the question you asked me?’, it was the last thing I’d expected to hear.
‘What question are you talking about?’ I foolishly and unthinkingly replied.
‘You asked me to marry you and I’m ringing to say yes!’ Fortunately, Nisha was laughing. She realized she’d caught me on the hop and saw the funny side of it.
Unfortunately, what should have been simple sailing thereafter turned into rather turbulent waters. Back in London after my ‘expulsion’ from Nigeria, I stayed with Nisha and Gita once again. By then I had come to know that this was actually Nisha’s flat, where her sister was a guest like me. As Nisha’s fiancé, I was no longer an interloper.
We fixed our marriage for December 1982 in Delhi, when both of us would be on holiday to meet our parents. This would ensure that both families could be present and all the celebrations arranged with typical Indian fanfare and festivity.
Meanwhile, Nisha and I started living together. It wasn’t a secret, but Nisha had given her parents the impression that we weren’t sharing a bedroom. They were Goan Catholics and therefore, this facade of propriety was important.
Unfortunately, sometime during the summer of 1982 Nisha got pregnant. It wasn’t intended; it was an accident. Our marriage was about six months away and this was not an easy situation to handle. She knew it would upset her parents.
With the help of my close friend Praveen Anand, who at the time was with the Hammersmith Hospital and had also become a good friend of Nisha’s, we arranged for an early termination of the pregnancy. Only a handful of our friends knew about this.
Alas, two months before our marriage, Gita decided to inform her parents. Nisha and I were never sure why she did this, but it came as a bolt out of the blue. It understandably upset Nisha’s mother who, thereafter, was unshakably convinced that I had led her daughter astray.
In a moment of anger, Nisha’s parents wrote to say that, under the new circumstances, they were no longer prepared to arrange our wedding in Delhi. This was a shattering blow. Nisha had wanted a traditional church ceremony and the fact that it could no longer happen, with her parents and friends around, was deeply hurtful. Fortunately, Mummy had no such concerns.
That left the two of us with a simple choice. The marriage had to take place in London and, thereafter, we would go to Delhi as a married couple. Strangely, her parents had no problem hosting a reception. In fact, they seemed rather keen to do that. The church wedding was where they drew the line.
Today, looking back, I’m actually thankful that events developed as they did because otherwise Father Terry Gilfedder would never have come into our lives. He was the parish priest at St Mary of the Angel’s on Moorhouse Road, the local Catholic church, a short walk from Nisha’s flat on Colville Road in Notting Hill Gate.
Father Terry agreed to officiate at our wedding. However, because Nisha wanted a church wedding, he was also required to put us through three formal ‘instructions’ prior to the event.
I suppose the terminology put me off. ‘I’m damned if my kids will be forced into Catholicism,’ I declared with misplaced passion. I can’t recall how Nisha assuaged my temper but when we met Father Terry for the first of these sessions I was irritable, to say the least.
He offered sherry. I was taken aback. It was 6 in the evening and although I’m not averse to a tot, I hadn’t expected this. Our conversation flowed like a river in torrent, sometimes loud and forceful, sometimes full and serene, occasionally like the rapids, short, sharp and staccato. We covered a range of subjects, but religion or Catholicism was not among them. I was enjoying myself. Father Terry filled my glass frequently and I drank without care.
The hour passed swiftly and when we rose to leave, Father Terry asked if next week at the same time would be convenient. I nodded and we were almost out of the door when his voice stopped us.
‘I have a question and I wonder if you will answer it the next time,’ he began. ‘Why aren’t the two of you living together?’
I’m not sure if the blood drained from our faces but we were speechless and stunned. We had lie
d and given Father Terry different addresses. Both Nisha and I thought that the truth should best be kept secret. After all, you don’t tell a Catholic priest that you’re living in sin!
This was Father Terry’s disarming way of telling us that he knew and couldn’t care less. It sealed our friendship. I was still twenty-six and for me he became the most enlightened man in the world.
Despite the fact that Nisha was marrying a Hindu, Father Terry agreed to a wedding with a full Catholic mass. At the time I didn’t appreciate how unusual this was. I even failed to grasp the significance of his suggestion that I should choose one of the two readings from the Bhagavad Gita. In the end, since I was not that familiar with the book, I could not, so he chose one from Kahlil Gibran instead. I asked if this cross-cultural ecumenism was permitted by the church. I can never forget his reply.
‘It’s not where it comes from that matters,’ he said. ‘It’s what it says that counts.’
However, it was Father Terry’s sermon that will always linger as the lasting memory of our wedding. He didn’t do what Catholic priests often do, which is to break into a discourse on fire and brimstone, God and damnation. Instead, using simple words of almost one syllable, he spoke of love. Nisha, our guests and I listened spellbound.
‘Karan and Nisha,’ he said, pronouncing our names with the gentle lilt of his Scottish accent, ‘I want to speak of three little words: I love you. Three words that symbolize today’s ceremony and your relationship with each other. Love is the bond that unites you but if you forget that you are two separate people, with separate habits, wishes and rights, love will also separate you. Never forget that you are two individuals and never let the “I” in you overrule the “you” of the other.’
Father Terry became a friend. He was also the first Catholic priest I got to know. And he’s the only genuine man of God I have ever met. So when I encounter others of the cloth, I judge them by his standards. They always fall short.
Looking back—to be honest, I wasn’t even aware of this at the time—our marriage was a success because Nisha was able to discern that I was both an adult and a child. I believe she loved both halves of me, although the child did occasionally grate on her nerves. Perhaps this is why she often called me ‘KT Baba’. In return I called her ‘Waffles’.
Whenever Nisha travelled out of London on work—and that could happen for as many as seven or ten days a month—she would arrange for one of our close friends to ‘babysit’ me. However, each time she would add an admonition: ‘You’ve got to learn to spend an evening on your own, without fretting or feeling miserable.’ I never did.
I’d like to believe that our marriage brought Nisha luck. When I first met her, she was an investment banker with JP Morgan. Within a year, her career accelerated with rocket-like speed. After a succession of moves that took her to Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company and Merrill Lynch, she ended up as an executive director at County NatWest. By the age of thirty, she was widely recognized as one of the few high-flying female investment bankers in the City, London’s financial centre.
Although by then I was a producer at London Weekend Television (LWT) and, in comparison to other journalists, well paid, Nisha’s salary was almost seven times more than mine. One of her perks was a ridiculously low mortgage, which allowed us to buy a spacious and beautiful flat in St James’s Gardens in Holland Park for over 100,000 pounds before either of us had reached our thirtieth birthday.
Nisha was never flashy but she was always conscious that she earned more than me and worried this might give me a complex. So whenever we went shopping and I would admire a jacket or a pair of shoes or an objet d’art in a shop window, she’d immediately say, ‘I’ll buy it for you.’ It was Nisha’s way of indicating that her money was also mine.
Nisha was a great organizer. Not only did she have a clear idea of the career path she intended for herself, she was also extremely good at identifying people who could be of use to me. And if I was too shy to approach them, she would go forth and do it herself.
By 1989 it seemed Nisha was destined to reach the top of her profession. Although already close to the summit, her colleagues were convinced that the last few hurdles would soon be crossed, possibly within a decade. The gods were clearly smiling on us.
Nisha’s sudden death was, therefore, a devastating blow. She fell ill during an Easter break in Istanbul and it was quickly diagnosed as encephalitis. It happened on Easter Saturday in a city where English was not easily understood and where we knew absolutely no one. That only added to the trauma.
Ironically, encephalitis was something Nisha was familiar with. A few weeks earlier, Praveen’s brother Deepak had been diagnosed with it in Bombay. As a neurologist who knew more about the disease than most doctors, Praveen had flown back to India to supervise Deepak’s treatment. Nisha would call him every day to enquire about Deepak. Thus, encephalitis became a central topic of concern for her, Praveen’s newly married wife Uma, and me.
It was, therefore, an unbelievable coincidence that Nisha should contract the same disease. When the doctors at the American Hospital in Istanbul told me that this was what they suspected, I knew I had to get her back to London and admitted to the National Hospital, where Praveen worked. But Nisha was in a coma and London is shut over Easter. Fortunately, I found her managing director Philip Porter’s number in her diary and rang him up. Within hours, an ambulance plane flew in from Salzburg to take Nisha home.
Nisha lived for a month but never recovered. In fact, the coma got steadily worse. Meanwhile, Deepak died and Praveen returned to London without waiting for his brother’s funeral obsequies. ‘I wasn’t able to save Deepak,’ he told his father, ‘but now I want to try and save Nisha. She is, after all, in my hospital.’
It wasn’t to be. Two weeks later, the doctors declared her brainstem dead. Praveen’s presence and confirmation of the verdict helped me accept it.
The advice from the National Hospital doctors was to switch off the machines. If Nisha could be said to be alive, it was only because the machines were keeping her going. Without their assistance she would not survive. This, they explained, was what brainstem death meant.
It was, however, a conversation with my father-in-law, Tony Meneses, who remained in India right through Nisha’s illness, that encouraged me to accept the doctors’ recommendation. In fact, it was the decisive factor.
‘First,’ he said, ‘this is a decision for you to take on your own. Don’t be swayed by what others tell you, whether it’s my wife or your mother. But remember one thing as you make up your mind. So far, the doctors and nurses have given Nisha the best possible care because they believed she could survive. Now, when they’re telling you she can’t, if you insist on keeping her alive, won’t their attitude change? Think about that.’
Till then, the pain of losing my wife had come in the way of viewing the situation from a detached perspective. My father-in-law, however, was gently pushing me in that direction. I heard him out in silence. I wasn’t sure what to say. But he wasn’t finished.
‘Do you really want Nisha to become a vegetable?’ It was a tough simile but I knew it was intended to force me to think clearly, not to hurt. ‘Nisha’s dignity is in your hands. Remember that only you can protect it and your decision will determine how others view her.’
The message from my father-in-law was obvious. Let Nisha go, was what he was saying. Her life is over and you must not try to artificially extend it. That would diminish and demean her. It would be undignified.
This also meant that I had to ‘arrange’ Nisha’s death. A time had to be agreed upon when the machines would be switched off. Those most dear to Nisha had to be informed so they could be with her at that moment. I did what was required, almost mechanically but deliberately. At such times, this helps to keep one going. But was there something I was forgetting? I felt there was.
I instinctively knew I had the answer when I suddenly remembered Father Terry. He had been a friend since our wedding day. Alth
ough she wasn’t religious, I felt Nisha would want him beside her. From the day we first met him, drinking his sherry while hiding our little secret, she had admired, respected and grown to like him.
I agreed to the hospital switching off the machines at 5 p.m. on Sunday, 22 April 1989. As the painful last hours and minutes ticked by, it was a sombre group that gathered around Nisha’s hospital bed.
I won’t say that Father Terry brought hope, but when he walked in at 4.30 p.m. he brought a sense of light. The gloom lifted, even if it did not dispel. Father Terry gave Nisha the last sacrament but also encouraged my mother to whisper Hindu prayers in her ear. Then he stood beside me as the machines slowly, painfully, flickered to a close and Nisha’s life ebbed away.
Nisha and I had been married for six years, four months and nineteen days. We’d known each other for about two years prior to that. Now, at thirty-three—which also was her age when she died—I faced the rest of my life on my own.
5
STARTING A CAREER IN TELEVISION
I
can’t deny that it was vanity that took me from The Times to London Weekend Television. I rather fancied the idea of seeing myself on screen.
When I returned to London in January 1982 after a winter vacation in Delhi—during which time I had learnt that the Nigerian government had withdrawn my accreditation—Charles Douglas-Home devised a series of challenging but horizon-expanding tasks to keep me occupied. One of these was a five-feature-article study of the Asian community in Britain.
‘We need to get inside the community and find out what it thinks, how it views Britain, the problems it faces and the hopes it has,’ Charlie explained. ‘And as an Indian, surely you’re the best person to do this for the paper?’
Prima facie what Charlie was saying made a lot of sense. But the truth was that the people who made up the Asian community in Britain—even those of Indian origin—came from a very different background and, consequently, had had very different life experiences to mine. We would actually be strangers to each other, even though we were all of Indian origin.