The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous

by Khushwant Singh

  Dom is said to have married thrice. When he was married to the actress Leela Naidu, I stayed with them in Hong Kong; they, in turn, visited me several times in Delhi. At the best of times, Dom spoke in a low mumble, hard to understand—when I had asked Indira Gandhi, whom he interviewed many times to write her biography, if she understood what he said, she had beamed and replied, ‘No, Leela Naidu translated for me.’ Dom’s second wife, Judy, bore him a son, although I don’t think Dom paid for his education; neither am I sure if he had church or civil weddings and court divorces. In any event, he certainly did not pay any alimony to his former wives—he never earned enough to do so.

  Dom was not choosy about his women: if any of them were willing, he was always ready to oblige. The only real love of his life, I think, was Sarayu, a Tamilian Brahmin married to a Punjabi and the mother of two children.

  Sarayu was instrumental in Dom’s overcoming of the writers’ block that plagued him for seventeen long years, from 1965 to 1982. In partnership with her, Dom wrote Out of God’s Oven, perhaps the most fascinating example of his condemnation of all things Indian that he hated. Between them, Dom and Sarayu traversed the length and breadth of India, interviewing poets, writers, editors, film producers, Naxalites, Ranbir Sena leaders, dacoits and politicians—and Dom decried the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, the Hindu Vishwa Parishad, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, exposing their vandalism, their penchant for violence and their pathological hatred of Muslims.

  While his prose was limpid and lyrical, Dom’s verse was not easy to read. His words had resonance, but one had to read every line two or three times before one could comprehend its meaning—people brought up on simple rhyming verse such as ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ would likely find Dom’s poems difficult. One could, however, detect a few themes that recurred consistently in his poems: he was obsessed with death; the hawk was the symbol of doom; his mother’s insanity haunted him all his life; and he sought escape in hard liquor and making love. He summed it up in ‘A Letter’:

  My father hugging me so hard it hurt,

  My mother mad, and time we went away.

  We travelled, and I looked for love too young.

  More travel, and I looked for lust instead.

  I was not ruled by wanting: I was young,

  And poems grew like maggots in my head.

  With Sarayu’s arrival, Dom turned to writing about love. In poetry he said of her:

  Fourteen years, the same mixture

  As when first I met her:

  … Her breasts always ready:

  Mindmarks and handmarks on each other:

  I study the landscape of her body

  As architect, husband, and brother.

  ... We have been more than married. It was meant.

  We’ve lived in each other. It was meant to be.

  When Dom was stricken with cancer, he refused to undergo chemotherapy. It was as if he almost wallowed in the prospect of an early end, with the ghost of his insane mother hovering over him.

  From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy,

  glare down like a gargoyle at your only son.

  … That I’m terminally ill hasn’t been much help.

  There is no reason left for anything to exist.

  Goodbye now. Don’t try to meddle with this.

  Dom Moraes died in his sleep on the evening of Wednesday, 2 June 2004, and was buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery in Bombay. He was only sixty-eight. With him died the best of Indian poets of the English language, and the greatest writer of felicitous prose.

  FAIZ AHMAD FAIZ

  (1911–1984)

  Faiz Ahmad Faiz was two years my senior in college—and exactly five years older, to the day, than my wife. He was studying for masters’ degrees in English and Arabic in Lahore and, though a student, had already been admitted to the charmed circle of Lahore’s Aesthetics Club, comprising Professor A.S. Bokhari (Patras), Imtiaz Ali Taj, Muhammad Din Taseer and Sufi Tabassum. This was due to his reputation as an up-and-coming poet.

  Faiz had been composing poetry ever since he was sixteen. At his first public appearance at a mushaira in Murray College, Sialkot (from where he had taken a bachelor’s degree), he had made his mark with a couplet:

  Lab bund hain saaqi, meree aakhin ko pilaa

  Voh jaam jo minnatkash-e-sehba nahin hota

  My lips are sealed, saaqi let these eyes of mine take a sip

  Without drawing to ask for wine

  A few years later, when I returned from England and made my home in Lahore, Faiz and I resumed our acquaintance. Following the instructions of the Communist Party of India, Faiz had joined the British Army and wore an officer’s uniform. It was about this time that Alys, whose elder sister was married to Taseer, came to India to marry Harkirat Singh (later a general) to whom she was engaged while he was a cadet at Sandhurst. By then, however, Harkirat Singh had been married off to a Sikh girl. Alys was heartbroken. On the rebound, she married Faiz and bore him two daughters—Saleema and Muneeza.

  Faiz was no lady killer. He was of short stature, with a dark-brown complexion that looked as if he had been massaged with oil. He was a man of few words, soft-spoken and impassive. It was not his conversation but his poetry that made him the centre of attraction at every party. Besides his genius, he was remarkably free of any kind of prejudice, racial or religious, and many of his closest friends were Hindus and Sikhs. He was a humanist in the best sense of the word. There were many contradictions in his character. He was a communist but was more at ease amongst capitalists. He was a man who denied God yet was most God-fearing. In his writings, he championed the cause of the poor and the downtrodden; but his style of living was that of an aristocrat: his daily consumption of premium Scotch and imported cigarettes would have fed a worker’s family for a month. However, he readily deprived himself of these luxuries to live on rations of dry bread and water given to him when he was imprisoned owing to his involvement with the Communist Party in post-Partition Pakistan.

  The Partition of India left deep wounds in Faiz’s mind. Although he decided to stay on in the country where he was born, he refused to accept the division between the peoples: he was unhappy with the way Punjabi-dominated Pakistan treated its eastern wing, the way Bhutto manoeuvred to deprive Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the prime ministership of the country and let loose General Tikka Khan army on hapless Bengalis. He remained to the end of his days Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi—he had as little patience with national divisions as he had for the racial or the religious.

  It was Faiz’s years in prison that brought out the best in him as a poet. Being in prison, he once said, was like falling in love again.

  Bujha jo rauzan-e-zindaan to dil yeh samjha hai

  Ke teri maang sitaron say bhar gayi hogi

  Chamak uthey hain silasil, to hum nay jaanan hai

  Kay a sahar terey rukh par bikhar gayi hogi

  When light in my prison window fades and comes the night

  I think of your dark tresses and stars twinkling in the parting

  When chains that bind me sparkle in the light

  I see your face light up with the light of the morning

  I have little doubt that Faiz had a premonition of his death. How else can anyone interpret the last poem that he wrote?

  Ajal key haath koi aa raha hai parwanah

  Na jaaney aaj ki fehrist mein raqam kya hai

  Death has some ordinance in its hand

  I know not whose names are on the list today

  Faiz’s village of nativity, Kala Qadir, where he intended to spend his last days, has renamed itself Faiz Nagar. Faiz could not have asked for a better imam zamin for his journey into the ultimate.

  FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

  (1896–1982)

  There is a gross misconception that Urdu is the language of Muslims. There were, and there are today, many good poets of Urdu who are Hindus. The greatest among
st them was Raghupati Sahay, better known as Firaq Gorakhpuri, a Kayastha from Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.

  Besides being a good poet, Firaq had a creditable academic record and had qualified for the civil services. But he resigned to join the freedom movement and spent some months in jail with Jawaharlal Nehru. For four years, he was the undersecretary of the Congress. He topped in the MA examinations and taught English at Allahabad University, before returing as reader in 1958. In 1961, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award; two years later, the Soviet Land Nehru Award; and in 1970, the Jnanpith Award. He could write in Hindi, Urdu and English, but he opted for Urdu as the better medium to convey his ideas. He soon came to be sought after in mushairas, where his closest rival and friend was an equally good poet, Josh Malihabadi (who migrated to Pakistan after the Partition).

  Firaq had a disastrous marriage. His daughter died young, his son committed suicide, and he wrote a lot of nasty things about his wife. His ideal of a female companion was:

  Moan aur behen bhi, aur cheheti bhi

  Ghar ki rani bhi aur jeewan sathi

  Phir bhi voh kaamini sarasar devi

  Aur seyj par voh beswa ki petli

  Mother, sister, daughter I adore

  Queen of my home, life companion and more

  Much desired as a goddess as well

  But when in bed a voluptuous whore

  Firaq was one Urdu poet who—instead of turning to Arabic and Persian vocabulary and imagery, as most poets of that language did—injected a lot of Hindi words in his poems. Instead of using Laila-Majnu, the bulbul, the rose, the moth and flame as symbols of eternal love, he turned to Radha and Krishna. Alongside, he used a lot of imagery from Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his compositions. He admitted openly that it often took him weeks to perfect a couple of lines of poetry.

  Firaq died in Delhi in 1982 after a long illness. When he heard of his friend Malihabadi’s death only a few days ago, he is supposed to have said, ‘Once again, the fellow has beaten me to it.’

  GEORGE FERNANDES

  (1930– )

  If anyone is looking for an appropriate subject for a biography, I can suggest one person through whose life one can tell the story of contemporary India, including the story of its achievements and failures: George Fernandes.

  I have always had a soft spot for George. He had everything I do not have. When I first met him, he was a handsome, well-built young man with zest for life, which attracted the most beautiful of women; I was a flabby, paunchy Sardar, more seeking than sought for. The one thing we had in common was our disdain for all religions.

  I have known George in different incarnations. I recall my first sight of him during a hot summer afternoon on a small platform at Kala Ghoda Chowk in the midst of hundreds of Bombay’s cab drivers, exhorting them to fight for their rights. Later, the same evening, I met him at a cocktail reception given by Mota Chudasama. He was the centre of attention with all the bejewelled glitterati of Bombay’s elite society and as much at ease chatting with them as he was talking to sweaty taxi drivers. He was a trade union leader then, basking in the glory of being a giant-killer, having trounced Maharashtra’s leading dada-politician, S.K. Patil, in the Lok Sabha elections. At one time, he edited a weekly, Pratipaksha, in Marathi and Hindi; in one of its issues, he described Parliament as a brothel house. The case was taken up by the Privileges Committee. And, for reasons unknown, dropped.

  When Emergency was declared, George went underground. However, he managed to let his friends know that he was still around. Once I was summoned by Mrs Gandhi to Delhi for an off-the-record and strictly private meeting; the day I got back to Bombay, I found a letter from George on my table with a one-line query: ‘How did your meeting with Madam Dictator go?’ He was outspokenly critical of Indira Gandhi. A few months later, the Calcutta police nabbed him and he was brought to the Red Fort in Delhi for interrogation.

  The next time I was saw George was at Palam airport. I noticed an enormous limousine flying the Indian tricolour draw up along the ramp. Members of a Russian trade delegation came down the steps; Camera bulbs flashed as they shook hands with some dignitary sent to receive them. It was the Honourable Mr George Fernandes, minister for something or the other.

  I met George several times after the Janata Dal government was thrown out of power. When I asked him about his past, about his underground days as the elusive pimpernel, he said, ‘No politician in India has had more bones in his body broken than I. Nor perhaps has anyone been in as many jails as I have. The police thought I was in the garb of a sadhu, so they went about interrogating sadhus. That was too obvious a camouflage. I let my beard grow and taught myself how to tie a turban. The beard grew fast enough, though the hair on the head remained short.’ When he travelled around the country by air, he booked himself under my name for no better reason than he could not think of another Sikh name. ‘But you can’t even speak Punjabi, and here many people know me,’ I said to him. He smiled and replied, ‘I said I was born and brought up in Canada. And no one ever asked me whether I was Khushwant Singh.’ He knew only three Punjabi words: Sat Sri Akal.

  It was after several months that the police realized that George was disguised as a Sikh, when he made the mistake of staying in one place longer than he should have. A note he had sent to a friend to get money led to his arrest in Calcutta. The police wanted him to admit he was George Fernandes and not Mr Singh, which he stoutly denied. The police then tried to break him down. He was too important a politician to be subjected to the third degree, but they did their worst to frighten him. They took him into the jungle to give him the impression that they would shoot him and pass it off as having killed him in an encounter. After they brought George to the Red Fort, they changed tactics. They used the filthiest abuses. ‘Ma, behen, beti, no one was spared,’ George told me. ‘Then they stripped me naked—a naked man feels very defenceless and betrays himself. While two officers were interrogating me, there were dozens of eyes watching every movement of mine from behind glass panels. They gave me a rough, prickly blanket to sleep on—it was like lying on a bed of nails. When none of this worked, they tried to break down my morale by other devious means.’ After many hours of grilling in a hot interrogation room, they would ask George if he would like chilled beer, lemonade or ice-cream; when he would say ‘Yes, thank you’, nothing would come.

  After the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984, following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, I met George frequently. He set up a relief organization to rehabilitate the families of victims. I received a lot of donations from Sikhs living abroad; I passed them on to George’s organization for disbursement. Then I saw George as defence minister. There was not the slightest change in his behaviour. No red light on his car, no sirens blowing, no escort.

  George was never a one-woman man. I heard of many women who befriended him, including a starlet in Bangalore. One such woman I knew well was the dusky, curvaceous beauty Olga Tellis. I lost track of George for a while after he married Humayun Kabir’s daughter, Leila, a Bengali Muslim; though she bore him a son, the marriage did not work out. I saw a great deal of Jaya Jaitley, who was George’s companion for twenty-five years. I had known her as a schoolgirl, when her family lived in the neighbouring block. She was the heartthrob of all the boys with her in school and college, including my son, Rahul.

  There is more to George Fernandes than a swashbuckling comprador of Indian politics. Who, besides him, a South Indian, could win elections from Bihar? Who, besides him, could charm anyone he met? It is a thousand pities that he has been stricken by Alzheimer’s disease. Your memory goes, you can’t tell one person from another. And you gradually sink into oblivion. I know, because my wife suffered from the disease for five years before she died.

  Unfortunately, a battle is raging around George now, regarding who gets to visit with him—so much so that the courts have been drawn into adjudicating whether Jaya Jaitley is allowed as a visitor or not. It is perhaps fortunate that George Fernandes, ‘Giant Kil
ler’, is blissfully unaware of the bitterness around him.

  GIANI ZAIL SINGH

  (1916–1994)

  When Giani Zail Singh was sworn in as the seventh president of India on 25 July 1980, I was rash enough to forecast that despite his modest education and inability to speak English he would prove to be the most popular president the country had had thus far—outstripping the suave Rajendra Prasad, the scholarly Radhakrishnan and Zakir Hussain, the garrulous V.V. Giri and Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy and the all-too-pliable Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad.

  Zail Singh started off with a bang. On Thursday, 8 July 1980, he came to the Central Hall of Parliament to bid farewell to fellow parliamentarians and announce the termination of his long association with the Congress party. He was a few minutes late and was visibly embarrassed as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was addressing the assemblage. She further embarrassed him with her words of welcome: ‘See, he is blushing like a bride!’ So Zail Singh did to the roots of his glossy-black dyed beard. His farewell speech to his fellow politicians was a tour de force of sentimental oratory, the like of which is rarely heard these days. He ended with a reference to Mrs Gandhi’s quip about his blushing, admitting that he felt like an Indian bride taking leave of her parents, brothers and sisters, when every member of the family is in tears. ‘You have decided to retire me from politics; however, mine will be a kind of shahi retirement,’ he concluded.

  Zail Singh’s first few months as rashtrapati were roses-all-the-way. Wherever he went, he was welcomed by mammoth crowds. He regaled them with rustic anecdotes, Urdu couplets, Persian and Punjabi poetry, quotations from sacred Sanskrit texts, the Koran and the Granth Sahib. Here, at last, was a ‘people’s president’—earthy, able to talk on the same level to the peasant and the artisan; able to enter into dialogue with the pandit, the maulvi and the granthi. The only class with which he neither tried to nor was capable of making an equation with was the Westernized waggery. They cracked Sardarji jokes at his expense at their cocktail parties. He often exposed himself to their jibes, as he did when criticizing the Darwinian theory of man’s descent from apes: ‘How could the Buddha be a progeny of a monkey?’ he naively asked. But few wags dared to take him on in public because they knew they could not hope to match him in witty repartee. He ignored their existence.