One man who loves the sound of his own voice is Joginder Singh, the retired head of the CBI. One evening I was in Lodi Gardens sitting on a ledge below the Bara Gumbad mosque. It is my favourite spot to take a short rest between my perambulations because I tire easily. It has become my chosen resting place for two reasons: the dome of the Bara Gumbad is the most sensuously perfect of all domes I have ever seen; and from where I sit I can see people striding along the paved footpath without them noticing me. I can watch the trees, birds and clouds without being disturbed. However, one evening I saw a family of three break away from the stream of walkers and head across the lawn towards me. As they got closer, I recognized Joginder Singh with a lady he introduced as his wife and a young girl who was his daughter. Joginder had a Walkman dangling on his side. He took out the earplugs to talk to me.
‘I am listening to my recorded speeches,’ he told me.
‘Listening to your own voice?’ I remarked, dumfounded.
His wife, who heads the publication division, came to his rescue. ‘Yes, they are full of wisdom. He reads lots of books, gets the best out of them and puts them in his speeches. You should listen to them sometime.’
I did not rise to the bait. My lady companion diverted the dialogue to another topic. ‘Are you writing another book?’ she asked him.
‘Yes,’ replied Joginder Singh in a triumphant voice. ‘Bofors! You’ll see, I will reveal everything about it.’ Joginder Singh was evidently very pleased with himself.
On my way back home, I recalled another man who was in love with the sound of his own voice. This was the late A.S. Bokhari, who was a professor of English at Government College, Lahore. He was a great wit; his Patras kay Mazaameen, a collection of humorous articles, is still widely read and acclaimed in Urdu circles. He was also an excellent after-dinner speaker and was applauded wherever he spoke. He became the director general of All India Radio, then of Radio Pakistan before he joined the UN as the head of the department of mass communications.
Professor Bokhari died in New York. Though he had a family, he lived alone in a spacious apartment attended to by an elderly female housekeeper and cook. My friend, Shafqat Mahmood, a retired Pakistani diplomat, who also lived in New York and visited Bokhari regularly, was informed. He immediately went to Bokhari’s apartment and as instructed by the late professor’s family in Lahore proceeded to make an inventory of his belongings.
When he had finished with the main rooms, the housekeeper told him about the attic where she said the professor spent his evenings and did not allow even her to enter. Shafqat went into the attic. He was surprised with what he saw. There was a hi-fi system; the shelves were lined with tapes of the professor’s speeches. He spent most of his evenings in the attic sipping his Scotch and listening to his own voice. It was a kind of vocal narcissism.
The champion of all talkers whom I had to suffer was my security guard, Sita Ram. He was a Jat from eastern UP and a follower of Chaudhary Mahinder Singh. Sita Ram was into religion and was prone to deliver long pravachans on spiritual matters. Though a Jat, his fellow policemen addressed him as Shastriji. Once travelling with me and a film crew to Jaipur, he talked all the way from Delhi to the Pink City. It did not do him much good. While others who joined the police force at the same time became head constables and SHOs, Sita Ram remained a constable.
While on the subject of great endless talkers, it o ccurs to me that I have never encountered a female of the species. Long-windedness, like the prostate gland, is a masculine phenomenon.
Billo
My granddaughter Naina found a kitten lying on the road. It had been bitten and mauled by a dog and left for dead. It was in a state of shock. She brought it home and nursed it for several weeks cradling it in her arms like a new-born baby. Its face had been cut and one eye damaged seemingly beyond repair.
Slowly the kitten recovered. Its wound healed and its damaged eye recovered its golden sparkle. But it is scared to go out of the flat because of the dogs. Since my granddaughter has to be at the university for several hours of the day, it attached itself to her maid-servant, Kamla.
During the day, it remains close to Kamla and when my granddaughter comes back, it shuttles between the two, purring as it snuggles in their laps. When neither of her two foster mothers is at home, it sits in my ailing wife’s lap and purrs louder to give her comfort. It refuses to respond to my overtures.
When I put it in my lap, it stops purring and is impatient to get away. It hurts my pride, because I am convinced all animals like me as much as I like them. I didn’t know whether it is female or male—a billee or a billa, so I have named it ‘Billo’. Cats do not respond to names; neither does Billo.
Billo has grown into a full-sized cat and spends most of its time in my apartment without coming too close to me except when I am having my meals. Then, it tries to grab whatever it can lay its paws or mouth on and runs away. It looks for tilings under sofas and chairs, examines all my bookshelves and artefacts and is particularly intrigued by the TV set.
Early one morning, when without switching on the lights I switched on the TV, I noticed a long tail dangling in front of the screen. It was Billo seated on the top surveying the room. As the sound came on, it went round the set looking for its source. Then it stared at the pictures and pawed the screen to make sure if the flattened images were of real people.
For many days the TV set became its favourite perch. Then one day as I was watching Discovery Channel, its hackles went up as a tiger appeared on the screen. The tiger roared and Billo fled for its life. Since then, it has not been near the TV set.
Not all people like cats. Some have even gone to the extent of wanting to pass laws to prevent them from wandering about. The classic example is of the state of Illinois considering a bill to ban their prowling about.
When it came for approval to Adelai Stevenson, Governor of the state, he wrote a dissenting note: ‘I cannot agree that it should be the declared public policy of Illinois that a cat visiting a neighbour’s yard or crossing the highway is a public nuisance. It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming—to escort a cat on a leash is against the nature of the owners.
‘Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in the rural areas. The problem of the cat versus the bird or the rat is as old as time. If we attempt to resolve it by legislation, who knows but what we may be called upon to take sides as well as on the age-old problems of dog versus cat, bird versus bird, or even bird versus worm. In my opinion, the state of Illinois and its local government bodies already have enough to do without trying to control feline delinquency.’
There must be something in my character which Billo does not like. Perhaps like Maneka Gandhi and a few others of her kind, Billo has come to the conclusion that I am not a nice man to know.
Translations
Shikwa
Ever since Shikwa (The Complaint) was first recited by Iqbal in 1909 at Lahore, it had remained one of his most controversial and most quoted works—not because of its poetic qualities, which are undisputed, but because of its message. Its theme is the poet’s complaint against Allah for having been unfair to the Muslim community; and while lauding the achievements of Muslim warriors and the civilizing role of Islam, Iqbal laments the decline of Muslim power and the taunts that infidels fling at them. Shikwa is regarded as the first manifesto of the two-nation theory, which was later elaborated and became the basis for the foundation of a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan, by Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
The excerpt below contains the first sixteen stanzas of Shikwa (the complete poem has thirty-one stanzas), translated by Khushwant Singh in 1980.
Why must I forever lose, forever forgo profit that is my due,
Sunk in the gloom of evenings past, no plans for the morrow pursue.
Why must I all attentive he to the nightingale’s lament,
Friend, am I as dumb as a flower? Must I remain silent?
My theme makes me hold, makes my tongue
more eloquent.
Dust be in my mouth, against Allah I make complaint.
We won renown for submitting to Your will—and it is so;
We speak out now, we are compelled to repeat our tale of woe.
We are like the silent lute whose chords are full of voice;
When grief wells up to our lips, we speak; we have no choice.
Lord God! We are Your faithful servants, for a while with us bear,
It is in our nature to always praise You, a small plaint also hear.
That Your Presence was primal from the beginning of time is true;
The rose also adorned the garden but of its fragrance no one knew.
Justice is all we ask for: You are perfect, You are benevolent.
If there were no breeze, how could the rose have spread its scent?
We Your people were dispersed, no solace could we find,
Or, would Your Beloved’s1 following have gone out of its mind?
Before our time, a strange sight was the world You had made:
Some worshipped stone idols, others bowed to trees and prayed.
Accustomed to believing what they saw, the people’s vision wasn’t free,
How then could anyone believe in a God he couldn’t see?
Do you know of anyone, Lord, who then took Your Name? I ask.
It was the muscle in the Muslim’s arms that did Your task.
Here on this earth were settled the Seljuqs and the Turanians,
The Chinese lived in China, in Iran lived the Sassanians.
The Greeks flourished in their allotted regions,
In this very world lived the Jews and Christians.
But who did draw their swords in Your Name and fight?
When things had gone wrong, who put them right?
Of all the brave warriors, there were none but only we.
Who fought Your battles on land and often on the sea.
Our calls to prayer rang out from the churches of European lands
And floated across Africa’s scorching desert sands.
We ruled the world, but regal glories our eyes disdained.
Under the shades of glittering sabres Your creed we proclaimed.
All we lived for was to battle; we bore the troubles that came,
And laid down our lives for the glory of Your Name.
We never used our strength to conquer or extend domain,
Would we have played with our lives for nothing but worldly gain?
If our people had run after earth’s goods and gold,
Need they have smashed idols, and not idols sold?
Once in the fray, firm we stood our ground, never did we yield,
The most lion-hearted of our foes reeled back and fled the field.
Those who rose against You, against them we turned our ire,
What cared we for their sabres? We fought against cannon fire.
On every human heart the image of Your oneness we drew,
Beneath the dagger’s point, we proclaimed Your message true.
You tell us who were they who pulled down the gates of Khyber?2
Who were they that reduced the city that was the pride of Caesar?
Fake gods that men had made, who did break and shatter?
Who routed infidel armies and destroyed them with bloody slaughter?
Who put out and made cold the ‘sacred’flame3 in Iran?
Who retold the story of the one God, Yazdan?
Who were the people who asked only for You and no other?
And for You did fight battles and travails suffer?
Whose world-conquering swords spread the might over one and all?
Who stirred mankind with Allah-o-Akbar’s clarion call?
Whose dread bent stone idols into fearful submission?
They fell on their faces confessing, ‘God is One, the Only One!’
In the midst of raging battle if the time came to pray,
Hejazis turned to Mecca, kissed the earth and ceased from fray.
Sultan and slave in single file stood side by side,
Then no servant was nor master, nothing did them divide.
Between serf and lord, needy and rich, difference there was none.
When they appeared in Your court, they came as equals and one.
In this banquet hall of time and space, from dawn to dusk we spent,
Filled with the wine of faith, like goblets round we went.
Over hills and plains we took Your message; this was our task.
Do you know of an occasion we failed You? is all we ask.
Over wastes and wildernesses of land and sea,
Into the Atlantic.Ocean4 we galloped on our steed.
We blotted out the smear of falsehood from the pages of history,
We freed mankind from the chains of slavery.
The floors of Your Kaaba with our foreheads we swept.
The Koran You sent us we clasped to our breast.
Even so You accuse us of lack of faith on our part:
If we lacked faith, You did little to win our heart.
There are people of other faiths, some of them transgressors.
Some are humble; drunk with the spirit of arrogance are others.
Some are indolent, some ignorant, some endowed with brain,
Hundreds of others there are who even despair of Your Name.
Your blessings are showered on homes of unbelievers, strangers all.
Only on the poor Muslim, Your wrath like lightning falls.
In the temples of idolatry, the idols say, ‘The Muslims are gone!’
They rejoice that the guardians of the Kaaba have withdrawn.
From the world’s caravanserais singing camel-drivers have vanished;
The Koran tucked under their arms they have departed.
These infidels smirk and snigger at us, are You aware?
For the message of Your oneness, do You anymore care?
Our complaint is not that they are rich, that their coffers overflow;
They who have no manners and of polite speech nothing know.
What injustice! Here and now are houris and palaces to infidels given;
While the poor Muslim is promised houris only after he goes to heaven.
Neither favour nor kindness is shown towards us anymore;
Where is the affection You showed us in the days of yore?
Bara Mah
The practice of composing verses on the twelve months was once common amongst Indian poets. It gave them an opportunity to describe nature and human moods, and moralize at the same time. Several exist in the Punjabi language, of which Guru Nanak’s is the most highly rated. It is believed to be amongst the last of the Guru’s compositions.
Chet (March–April)
Chef basant bhala bhavar suhavde
It is the month of Chet
It is spring. All is seemly,
The beauteous bumble-bees
The woodlands in flower;1
But there is a sorrow in my soul
For away is the Lord my Master
If the husband comes not home, how can a wife
Find peace of mind?
Sorrows of separation waste away her body.
The koel calls in the mango grove,
Her notes are full of joy
But there is sorrow in my soul.
The bumble-bee hovers about the blossoming bough
(A messenger of life and hope)
But O Mother of mine, ‘tis like death to me
For there is a sorrow in my soul.
How shall I banish sorrow and find blessed peace?
Sayeth Nanak: When the Lord her Master comes home to her
Then is spring seemly because she is fulfilled.
Vaisakh (April–May)
Vaisakh bhala sakhaves kare
Beauteous Vaisakh, when the bough adorns itself anew
The wife awaits the coming of her Lord
Her eyes fixed on the door.
‘My l
ove, who alone can help me cross
The turbulent waters of life,
Have compassion for me and come home,
Without thee I am as worthless as a shell.
Love, look thou upon me with favour
And let our eyes mingle
Then will I become priceless beyond compare.’
Nanak asks: ‘Whither seekest thou the Lord?
Whom awaitest thou?
Thou hast not far to go, for the Lord
Is within thee, thou art His mansion.
If thy body and soul yearn for the Lord,
The Lord shall love thee
And Vaisakh will beautiful be.’
Jeth (May–June)
Mah jeth bhala pritam kiu bisrai
Why forget the beloved Lord in the good month of Jeth?
The earth shimmers in the summer’s heat
The wife makes obeisance and prays
Let me find favour in Thine eyes O Lord,
Thou art great and good
Truth manifest and unshakable,
Of attachments art Thou free.
And I, lowly, humble, helpless.
How shall I approach Thee?
How find the haven of peace?
In the month of Jeth, says Nanak,
She who knoweth the Lord
Becometh like the Lord.
She knoweth Him
By treading the path of virtue.
Asadh (June–July)
Asadh bhala suraj gagan tapai
In Asadh the sun scorches.
Skies are hot
The earth burns like an oven
Waters give up their vapours.
It burns and scorches relentlessly
Thus the land fails not
To fulfil its destiny.
The sun’s chariot passes the mountain tops;
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 28