Malicious Gossip

by Khushwant Singh

  I go to my bedroom to let the air-conditioner cool my naked flesh and raw temper. It welcomes me with a distinct lowering of tone. Its drone lulls me to slumber. It resents my indifference and goes off in a sulk. The bedroom becomes like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  Power cut. No light. No fan. I spend most of the night sitting in a chair in the lawn slapping mosquitoes and counting the stars. A pale old moon wanders into the sky. The morning star glitters. I go indoors and throw open the windows. A cool breeze, fragrant with Madhumalati, drives away the dank fuzz of yesterday’s dead air. Through the dark foliage of the mulberry tree appears the grey dawn. A magpie robin begins to warble; its dulcet notes awaken the koel which screams to announce the birth of another day.

  Flying-foxes wing their soundless way to their perches on massive Arjun trees. The old lady who lives above comes slish-sloshing along the road, looks round to see if anyone is looking, quickly plucks a few hibiscus flowers from my hedge, tucks them in her dupatta and slish-sloshes towards the temple. Her old man follows. He also stops by my hedge, looks around to see if anyone is listening, presses his paunch and breaks wind. He walks on with lighter step and a “who did that” look of innocence on his wrinkled face. A light goes up in the opposite block. A woman draws her curtains, ties her untidy hair into a bun and stretches her longing arms towards me. Crows begin cawing to each other, sparrows start quarrelling in the hedges. From the neighbouring mosque, the muezzins’ voice rises to the heaven, proclaiming the glory of Allah. Temple bells peal to awaken the gods from their slumbers. A milkman cycles round the block clanging his milk cans. Another man also on a cycle follows him calling in a heavy voice: Paperwallah! Ishtaitman, Taim of India, Aikspraise, Hindustan Taime, Paperwallah! I hear the shush of papers being pushed under my door.

  A Bangladesh Diary

  No sooner you board the Bangladesh Biman than you know you are heading towards a country poorer even than yours but inhabited by a people richer than any you have met anywhere in the world. The Biman Boeing is okay; it is more than half empty—which is more than okay. It is five hours behind schedule; flight delays are inevitable because all they have is three Boeings for their share of the world’s air traffic and seven Fokker Friendships for domestic use. The food they serve would make Indian Airlines proud of its menu and encourage P.C. Lai to further reduce the ration of dog biscuits he serves with tea or coffee. But the crew! I have yet to travel by an airline which has more courteous stewards and friendlier air-hostesses who go more out of their way to make you feel you are one of them.

  Sweeping statements based on a two and a half hour flight from Bombay to Dacca and an all-too-brief dialogue with air-hostess Suheli Hasnat Khan. She joined the airline at sixteen, speaks very little Hindustani and her English is so Bengali accented that I have to make her repeat everything she says. Suheli decides I am very much like her grandfather for whom she had a special attachment. She is one of a family of eight children, says her five daily prayers, observes the Ramadan fasts and will be only too happy to marry anyone at anytime her father decides she should. “I take it you have never been in love?” I asked her. “No, not yet,” she smiles (she is twenty). Her fair, lissom figure and dark sparkling eyes must have given many a Bangladeshi swain sleepless nights.

  We land in Dacca at 1 a.m. I had seen this airport in December 1971 after the Indian and Pakistani air forces had done their worst, leaving large craters on the runways and reducing the airport building to a mess of splintered plate-glass and gaping holes in the walls. I saw it again three years later (1974), repaired but like the victim of an accident. Now it was all aglitter with neon lights, glass and concrete. And a welcoming committee of government officials and a somewhat emotionally inebriated Kamal Anwar, the eldest son of my departed friend, the poet Jasimuddin. The three: mile route from the airport to Hotel Intercontinental has had a facelift. It is a dual highway festooned with brightly lit hoardings. “All done in the last year and a half of the present regime,” says Taj-ul-Islam of the government’s External Publicity. “Looks like a showpiece to impress visitors,” I remark. He smiles a smile indicating “no comment”.

  Dacca is under curfew from midnight to 1 a.m. The streets are deserted. I feel sorry for the ladies who make their living between these hours—and pimps and thieves. The crime rate in Dacca has fallen to an all-time low.

  Next morning I am in the lobby of the hotel, sitting beside the fountain and ogling at the visitors—mainly American and Japanese. G. Ratnam of Siemens joins me. He is having a spot of trouble getting a deal through the Bangladeshi government. “Our (Indian) tradesmen have been supplying shoddy goods to Bangladesh and have forfeited our trust,” he says. The morning papers also carry editorials criticizing Indian business methods. Himayet, my young escort, arrives to take me on a Dacca-darshan tour. I have done this before but the difference is noticeable. The streets and parks are cleaner. No one urinates or defecates in the open—he can get a lash on his buttocks and a fifty-taka fine. I realise that the only way to stop public defecation is the danda. Near the University the car clutch gives way and we have to call off our tour.

  We walk over to the Dacca Club to await Inamul Haq, head of the government’s External Publicity Department. The Club’s tennis finals are being played. Members sit under the shade of colourful parasols sipping tea, watching the game and gossiping. The tennis is not very exciting, the atmosphere reminiscent of the gymkhana. An hour later Inamul Haq arrives with the rest of the party of journalists which includes several editors. (Bangladesh has three English and nine Bengali dailies. Ittefaq in Bengali has a circulation upwards of 1,30,000—the three English dailies under 35,000 each).

  We set out in two Japanese Toyotas. The roads and the buildings look distinctly in better shape than what I had seen them earlier. The countryside is also more lush green and prosperous. Haq tells me that they have had a succession of good harvests. “We produce 13 million tonnes of foodgrains. We need sixteen.” The new varieties of rice now produced in Bangladesh could, with more inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, double their yield. But Bangladesh’s 80 million population goes on multiplying at the rate of nearly three per cent per annum. Eradication of poverty (in no country in the world are there so many beggars) will remain a distant dream.

  We drive along a narrow road embankment through a green sea of paddy dotted with island villages. We reach Madhavi in the Baburhat district which, I am told and retold, is the Manchester of Bangladesh. It is the centre of handloom weaving. Everywhere I see hanks of freshly dyed yarn strung up for drying. Madhavi has been in the news because a new project—a five-mile stretch of kutcha road built entirely by shramdan. It was laid in two months by 25,000 volunteers from the neighbouring villages and students from local colleges. I stop to talk to a fifty-year-old dyer, Mohammad Qadam Ali. He gets a wage of 200 takas (Rs 100) per month, He has to feed and clothe his wife and five children. Prices of rice, lentils, meat, sugar and cooking oils are much the same as in India. Only fish is cheaper. Qadam Ali cannot save anything out of his monthly wage. And he has not finished with producing children.

  A few miles further south is Narsinghdi on the banks of the Meghna. It has three jute mills employing 5,000 workers. (The jute and textile industries were nationalized by Sheikh Mujib.) Here the minimum wage is 150 takas per month with subsidized housing and free medical care. We relax in the mills’ guest house. My brother journalists (all Muslims) get down to scotch and chilled beer. A small can of beer costs thirty takas (Rs fifteen). Scotch is cheaper than in India but soda has faded out of Bangladeshi memory. We sit down to a feast of fresh lobsters, prawns and rohu taken that morning from the river. My Bangabandhus, their appetites whipped by Scotch and beer, consume mounds of rice and the fruits of the Meghna.

  On our way back we stop at Baburhat and I am told again for the fiftieth time that the district is the Manchester of Bangladesh. Baburhat is the wholesale market of handloom products. The village, as most others in the country, is separated from the
road by a canal and linked to it by a rickety wood bridge. At both ends sit bearded maulanas intoning passages from the Holy Quran into loudspeakers with a trayful of coins in front of them. This holy beggary is peculiar to Bangladesh.

  We resume our journey homewards. Clouds gather high above the arched bridge over the Sitalakha river and a gentle drizzle cools the air. “It is the nor’-wester,” Inamul Haq tells me. “When the day is hot the nor’-wester is sure to come.” By the time we reach Dacca, it is dark.

  I call on our High Commissioner, K.P.S. Menon, at his residence in Gulshan Park. The house is well guarded by armed constabulary, powerful lights and barbed wire (an attempt was made to murder Menon’s predecessor, Samar Sen).

  Mrs Menon, an attractive and charming young lady, tells me how much she likes living in Dacca. There’s lots to do but she regrets her Bengali is not up to enjoying plays and poetry recitations which are features of the cultural life of the city. Her husband, who is an exact replica of his distinguished father in appearance, voice and diplomatic courtesy, has the same uncanny insight into the problems that bedevil relations between India and Bangladesh. Farakka has for the time being been settled but the long-term sharing of the waters will need a lot of goodwill and compromise on either side. There is also the thorny question of defining limits to adjoining seas. And Bangladesh is unhappy over the hospitality we extend to elements hostile to the martial law regime.

  In Yankee Land

  “The United States was a sleeping giant; it sleeps no more. God help anyone who crosses our path,” said the American sitting next to me in the plane. He was an airlines pilot full of information of the latest weaponry in the US arsenal. “We have planes which can simultaneously hit a dozen flying targets as far away as 200 miles from them. We have satellites armed with laser beams which can demolish anything anywhere on the face of the globe within a matter of seconds. What our scientists have done is not fully known to people of the world. We are a high-technology society, the like of which does not exist anywhere else.” He proceeded to elaborate. His home in California is almost entirely run by a computer. Lights go on and off, food gets shoved in the oven, cooked and kept warm—all as programmed on the computer. It sounded as if the Brave New World of science fiction of yester-years had become a reality. I asked him about the F-16s and AWACS planes that the US was going to supply to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Awesome!” he replied. “All computerized; knock out anything, anywhere, anytime. If you fellows know what is good for you, you better know which side to back.” I protested mildly, “Since you are giving them to Pakistan, we can only be at the receiving end.” He smiled grimly: “Don’t say I didn’t tell you!”

  There is always something new in New York. My hotel room has a new kind of lock which opens when a rectangular piece of cardboard is inserted into a slot. It is “programmed” afresh every night to befool the cleverest thief. The television, besides the usual thirteen channels, now shows a variety of films, including dirty ones at certain hours. A gadget becoming popular with Indians visiting the States is a wireless telephone which can be carried in the pocket.

  It receives and dials calls through the regular telephone from anywhere within a fifty-foot radius: you don’t have to run from the garden, kitchen or the loo when the bell rings. They tried to persuade me to buy one: “Only ninety-nine dollars! And see how simple and painless your telephone becomes!” they said. I told them that our CM. Stephen had made the Indian telephone system the simplest in the world. “It doesn’t matter where you dial your number from; the garden, kitchen or the loo, you’ll get it wrong. So why waste ninety-nine dollars!”

  The World Trade Center’s two skyscrapers are the world’s highest buildings today dwarfing the Empire State Building by many feet. The bird’s-eye view they present from the top is very different from the downtown Manhattan seen from the Empire State. From atop the Trade Center you get a view of the harbour, the broad East river with its innumerable bridges with ships gliding in and out past the Statue of Liberty. I could see all this from the tenth floor room of my hotel, the Vista International, where a hundred men and women from thirty-six countries were assembled to discuss “Challenges to Freedom” with the liberty lady menacing us with her torch which she wields like a policeman’s truncheon. There was much eloquence on restrictions on the media in Socialist states (“all Soviet newspapers are one paper with different names ... They do not broadcast news but narrowcast them” etc). But strangely enough very little reference was made to restrictions on the press in Kingdoms, Sheikhdoms and military dictatorships. What came as an even greater surprise to me was to hear senior professors of journalism from different American universities denounce The New York Times and The Washington Post for their “left-slanted” reporting and comment on international events notably in Vietnam and EI Salvador. On second thoughts it was not so surprising as most of the delegates were Reaganites and the money for the conference had been provided by the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. At the same time I must concede that at the three conferences funded by the Unification Church that I have attended there was not the slightest attempt made to propagate its creed, laud Reverend Moon or influence anyone to express a point of view in line with theirs. “Why should they waste so much money on people like me?” I asked friends critical of the Moonies. “Air tickets for a hundred delegates, hospitality (Vista charges 250 dollars i.e., Rs 2,000 per day for one room) and all the bandobast must cost almost a million dollars.” They replied that persons like me were invited to give such conferences legitimacy and respectability. That would be the laff of the century in my country. Legitimacy, respectability and Mr K. Singh don’t go together in India.

  In half an hour we are out of New York going along a broad highway into New England. It is autumn time—the most beautiful time of the year and nowhere more spectacular than in North America. The flame bush and the sumac spread like glowing embers on green velvety hills; maples in various shades of green, yellow and fiery reds and even redder Virgina creeper clambering over evergreen larches and firs. God in His infinite wisdom has chosen to give this country a major portion of His bounty. And whether you like them or not you have to concede the Yanks have done a great job with all they got from Him and grabbed from the aboriginal Red Indian. They maintain their lead over other nations in whatever they do. I do not envy the prosperity they have won by hard, honest toil. I say Shabash!

  America abounds with success stories of the log cabin to the White House variety. Indians have a lion’s share of it: 90 per cent being in the top ten per group in terms of affluence. One of them is Ranbir Vohra. His friends in All India Radio might recall the tall, lanky, handsome man who smoked dehati style holding his cigarettes in a clenched fist and flicking the ash by clicking his thumb and fingers. (He continues to do so to the amusement of his American colleagues). Vohra picked up Chinese during his posting in Peking. India had nothing to offer him. So he went to Harvard. All he had was four dollars in his pocket and his wife Meena by his side. He slogged his way up. He topped the list in every exam he took and was appointed Associate Professor even before he got his doctorate. He is now full professor and serving his ninth year as Chairman of the Social Sciences Department at Trinity College, Hartford. He owns a four-bedroom house, two cars and a formidable reputation as one of the best Sinologists in America.

  Vohra has all the recognition he needs in America. But like most expatriates, it is in the country of his birth that he wishes to be recognized and to live in after his retirement. He kept asking about prices of land and rents of apartments in Delhi. It was all very sloppy and sentimental but nevertheless very heartwarming. Better the heat and dust of India than the Sylvan Springs of Connecticut.

  In my talk on Indo-US relations I said that perpetuation of stereotypes made understanding of each other very difficult. India continues to be regarded as a hot, dusty, humid and congested country and Indians regard Americans as uncouth, undeservedly rich with IQs of teenage cowboys. And how all the ai
d and goodwill extended by the US to India on the nation-to-nation level gets washed out by a single unpleasant encounter. At the end of my talk a very shapely black girl (wheatish is how our journalists would describe her) came up to me and asked me if I thought the Gandhian approach espoused by the late Martin Luther King towards colour discrimination was the best. I replied: “No madam! The only answer to a racial insult is an insult of the same kind with a little interest added to it. When a white man calls you a nigger, call him a honkie and kick him in the arse.” I was fully rewarded for my un-Gandhian response. Right in the view of all the faculty, students and visitors, the lissome dark lass planted a full-blooded kiss on my beard.

  Korean Diary

  I had to keep reminding myself that I was not in the Land of the Rising Sun but in the land of the Morning Calm, not in Japan but in Korea, not in Tokyo but in Seoul. The similarities so swamped my senses that I found it hard to spot the differences. The Koreans are slightly bigger, a shade better looking than the Japanese, their language has more Chinese-sounding words in it, they do not bow so often or so low as the Japanese but are equally courteous. Their food, particularly the barbecued varieties of meat, tastes better than anything I have eaten before and their ginseng wine, soju, smells of overripe radish. Their women wear simplified versions of Japanese dresses and their Kisaeng have less make-up on them than Japanese geisha girls. The Koreans are not as rich as the Japanese: Japan is tops in the material world; Koreans are fast catching up with them and by the end of the 1980s will have qualified for membership of the world’s Rich Nations Club. South Koreans are conscious of the fact that they are held out as a lesson to the developing nations; they are confident of achieving their destined affluence and not much worried about bartering their morning calm for turbulent prosperity. After a week in Seoul I asked myself the Biblical question: “What shall it profit a people if they gain the whole world but lose their souls?” I did not find the answer but wished that I had been given the choice: I would take the world and give away all the souls to anyone who wants them.