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Copyright © Khushwant Singh 2013
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Ali Sardar Jafri
Amrita Sher-Gil
Balwant Gargi
Begum Para
Bhagat Puran Singh
Chetan Anand
Dhirendra Brahmachari
Dom Moraes
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Firaq Gorakhpuri
George Fernandes
Giani Zail Singh
Inder Sain Johar
Indira Gandhi
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
Jawaharlal Nehru
Krishna Menon
Lal Krishna Advani
Louis Mountbatten
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar
Mahatma Gandhi
Manzur Qadir
Mother Teresa
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Mulk Raj Anand
Phoolan Devi
Prem Nath Kirpal
Protima Bedi
Sahir Ludhianvi
Sanjay Gandhi
Shraddha Mata
Tikka Khan
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
The Zakarias: Fatma and Rafiq
Ziaur Rahman
Acknowledgements
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I have never been a very tactful person. I have never been discreet either. I am a voyeur and a gossip. I am also very opinionated. These are good qualities to have if your aim is to be a writer who is read. You could add to that the extremely useful habit of keeping a diary.
I have met a good number of this subcontinent’s most famous (or infamous) and interesting people. I have also suffered famous bores, and sometimes been rewarded with behaviour so ridiculous that it becomes compelling. One reason why I have found myself around so many well-known people is that I was in professions which made this possible: journalism, law and public relations for India’s foreign missions. Another reason is that my father was a successful contractor and builder and he sent me to schools and colleges where the children of the rich and famous of the day studied. Several of them later became rich and famous themselves.
Through the latter half of my life, I have had the luxury of having some of the high and mighty of India, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries come to me. I have never understood why. It is true that I live in a comfortable flat in one of Delhi’s more pleasant areas, and I am generous with my Scotch. But I also insist that nobody should ring my doorbell unless they are expected, and certainly not before 7 p.m., and then I ask everyone to finish their drinks and bugger off before 8 p.m. Besides, I get easily bored and now, at death’s door, very easily tired. Still, people keep coming to spend time with me. Maybe they have nothing better to do. Or maybe they are being kind to an old man and want to keep him company—even if he would be happier without it.
I have seen prominent people at close quarters or been privy to facts about them that are not widely known. A lot of what I have observed or found out is not flattering, but I have never held back from making all of it public in my columns and books. If what is good in a person can be written about, why not the bad? I don’t do this out of malice, only out of my firm belief in being truthful. I cannot cheat myself or my readers. If I am proved wrong, I will gladly admit my mistake.
I have been criticized most severely for writing uncomplimentary things about dead people. No one seems to disagree with me that the person concerned was a windbag or a liar or a brute. Their objection is that I do not respect the dead. I find this hypocritical. Death does not wipe away the sins of nastiness or idiocy. A man should be judged in death as he would be in life. The truly good and the great are not diminished when their faults are exposed; on the contrary, they earn greater respect for rising to admirable heights despite their very human flaws.
I have no fear of people being nasty to me in print. If I cannot ignore the criticism or venom, I join in the laughter. I wish everyone would do that. Instead, some of them get very angry. And when they cannot do you physical harm or prove you wrong by fair means, they take you to court for libel or worse. I should know. I had this done to me by Maneka Gandhi. She did not like the little that she read of my autobiography in a pre-publication excerpt in India Today. She went to court and got a stay on publication. Nothing that I had written was a lie, but it was her word against mine, and I was up against a legal system run by thin-skinned and humourless humbugs. I had to wait some years before my autobiography could be published, and only after some lines were deleted.
I don’t wish to be dragged to court again. Death threats don’t scare me, but I fear court cases that can go on for decades. There is enough in this book to inform, entertain and perhaps shock the reader. But, alas, I cannot name the large lady politician who told me of her passion for Rajiv Gandhi and hatred of Sonia for having cheated her of Rajiv’s love. Nor can I name the overrated poetess who seduced a legendary Urdu poet and songwriter only to find that he could not get it up. I cannot write about the Indian president who pulled out a bottle of premium whisky from under his bed and shared a drink with me. I cannot tell you what I have heard about a central minister’s love of al fresco sex, or a right-wing leader’s dealings with an underworld don.
To read all these stories and more, you will have to wait till I am dead and a suicidal publisher decides to print them. For now, enjoy this book of profiles of the good, bad and ridiculous people I have known over almost a century.
ALI SARDAR JAFRI
(1913–2000)
The day Ali Sardar Jafri died in Bombay (1 August 2000, at 8.30 a.m.)—an ironic death in a season of troubled détente—I made it a point to watch Pakistan Television to find out what it had to say about him. Jafri was not only in the front rank of Urdu poets in recent times but also the spearhead of the movement for rapproachement with Pakistan. PTV made a passing reference to Jafri’s death as a poet who wrote of the need for love and understanding between people. I was disappointed. I was also disappointed by the coverage given by the Indian media, both print and electronic. There was more to Jafri than the hastily written obituaries and collages put together to meet deadlines.
I had known Ali Sardar Jafri and his beautiful wife, Sultana, for over thirty years and, during my years in Bombay, we met each other almost every other week. Despite his commitment to communism, Ali Sardar liked the good things in life: good Scotch, good food and comfortable living. He lived in a pokey little three-room flat off Peddar Road. Apart from his wife and three children, who often stayed with him, he had two widowed sisters living in the same apartment. There was not much room to move about and many of his bo
oks were stacked under his bed, upon which he read, wrote and slept.
I would arrive armed with a bottle of Scotch; then Ali Sardar would send for soda and biryani from a restaurant, Allah Beli, facing his apartment. I sought out his company because he was one of the most erudite Indian writers I had met. He also had a phenomenal memory. If I quoted a line by any Urdu poet, he would come out with the rest of the poem. And explain every word by referring to Persian poets—from Rumi and Hafiz to Ghalib and Allama Iqbal.
When I set about translating Iqbal’s ‘Shikwa’ and ‘Jawab-e-Shikwa’, I travelled all the way to Bombay to seek Ali Sardar’s assistance. For two days, he and Sultana came to my hotel in the morning; we worked till lunchtime, when Rafiq Zakaria and his wife, Fatma, joined us to find out how it was going. After they left, we resumed our labours till it was time for our sundowners.
I often needled Ali Sardar about his communism. He had been a cardholder and had been expelled from the Aligarh Muslim University (which later gave him an honorary doctorate) and spent eighteen months in jail during the British Raj, and again after independence, under Morarji Desai’s government. Although he had ceased to be a cardholder, he stoutly defended Marxist ideology. What was beyond my comprehension was that despite professing atheism, during the month of Muharram, he often wore black and attended Shia majlis and abstained from alcohol. During a television interview with me, wherein he expected to be questioned about Urdu poetry, I confronted him with his contradictory beliefs in both Islam and Marxism. He was visibly upset and fumbled for words, then took it out on me after the interview was over. He called me everything under the sun, stopping just short of calling me a bastard. Had he not been so obsessed with communism and social problems, I am convinced he would have been a greater poet.
Ali Sardar was also an incorrigible optimist. Inspired by Rumi’s line ‘Hum cho sabza baarha roeeda aym’—like the green of the earth, we never stop growing—Ali Sardar summed up his life story, ‘Mera Safar’, thus in a few memorable lines:
I am a fleeting moment
In the magic house of days and nights;
I am a restless drop travelling eternally
From the flask of the past to the goblet of the future.
I sleep and wake, awake to sleep again;
I am the ancient play on the stage of time—
I die only to become immortal.
AMRITA SHER-GIL
(1913–1941)
Women seduce. That is a fact. I have been seduced by women all my life, right from the time I was attracted to my first love, Ghayoor—it was she who had held my hand. Most women have made the first pass at me, led me on, with the exception of two women, wherein I took the lead. Even when I was attracted to a woman, I had little confidence to make the first move; instead, I was terribly flattered when women made a pass at me. Looking back, I wish I had the confidence to make the first move, for I could have got closer to several women, like the now legendary painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Amrita, you see, had threatened to seduce me. It happened in Shimla in the mid-1930s.
Amrita came into my sitting room (and my life) one day and introduced herself. She told me of the flat she had rented across the road, and wanted advice about carpenters, plumbers, tailors and the like. I tried to size her up. I couldn’t look her in the face too long because she had that bold, brazen kind of look that makes timid men like me turn their gaze down.
She was short and sallow-complexioned (being half Sikh and half Hungarian). Her hair was parted in the middle and tightly bound at the back. She had a bulbous nose, with black heads showing. She had thick lips with a faint shadow of a moustache. Politeness, I discovered, was not one of her virtues; she believed in speaking her mind, however rude or unkind it be.
As a baby, my son, Rahul, was in the playpen, learning to stand on his feet. Everyone was paying him compliments: he was a very pretty little child with curly hair, large, questioning eyes and dimpled cheeks. ‘What can ugly little boy!’ remarked Amrita. Others protested their embarrassment. My wife froze. Amrita continued to drink her beer without concern.
Later, when she heard what my wife had to say about her manners, that she had described her as a ‘bloody bitch’, Amrita told her informant: ‘I will teach that woman a lesson. I will seduce her husband.’
There were stories that Amrita had seduced many well-known characters of that time. People like the art critic Karl Khandalawala, Iqbal Singh and her nephew, the painter Vivan Sundaram, have written books on Amrita; Badruddin Tyebji has given a vivid account of how he was seduced by her—she simply took off her clothes and lay herself naked on the carpet by the fireplace. Vivan admits to her having many lovers; according to him, her real passion in life was another woman.
Unfortunately, Amrita couldn’t carry out her threat of seducing me because she died a few months later. She was not yet thirty then.
BALWANT GARGI
(1916–2003)
I will never understand why Balwant Gargi committed adultery and then sat and wrote about it.
I don’t recall when I first met Gargi, except that it was at the home of a good-looking lass whom he had succeeded in leading astray from the straight and narrow path of matrimony. What had she found in him? He was a short, squat man who punctuated his talk with effeminate gestures and walked with a mincing gait, like one afraid of slipping.
Gargi was said to be a good playwright; but since he wrote in Punjabi and only rarely were his plays staged, few people knew his real worth. I did not read or watch any of his plays, but I did get to read an anthology of profiles: they were the wittiest pieces of prose I had ever read in Punjabi. They were obviously designed to hurt, and succeeded in doing so. Thereafter, every time Gargi produced a book, he lost a dozen of his close friends. He made up for the loss by acquiring new admirers. He was certainly an engaging talker and had the knack of surrounding himself with attractive women, successfully persuading quite a few of them that a Dunlopillo mattress was not what was necessary to make the bed an exciting place.
In his younger days, Gagi professed communism (we all did), then jettisoned it (so did we) and landed a job to teach Indian theatre at Seattle University. He produced an excellent book on Indian theatre in English; I complimented him on writing 300 pages on a subject that did not exist. He returned from Seattle with a lovely blonde American wife, Jeannie, and all of his friends fell in love with her. It was a misalliance. Gargi’s diet was literary sarson ka saag; Jeannie was American apple pie. Gargi wanted appreciation for what he wrote; Jeannie never bothered to learn Punjabi and was therefore unable to become a part of her husband’s claque. Gargi was gregarious, open-hearted in his hospitality, with not much in his kitty to be open-hearted about; Jeannie cherished the privacy of her home and could not stomach people dropping in at all hours. She also had an enormous appetite for food, which embarrassed Gargi for the simple reason that his friends might think he did not give her enough to eat at home. It was Gargi who took the irrevocable step to break up the marriage by committing adultery.
Gargi wrote an emotionally charged account of his lustful encounter with one of his girl students in a garage, through the window of which could see his wife and children. It was a detailed and lusty account of the love-making, describing even the size of her breasts and her nipples. And that was the end of his marriage with the beautiful Jeannie.
In his semi-autobiographical novel The Naked Triangle, Gargi barely concealed the identity of the people he wrote about, and some were mentioned by their real names. There was the writer and film producer Rajinder Singh Bedi, recounting his affair with a nineteen-year-old girl who bared her bosom to him as a sort of introductory ‘how do you do?’—it made for nice erotica, but it does not need much imagination to know how the lady in the episode, Mrs Bedi, her children and grandchildren would react to this disclosure. The book was largely set in Chandigarh, and Punjab University’s academic circle was up in arms against him for having portrayed them with their shirts up, pants and shalwars down. Balwa
nt Gargi was like a cactus—he hurt anyone he touched.
After his marriage ended, Gargi was a heartbroken man and lived in New Delhi under financial strain before shifting with his son to Bombay. In his later years, I was told, he was struck by Alzheimer’s disease.
BEGUM PARA
(1926–2008)
In the early 1970s, I visited Pakistan twice to see how Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was doing, and how Pakistan was taking the drubbing of its army by the Indian forces in the 1971 war. The second of these visits turned out more interesting, as among the people I met was Begum Para. That meeting has remained one of my most memorable encounters.
I had first met Begum Para through Rukhsana Sultana, who was her niece and married to my nephew. One-time super-vamp of the Indian screen, Begum Para had put on a lot of weight after she married Nasir Khan (brother of superstar Yusuf Khan, a.k.a, Dilip Kumar). She had borne him two lovely children—a daughter and a son—and I had met them several times in Bombay when she was living there. Many a Sunday morning, the family would join me at the Gymkhana Club bathing pool to swim and have breakfast.
When Nasir died, he left behind very little besides a flat in Bandra and a couple of films. Now, Begum Para felt that she had a right to some of the millions that her brother-in-law was making; however, this was to no avail. So she frequently brought up the question of money: if anyone could loan her forty or fifty thousand rupees, she would say, she could have her old films rescreened and make a fortune. I didn’t take the hint.
In sheer desperation, Begum Para eventually abandoned Bombay for Pakistan, where she had a considerable inheritance waiting to be claimed. But it didn’t take her long to discover that her relatives were not willing to part with anything, and she was on weak ground, having earlier opted for India. She earned a little by flogging films she had brought with her and appearing on television. Her children too were unhappy; after the free and easy atmosphere of Bombay, the girl, who was rapidly growing into a beautiful young lady, found the puritanical atmosphere of Pakistan particularly stifling. They wanted rather badly to return to Bombay.
The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous Page 1