Khushwant Singh's Book of Unforgettable Women

by Khushwant Singh

  Unknown to her, there was someone who had taken a fancy to her. This was young Bikram Singh, a friend of Kailash and member of a gang of dacoits led by a man called Babu Gujjar. Bikram Singh had seen Phoolan around the village and heard stories of her performances in the lentil fields. One afternoon he came to Gurh-Ka-Purwa with some of his gang and bluntly told Phoolan’s parents that he had come to take away their daughter. Phoolan was adamant. ‘I will talk to you with my sandals,’ she said spitting on the ground. Bikram hit her with a whip he was carrying. Phoolan Devi fled from the village and went to stay with her other sister, Rukmini, in the village Orai. It was there that she heard that a warrant for arrest had been issued against her and Kailash for the dacoity in her cousin’s house. The man who took her to the police station raped her before handing her over. She spent a fortnight in jail. When she returned home, Bikram came to see her again. He threatened her: ‘Either you come with me or I take your brother Shiv Narain with me.’ Phoolan was very attached to her only brother; he was eleven years old and studying in the village school. After some wrangling, she agreed to go with Bikram.

  Kailash describes Bikram Singh as fair, tall and wiry. Bikram was obviously very taken with Phoolan. He, had her long hair cropped. He gave her a transistor radio and cassette recorder as she was inordinately fond of listening to film music. He bought her a khaki shirt and jeans. He taught her how to handle a gun. She proved a very adept disciple and was soon a crack shot.

  For the first time in her life Phoolan felt wanted by someone. She responded to Bikram’s affection and began to describe herself as his beloved. She had a rubber stamp made for herself which she used as a letterhead in the letters she got written on her behalf. It reads: ‘Dasyu Sundari, Dasyu Samrat Bikram Singh ki Premika’ (Dacoit Beauty, Beloved of Bikram Singh King of Dacoits).

  Being the ‘beloved of Bikram’ did not confer any special privileges on Phoolan. Whether she liked it or not, she had to serve the rest of the gang. At the time, the leader happened to be Babu Gujjar, a singularly rough customer. He had his own way of expressing his superiority over his gang. He liked to have sex in broad daylight and in front of the others. So Phoolan Devi had to submit to being ravished and brutalized by Babu Gujjar in public. When her turn came to be made love to by Bikram, she complained to him about the indignity. By then, Bikram had developed a strong sense of possession over Phoolan. He did not have the courage to admit it, but one night while Babu Gujjar was asleep, he shot him in the head. Bikram Singh became the leader of the gang and at Phoolan’s insistence, forbade the others from touching her. There wasn’t much resentment because the gang soon acquired another woman, Kusum Nain, who happened to be better-looking than Phoolan. Kusum, a Thakur, attached herself to the Thakur brothers, Lal Ram Singh and Shri Ram Singh. The two women became jealous of each other.

  Despite her many unpleasant experiences with men, Phoolan Devi did not give up her habit of cock-teasing. She sensed that her full bosom and rounded buttocks set men’s minds aflame with lust. Nevertheless, she persisted in bathing in the presence of the men of her gang. One gangster, now in police custody, who had known her as well as Kusum Nain and Meera Thakur (other female dacoits, since then slain) vouches for this: ‘The other girls were as tough as Phoolan but they observed certain proprieties in the company of men. They would go behind a tree or bushes to take a bath. Not Phoolan; she took off her clothes in front of us as if we did not exist. The other girls used language becoming to women. Phoolan is the most foul-mouthed wench I have ever met. Every time she opens her mouth she uses the foulest of abuse—bhosreekey, gaandu (bugger), madarchod, betichod (daughterfucker).’

  The inspector of police has in his files a sheaf of letters written to him on behalf of Phoolan Devi. They are a delightful mixture of the sacred and the profane, of high falutin Hindi and sheer obscenity. The one he read out to me began with salutations to the Mother Goddess under her printed letterhead. The text ran somewhat as follows:

  Honourable and Respected Inspector General Sahib,

  I learn from several Hindi journals that you have been making speeches saying that you will have us dacoits shot like pie-dogs. I hereby give you notice that if you do not stop bakwas (nonsense) of this kind, I will have your revered mother abducted and so thoroughly fucked by my men that she will need medical attention. So take heed.

  It is more than likely that Bikram Singh, besides keeping Phoolan Devi exclusively for himself, also claimed his right as the leader, to enjoy the company of Kusum Nain as well. This irked the Thakur brothers. They left Bikram’s gang and looked out for an opportunity to kill him. On the night of 13 August 1980, they trapped and slew Bikram Singh. It is believed that the murder was committed in Behmai, and that the Thakurs unceremoniously kicked Bikram’s corpse before it was thrown into the river.

  Lal Ram Singh and Shri Ram Singh retained Phoolan Devi in Behmai. They brutalized and humiliated her in front of the entire village. One night, on the pretext of wanting to relieve herself, Phoolan Devi managed to vanish into the darkness. She crossed the Jamuna over to the Mallah village, Pal. From there she got in touch with the Muslim gangster Baba Mustaqeem and pleaded with him to help her avenge the murder of Bikram Singh. Mustaqeem agreed. This is how she ended up being at Behmai on the afternoon of 14 February 1981.

  Ghayoorunnisa Hafeez

  Ghayoorunnisa Hafeez of Hyderabad came into my life when I was seventeen years old. She was a couple of years older and had come to Delhi to join Lady Hardinge Medical College where her elder sister was studying.

  After a year of medical studies she joined Lady Irwin College to take a degree in home science. My younger sister was a student there. The two girls became friends. She was invited to our home for a weekend.

  She came draped in a burkha. At my sister’s insistence she took it off and was introduced to the family. For me it was a bewitching experience. The art of unveiling is a dramatic event, as spectacular as when a curtain goes up in a theatre revealing a stage brightly lit with coloured lights, resembling a fairyland.

  My first impression was that she was beautiful beyond compare. She was a small, frail girl with a sallow complexion and curly light brown hair. She spoke English without any regional accent. Her Urdu was delightfully Dakhhani. What really bowled me over was that a girl who had spent so many of her adolescent years in seclusion could be so saucy and forward.

  A few days after she came to our home for the first time, my sister and I took her to the pictures. I sat between the two girls. No sooner were the lights dimmed than she took my hand under the folds of her sari. I was wild with joy.

  She once got permission to spend an evening at our home. I went to pick her up and instead of taking her home, I took her for a long drive around New Delhi. At that time it was still sparsely populated and the ridge was a welcome wilderness. We never got beyond holding hands and exchanging words of affection. She was very firm about how far unmarried people could go in getting to know each other.

  We wrote long letters to each other. We continued writing to each other in the years I was in England. Her letters got shorter and rarer and then stopped altogether. I learnt from my sister that Ghayoor had got married to a Muslim army officer who also belonged to Hyderabad.

  Why I regard my brief and near-platonic relationship with Ghayoor an important landmark in my life is because it changed my attitude towards Muslims.

  Like other Hindus and Sikhs of my generation, I had been brought up on anti-Muslim prejudices based on Muslim stereotypes.

  The first awakening came with my close association with the saintly maulvi Shaifuddin Nayyar, my Urdu teacher. A more upright and God-fearing man I had not met in my childhood.

  Then came Ghayoorunnisa Hafeez who proved to me that members of the two communities could love each other. Once you fall in love with someone of another community, you fall in love with all her people. And finally there was Manzur Qadir. After coming to know these people, I came to the naïve conclusion that an Indian Muslim could
do no wrong.

  Ghayoorunnisa resurfaced in my life thirty years later. My sister had asked me over for breakfast at my parents’ home. When I arrived there she asked me, ‘Do you recognize this girl?’ Of course! It was Ghayoor. She was no longer a girl but a middle-aged woman who had buried two husbands. With her was a comely teenager, Fareesa, her daughter from her first husband. Fareesa joined Lady Irwin College. I was appointed her local guardian. Fareesa was very popular with college boys. Whenever she went out with them she left a note saying that she was going to see her local guardian. She had no problem extracting a letter from me stating that she had spent the evening in my home.

  Fareesa spent her first honeymoon with her English husband at my house. She later divorced him and married a Swedish banker. They live in style in Hong Kong. Whenever I am in Hong Kong I stay with her. To her children from her two husbands, I am ‘nana’—maternal grandfather.

  Once having re-established contact with Ghayoor, I never lost it. Every time I go to Hyderabad, we spend our evenings together. She has become very frail and nearly blind. She has also become very religious. It is five prayers a day and a daily appeal to Allah to send for her. The last time I was in Hyderabad, I had to track her down to an old ladies’ home.

  She took me to a dargah where her parents and sisters are buried. She has reserved a site for her own grave. ‘I paid Rs 1,500 for it fifteen years ago. Today this would cost more than Rs 15,000’, she told me. ‘Why don’t you sell it and make a profit?’ I said trying to cheer her up. She turned down the suggestion.

  ‘I have had salt sprinkled on the grave. It is a Hyderabadi custom, and no one else besides me can be buried there.’

  As I was leaving, Ghayoor said, ‘I have no one left in the world who bothers about me except you. Fareesa is involved with her own family and hardly ever writes to me. My parents and all my sisters are dead. Why does Allah not listen to my prayers and send for me? I don’t want to live any longer.’

  Sadia Dehlvi

  It was in 1987 at Amina Ahuja’s calligraphy exhibition, that I first met her. ‘Come, let me introduce you to Sadia Dehlvi,’ said Amina taking me by my hand and leading me to a girl sitting on a morha in the middle of a crowded room. The girl didn’t bother to get up. She simply gaped at me with her large, luscious eyes. Her jet-black hair cascaded in curls around her oval face. There was nothing I could think of saying to her except blurting out, ‘Why are you so beautiful?’

  Her face flushed with joy as she put out her hand and replied, ‘If you think I am beautiful, I must be beautiful’, or words to that effect. I had not caught her name and asked her to tell me again. ‘Sadia Dehlvi,’ she replied. ‘You must have heard of the Dehlvis of the Sharma group of journals. I am Yunus Dehlvi’s daughter. I edit an Urdu magazine, Bano.’

  I spent an hour talking to her. I invited her to my home to meet my family. From that day to the time she married Reza Parvez and left for Pakistan, Sadia remained my closest friend. Our age difference did not matter at all. Nor the fact that she came from a conservative Muslim family well-known in northern India and that I, an aged Sikh, was often described by the gutter press as the ‘dirty old man of Delhi’. Although often seen with me, I meant to keep our friendship to ourselves. Not Sadia. She proclaimed from the house tops and in interviews to Bombay’s gossip magazines that ‘the only man in my life is Khushwant Singh.’

  Sadia was emotionally very promiscuous. And utterly outspoken. She talked to me by the hour telling me of the many men in her life. She had made a disastrous marriage with the scion of a family that ran the leading Urdu daily in Calcutta. Her husband had been mother-fixated and prone to violence. She divorced him and returned to her parents’ home. She was a restless character, ever changing her jobs and admirers. She would open a boutique one day, talk of the millions she would make in a few months and then close it after a few days to start a furniture business. She would take a franchise in a restaurant and give it up in a few days to make bigger millions by exporting carpets. For a while she toyed with the idea of getting into politics. She led a march to Meerut where communal riots had broken out, and tried to nurse Jamia Nagar and Zakir Bagh which had sizeable Muslim populations, as her constituency. She went abroad a few times. Once in England she ran out of money and worked as a barmaid in a pub serving beer to customers. To atone for her ‘sins’, on her way back to India, she broke journey to perform an Umra pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina. She had a natural flair for writing, and was commissioned by India Today as well as The Times of India to write regular columns for them. No one could have asked for a bigger break. Her enthusiasm lasted a few weeks. She quickly got bored with anything she did. One time she took to riding and then decided to learn flying instead. She hired a maulvi sahib to teach her Persian and Arabic. Then the zest for living got the better of the desire to become a scholar. She loved animals and once bought a cuddly little cocker spaniel. Then one day she dumped it in the flat of her then closest girl friend, Kamna Prasad, promising to pick it up later that evening. Three days later Kamna had to deposit the pup in Sadia’s home.

  Sadia had a grasshopper’s personality. Above everyone else, she loved herself. Once she was in the press party that accompanied Rajiv Gandhi on a foreign tour. Being much the most photogenic in the group next to the prime minister, she attracted more attention on television and in the media. For a while she toyed with the idea of joining the Congress party and getting into one or the other houses of Parliament, but soon got bored with the idea.

  One thing Sadia was consistent about was wanting to get married. More than marriage, she wanted to be a mother. Her husband had to be Muslim. The father of her child had to be Muslim. When the late Ismat Chugtai advised her to be bold and produce a bastard (‘Haraamee paida kar’), Sadia was appalled.

  Many eligible men proposed marriage to her. She gave them bhaav but never her hand in marriage. Ultimately it was Reza Parvez, almost twenty years older than her, divorced father of two grown-up children and a Shia (Sadia is Sunni), who wore down Sadia’s resistance. Her mother kept telling her right till the day of her wedding, that if she wanted to change her mind, she could do so before signing the nikahnamah. She did not change her mind. I signed the nikahnamah as a witness to her consent to marry Reza. I thought Sadia would take Pakistani citizenship and go out of my life. Once again I had misjudged her.

  A few months after Sadia and Reza had settled down in Islamabad to what appeared to me blissful and happy matrimony, they came to meet me in Lahore where I had been invited to deliver the Manzur Qadir Memorial Lecture on Indo-Pak relations. Sadia came to the lecture dressed in a gorgeous sari. Pakistani women invariably wore salwar-kameez. Sadia sported a red bindi on her forehead. In Pakistan this was the sign of kufr (heresy) worn by infidels. She had become aggressively Indian in a country which regarded India as enemy number one. In course of time, a Pakistani rag denounced Sadia as an Indian spy. She became persona non grata in Pakistani society. Reza was fired from his job.

  Sadia was confused and unhappy. Far from being a Grihalakshmi, she had brought misfortune on her husband’s household. She was back in Delhi looking for a job and seeing gynaecologists wanting to know why she had not conceived. Reza, she confided to me, was a great lover. The couple returned to Pakistan. Reza had to sell his house in Karachi to keep the home fires burning. Slowly the wheel of fortune turned in their favour. Reza found a job; Sadia was pregnant. A son was born to them. They named him Armaan. Six months later Sadia brought Armaan to meet his real grandfather—me. She chided me for not having dedicated any book to her. So I did. Not a Nice Man to Know bears the dedication: ‘To Sadia Dehlvi who gave me more affection and notoriety than I deserved.’

  Anees Jung

  If I had to draw a list of the most engaging conversationalists I have met in my life, Anees Jung’s name would feature right at the top. Even though I am never sure that what she tells me is true or a figment of her fantasies.

  She could flatter any man out of his wits, then r
un him down while talking to others. And if confronted, flatly deny having done so. She does it to me all the time and yet I look forward to being with her. She is a good hostess, serves gourmet food and vintage wines. She often has well-known singers to entertain her guests. She is an incorrigible name-dropper, but the amazing truth is that she does in fact know all the names she drops.

  To her home come Presidents of the Republic, cabinet ministers, leaders of the Opposition, Governors, national figures, poets, writers, ambassadors and counsellors.

  The paradigm for human beings according to her, is what she describes as the ‘Renaissance gentleman’: Well-dressed, sophisticated, au courant with the arts, literature and lifestyle. Her self-image is that of a Renaissance lady who gathers men around her. Where did I fit in her scheme of things?

  Well, I was the first to give her a job. I have known her for over thirty years. And though often exasperated by her go-getting ways and saying nasty things about people behind their backs, I could never drop her. She took good care that I did not do so.

  Sometime in the early 1960s, she returned with a degree from some American university. She rang up my wife to say that she had met our son in Bombay and he had suggested that she get in touch with his parents when she was in Delhi. She was promptly invited to lunch. Both of us were charmed by her. She bore an aristocratic, Hyderabadi name, ‘Jung’.