The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous

by Khushwant Singh

  Shraddha Mata was already in her mid-seventies when I met her, and the most beautiful woman of her age you would see anywhere. What she must have looked like in her twenties when she turned a tantric! She was the stuff dreams are made of: hair knotted in a bun, ivory complexion, high cheekbones, full bosom. A tiger skin to cover her middle and Shiva’s trident in her hand. She lived alone in Hathroi Fort. She spent most of her day meditating in a tiny windowless cell dug in the ramparts of the fort. The lookout tower had been converted into a shrine to the Goddess Durga; there, she kept vigil till the early hours, performing tantric rituals and weird ceremonials while the world slept. The fortress was infested with snakes and scorpions. Also mice and mosquitoes. She refused to let anyone kill them—taking life, according to her, was God’s prerogative. Her closest companions were a pack of friendly dogs, all jet-black.

  During the day, Shraddha Mata sometimes received visitors seated on her takht posh, crown dais, draped in saffron robes; the visitors would have to squat uncomfortably on the bare floor, her dogs sprawled between her and them. On one visit, she said to me: ‘Tell people of Mahashakti of the third eye, through which Truth is revealed. Warn the people against pursuing materialism; it will spell the ruin of the world.’ She talked of the Kendra Bindu and the teachings of the saints. She turned to the conjunction of the planets and their effect on humans. ‘If only Sanjay had come to see me as I had asked him to do, I would have given him a jap that would have saved his life. I met Sanjay only once, when he was holidaying with his family in Kashmir. He was then a little boy. I could see in his eyes that he was going to be tejasvi [radiant personality]. Sanjay’s son, Varun, is destined to be the reviver of Hinduism. Once I told Panditji that he was destroying the sacred threads of the Hindus, his grandson would put them back.’

  On another occasion, I touched her feet and asked about her health. She told me about her diabetes. ‘It was the water in England that brought it on,’ she said. ‘I was there to inaugurate a Shakti temple in Sussex. They put me on insulin.’ The diabetes had affected her vision. At times, it brought a high fever. ‘One day, it shot up to 105,’ she said. ‘Medicines did not help. I brought it down to normal by chanting the right mantra.’ She read disbelief in my eyes and decided to cut me to size: ‘The first time you came to see me at Nigambodh Ghat, I called you an “ulloo ka pattha”. You put it down in your column in English as “son of an owl”.’ She laughed at her own joke.

  That was the tenor of all our meetings.

  TIKKA KHAN

  (1915–2002)

  The Bangladesh war had just ended, and I was as eager to be the first Indian journalist to interview General Tikka Khan as he was determined to have nothing to do with any Indian. He was angry that he had been dubbed by the Indian press as the ‘Butcher of Bengal’ and was smarting under the ignominious defeat inflicted by the Indian Army on Pakistan. He did not acknowledge my letter asking for an interview; it was my friend Manzur Qadir who interceded on my behalf and persuaded him to talk to me as ‘a friend of Pakistan’.

  General Tikka Khan received me courteously in his bungalow. He was a short, stocky man with a dour expression—he looked more like a bank clerk than a soldier. With him was his orderly, a huge man in a Pathan-style skull cap with a stiffly-starched turban. As I looked around, I noticed the paraphernalia usual in the homes of army top brass—regimental insignias, trophies and photographs in silver frames. On the mantelpiece and the walls were quotations from the Koran, including one that I was able to decipher. I kept it to myself as I felt it might come in handy in my dialogue with the general.

  Tikka Khan was a bitter man. He maintained that stories published in the Indian and foreign press, of mass killings and gang rapes committed by Pakistanis, were untrue. ‘We are a God-fearing people, my soldiers were a disciplined body of men. They didn’t go about shooting innocent Bengalis and molesting their women. It is you Indians who spread these lies and had British newspapers publish these calumnies against us,’ he said, looking directly into my eyes.

  I made a mild protest. I told him that I had visited Bangladesh soon after the war and heard stories of atrocities committed by Pakistani troops and officers from the mouths of Bangladeshi Muslims. ‘They could not all be lies,’ I said. ‘And I saw the enormous anger against Pakistanis. But for the Indian troops to protect them, Pakistani prisoners of war would have been lynched by Bangladeshi mobs.’

  ‘There might have been a few incidents,’ the general finally conceded. ‘There are some black sheep in every herd. And you know how prone Bengalis are to exaggerating everything!’ He then quoted an Urdu couplet:

  Shauq-e-tool-o-peych iss zulmat qade mein hai agar

  Bangaali ke baat sun aur Bangaalan ke baal dekh

  If you like to add length to a story, put a twist in its tail

  Hear a Bengali talk (endlessly) and gaze upon his woman’s long hair

  I found this very amusing and put it down in my notebook, fodder to tease my Bengali friends with.

  I asked the general why Pakistan had put up such a miserable performance on the field of battle.

  ‘It was not a fair fight,’ he replied. ‘First, you cut off air contact between West and East Pakistan. Then your men infiltrated deep inside East Pakistan, long before we were compelled to declare war. All these stories of the Mukti Bahini were propaganda. The Mukti Bahini were Indian soldiers trained for guerrilla warfare; there were very few Bengalis in it to start with. You armed them, your officers led and directed them. Our troops had to face the enemy in front as well as in their rear.’

  The orderly volunteered his opinion: ‘Awaam humare khilaaf ho gaya tha’—the people had turned against us.

  The general did not approve of his orderly expressing an opinion and raised his hands to silence him. But I cashed in on the pronouncement. ‘That is exactly what I have been saying. What can an army do if the entire populace of a country rises against it?’

  ‘It was Indian propaganda,’ maintained the general.

  I did not have very much more to ask him. I pointed to the quotation from the Koran on the mantelpiece and, feigning innocence, asked, ‘What does it mean?’

  The general read it out loudly: ‘Nasr min Allah Fateh-un qareeb. It means: Allah grants victory to those whose cause is just.’

  ‘General Sahib, Allah in His wisdom granted us victory because our cause was just.’

  For the first time during the interview, the General smiled. ‘Sardar Sahib, I suspect you knew what the quotation meant.’

  I admitted I did and took my leave.

  In the years that followed my interview with him, General Tikka Khan was imprisoned several times as the political climes of Pakistan changed. After Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s execution in 1979, he emerged as one of the leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party and rose to the coveted position of Governor of Punjab during Benazir Bhutto’s tenure as prime minister and finally retired from politics in 1990. Adamant about his beliefs and the justness of his cause, the Butcher of Balochistan and Bengal spent the last years of his life in illness and died in 2002.

  VIDIADHAR SURAJPRASAD

  NAIPAUL

  (1932– )

  When I got the news of V.S. Naipaul being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, I was delighted and felt I had been vindicated. I was delighted because I had known him as a friend for decades; I felt vindicated because every time I wrote about him I said he deserved the Nobel Prize as he was a much better writer than many other Nobel laureates. He handled the English language with greater finesse than any other contemporary writer and his range of interests were wider: humour, history, travelogue, religion, clash of civilizations, personal profiles, and so on.

  I had met Naipaul’s first wife, who was English, and got on famously with his charming, vivacious present wife, Nadira, who is a Pakistani Punjabi. I met his late brother, Shiva, and saw quite a lot of his mother when she visited Delhi. Whether it was in Delhi or in Bombay, throwing a party for Vidia was a must. I took him
with me wherever I went. He liked being entertained and meeting new people. He never returned the hospitality. That did not matter as everyone felt privileged to have him in their house and to be able to drop his name.

  I had the opportunity of interviewing Naipual with Bhaichand Patel on 8 May 2000. He didn’t relish being interviewed. Bhaichand Patel and I were very exercised over the destruction of the Babri Masjid and heckled him for what was widely believed to be the Sangh Parivar’s view of the act of vandalism. Naipaul stood his ground. He was an outside observer, not concerned with the rights and wrongs of destroying a mosque. The phrase he used was: ‘It was a balancing of history’. I interpreted this to imply that deep in the Hindu psyche was the resentment that Muslin invaders had destroyed hundreds of their temples, so what was so devilish about destroying a dilapidated old mosque?

  Naipaul’s Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey caused a lot of uneasiness amongst Muslims. Even Salman Rushdie accused him of harbouring anti-Muslim feelings. What Naipaul wrote cannot be faulted. He observed that people who accepted Islam wrote off their pre-Islamic past. This phenomenon can be verified in Muslim countries today. In Egypt, the Pharaonic period, which produced the pyramids, the Sphinx and many beautiful temples, is only of historic interest, bringing in tourists and foreign exchange. It is the same in Pakistan. They have consigned their Hindu and Buddhist past to archives, museums and history books. Even the period of Sikh dominance is brushed aside as of little consequence. The destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan is a recent example of erasing a pre-Islamic past. This can be seen in all Muslim nations, including the most Westernized ones like Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia. Naipaul did not invent this fact of history; he only exposed it.

  Known for being aggressive, Naipaul mellowed a great deal after marrying the highly animated and attractive Nadira. He was not as gruff and edgy as he was, and for good reason started writing about sex with remarkable candour and erotic artistry. Of course, he continues to raise the hackles of people with his comments, especially about other writers. But analysing a litterateur’s criticism of literature is the matter for another book.

  THE ZAKARIAS

  FATMA AND RAFIQ

  When I took over as editor of The Illustrated Weekly in Bombay, the last of the staff to be interviewed by me was ‘Aunty Wendy’. This happened to be Fatma, wife of Rafiq Zakaria, then a senior minister in the Maharashtra government. She was not on the payrolls of The Weekly but brought in her contribution and proofread it once a week. She had been told that I meant to abolish ‘Aunty Wendy’, and came armed with a letter stating that she would not be writing for the journal any longer. I read it and tore it up. ‘I am dismissing “Aunty Wendy”, not you,’ I said. ‘If you wish to continue your association with The Weekly, we can think of other things that you could do.’ She nodded her head, then invited me to her home for dinner to meet her husband and children.

  The Zakarias took me by storm. They were a tempestuous family, where shouting at each other was followed by periods of comparative calm. Rafiq had an uncontrollable temper; one never knew when he would flare up. Fatma was more contained but determined to get what she wanted by persistent nagging. They entertained a great deal but only invited people who could further Rafiq’s career. He was brought into politics by Morarji Desai, once chief minister of Maharashtra; for years, his portrait had the place of honour in the Zakaria sitting room. When Morarji Desai went out of favour, his portrait was removed and replaced by that of Yashwant Rao Chavan, the then chief minister of Maharashtra.

  Fatma helped Rafiq in achieving his political ambitions. She made his engagements, confirmed them every morning and kept his files in order. He wanted to distinguish himself from his colleagues by appearing to be a man of letters. Here too his wife helped him in collecting material and editing what he wrote. After a book on Indian Islam, he and his wife wrote a fictional biography of Razia Sultana. I had given it an unfavourable review; they thought I had praised it. For reasons known only to him, Rafiq suspected me of being prejudiced against Muslims: my dispensing with ‘Aunty Wendy’, he thought, was meant to dispense with the part-time services of a Muslim.

  At my first evening with the Zakarias, we took measure of each other. They served me Scotch; Rafiq kept up the pretence that being a member of the Congress party he did not touch liquor. I was told that I wasn’t to tell anyone that I was served whisky in their home. The three boys, Mansoor (from Rafiq’s first wife), Arshad and Fareed, gaped at me in disbelief; they had been brought up on stereotyped notions about Sikhs, that they hated Muslims and went berserk at noon, etc. Fatma’s mother, a big, portly woman who was staying with them, had warned them against using taxis driven by Sikhs. She couldn’t quite make out what I was doing in their home and to her last day referred to me as chhapeywala—the fellow from the printers. Other members of the household included a Goan Man Friday called Pascal Lobo; a wafer-thin Maharashtrian maidservant, with protruding teeth, called Vasanthi; and a cook I called ‘The Assassin’ because he looked as if he could poison in my food. I was able to come to terms with all of them save the cook and the dog. The cook never exchanged a word with me; the dog bared its fangs at me whenever I came or left.

  Rafiq began his bulldozing tactics early on. Why didn’t I give his wife a permanent job on the staff? He could speak to the chairman of the company, retired Justice K.T Desai, and the general manager, Tarneja, but the initiative had to come from me. I had no idea how good or bad a worker Fatma could prove to be, but I could not resist the pressure put on me. I thought I might try her out as a subeditor and see how she acquitted herself. But Rafiq dictated the proposal that I sent to the management—Fatma was to be one of the three assistant editors. Rafiq spoke to Desai and Tarneja. The proposal was promptly accepted.

  Within a few days, Fatma was installed as assistant editor and quietly assumed the powers of my senior-most aide. No one could see me without being cleared by her; all telephone calls to me were first received by her. Even my social life came to be regulated by her. At least twice a week, I had dinner with her and Rafiq; on other days, if I had not been invited out, food was sent to my apartment. Fatma proved to be an extremely possessive woman who could not tolerate my making friends with other women or men she did not approve of. There was, however, a very positive side to her character. Although she did not and could not write, she organized the commissioning and publishing of articles. She was an excellent sub and unsparing in her endeavour to see The Weekly come up. Her dedication to her job and to me was complete. Without her, I could not have run the journal.

  ZIAUR RAHMAN

  (1936–1981)

  I had the privilege of meeting both Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and President Ziaur Rahman many times. They were as unlike as any two persons I have known could be; apart from being Bengali Muslims, they had nothing in common. Mujib was above average in height for a Bengali, flabby and sloppily dressed. Zia was short, slim and made as if of whipcord. ‘His punch can make a man senseless,’ his bodyguard had once told me. Mujib was warm-hearted, outgoing and garrulous, Zia was distant, reserved and a man of few words. Mujib’s office was like an oriental durbar of the Mughal times: dozens of people squatting on the carpets, sprawling on the sofa and chairs, standing along the walls. Telephones rang continuously; he answered them while carrying on conversation with whoever happened to get his attention and signed papers placed on the table. It was chaotic. Zia’s office was as cold as he. In the waiting room, his secretaries and security staff discreetly engaged you in polite conversation while their eyes searched your person for concealed weapons. He received his visitors one at a time and stuck to a stopwatch schedule. No one dared to walk into his room unannounced, no telephones buzzed. Your questions froze in the air; his measured answers did not unfreeze them. Mujib insisted on embracing you and calling you an old friend on your second meeting. Zia gave you a stiff shake of his cold hand and a faint smile of recognition. Mujib spoke of himself in the third person, ‘Banglabandhu says’, and expecte
d you to address him likewise. Zia never opened up, nor let anyone become too familiar with him. He was always ‘Mister’, ‘President’, ‘Sir’.

  I first met Ziaur Rahman after he had been in office for two years. I had my reservations about military dictators and a distinct distaste for one who instead of punishing the assassins of Mujib had rewarded them with diplomatic assignments. Nevertheless, the little I saw of the Dacca environs in the week I spent in Bangladesh was most impressive. The city which had been in shambles a few years earlier had become orderly, with signs of prosperity burgeoning from its shopping centres and marketplaces. They had harvested a bumper crop of rice and the countryside looked greener, cleaner and more prosperous than I had ever seen it. I told Zia this; he looked very pleased and extended my interview. My last question to him was about the anti-India feeling growing in his country. Many walls had slogans painted on them: ‘Indian dogs, get out’, ‘Hands off Bangladesh’. I asked Zia if he could give any instances of Indian interference in his country’s affairs. All that he could mention was the Indian government giving asylum to Tiger Siddiqi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s family. I countered this by asking him why no one had been arrested or punished for the Banglabandhu’s murder. He made no comment but looked at his watch impatiently. I knew the interview was over.

  I was Zia’s last visitor that evening. He was walking down the corridor a few yards ahead of me, between two enormous bodyguards. It was then that I noticed how short he was—a little over five feet. He wore high-heeled shoes.