Sex,Scotch and Scholarship

by Khushwant Singh

  I was still dependent on my father’s generosity, and my children’s education was still being paid for by my wife. And once again I had to take a job to prove to Delhi society that I was not a nikhattoo - an idler. For them writing could be a hobby, never a full-time occupation.

  I became chief editor of Yojana, a new weekly in English and Hindi published by the Planning Commission. It gave me the opportunity of travelling all over India with a young photographer, T.S. Nagarajan. We visited dams, factories, mines, rural projects. I got to know my country better. I wrote about everything I saw. But no matter how I slogged, the journal did not pick up circulation. It was dismissed as government propaganda and distributed in the lackadaisical manner common to all governmental publications. I was also caught up in rivalries between senior officials and ministers of government. If I praised one, I annoyed six others. Fortunately for me, I ran into the talent scout of the Rockefeller Foundation. He had read my short book The Sikhs and asked me if I would care to do a more definitive work on the same subject. I jumped at the offer. I drew up a project report, got the Aligarh Muslim University (I deliberately chose a Muslim university to explode the theory of historic Sikh-Muslim animosity) to sponsor my application. It was immediately accepted and I put in my resignation as editor of Yojana.

  I had made a very poor deal with the Rockefeller Foundation and soon discovered that I would be out of pocket for another three years. My son was then studying in King’s College, Cambridge (paid for by my wife). We left our daughter in a convent in Mussoorie and flew to London. The first thing I wanted to do was to examine material on the Sikhs at the India Office Library.

  The three months in London proved very fruitful. Apart from collecting material, I was able to complete a biography of Maharaja Ranjit Singh as well as a smaller book on the ten years of turmoil that followed his death and culminated in the annexation of the Sikh kingdom by the British. Before I left London, both books were accepted by publishers. My wife returned to India; I proceeded to the United States and Canada to gather material on Sikh communities settled on the West Coast, stretching from Vancouver to Southern California. Much of this material had remained untapped. By the time I returned home I had a clear idea what I would write. Fortunately for me, the English woman who had been my secretary at UNESCO, Yvonne Le Rougetel, agreed to come over and work for me for the pittance of five hundred rupees a month.

  We slogged for many months. She typed and retyped what I had written several times. My fellowship was coming to an end. I asked for an extension of one year. It was turned down. I managed to finish the two volumes in four years. Both were later published by the Princeton and Oxford University Presses. At long last I came to be recognized as somewhat of an authority on the Sikhs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica asked me to write their items on Sikhism and Sikh history. The Spalding Trust of Oxford invited me to deliver a series of lectures on Sikhism. Princeton University invited me to teach comparative religion. By then several of my short stories and articles had appeared in American, British and Indian journals. I was commissioned by The New York Times and The Observer (London) to write for them. These gave me an entry into serious journalism.

  After a short stint at Princeton and Hawaii, I also taught Indian religions and contemporary Indian politics at Swarthmore College. These lectures were published under the title Vision of India. While teaching in America I learnt more about my country than I had known living in it. As a famous Rababi said: ‘I have learned much from my teacher, still more from my colleagues, but from my pupils more than from all of them.’ From a student who could barely pass his examination, I had become a professor with several books to my credit. It was living in university campuses that set the pattern of my later life. I learnt to eat little, drink more and became a stickler for time. I had no illusions about my being a good teacher or a great writer. But I always managed to raise a laugh whenever I spoke. I am a born jester. And whatever rubbish I wrote, got published.

  It was at Swarthmore that I was invited to take over the editorship of The Illustrated Weekly of India in Bombay. I had earlier been chosen by its last English editor, C.R. Mandy, to succeed him, but had declined the offer because of the grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The editorship had gone to an Indian, A.S. Raman, who, though he Indianized the journal, also used it for blatant self-publicity. He was inordinately fond of the bottle and was fired for indiscipline.

  It was in 1969 on a warm autumn day, when Bombay is sultry and smelling of rotting fish, that I stepped out of the Delhi-Bombay Express at Victoria Station. My friends Gopi and Manna Gauba were there to receive me. Besides them, and my son Rahul, I knew no one in the city. Rahul had vacated his room at the one-guest pension run by the young Parsi couple, the Jehangirs, and resigned his job with The Times of India to take over as editor of Reader’s Digest He did not wish to work under the same roof as his father. Sensible boy!

  The Gaubas deposited me at the Jehangirs’ flat near Churchgate. I spent the afternoon acquainting myself with the neighbourhood and restaurants as the Jehangirs were to provide me only with breakfast. My room overlooked a spread of lawn on the other side of which stood the Raja Bai Tower with its clock, Bombay University and the high court. It was a pleasant neighbourhood with many large shops and eateries, both European and Indian. I was only a stone’s throw away from the sea along Marine Drive and Nariman Point. My office was at walking distance, about a couple of kilometres away past the Gymkhana Club. It faced Victoria Terminus.

  Life soon fell into a routine. I got to my office an hour before anyone else. By the time others came I had done my day’s work - editing articles and short stories, writing edits and captions and answering all the mail that remained unanswered - and was free for any advice my colleagues sought of me. It was not very hard work and more rewarding than I deserved. My months of lecturing on India and Indian religions at Swarthmore College and earlier at Princeton University stood me in good stead. I had known so little about my country till I was forced to teach myself about it to be able to teach my American students. What went for me went for the vast majority of my educated countrymen - they did not know how their next-door neighbours lived, what they ate, the gods they worshipped, the customs and rituals they followed. So I launched a series on the different subcommunities of India: Chitpavans, Vokkalingas, Lingayats, Aiyers, Aiyengers, Jats, Gujars, Memons, Khojas, Bohras and so on. The response was spectacular. Every copy of the journal sold out; the circulation began to shoot up. The Weekly, which was at the bottom of the list of The Times of India publications, came to top it with a wide margin. I became a cult figure in the world of Indian magazine journalism, admired by many, and envied and hated by my colleagues.

  In Bombay my world was quite different from what it had been when I was living and teaching in the States and what it became after I was sacked from The Weekly and returned to Delhi. My social life was dominated by one family, the Zakarias. Fatma Zakaria, though junior to the other two assistant editors, became de facto my number two on the staff. Although she wrote very little herself, she was an excellent organizer and sub. Others who wrote much more, like Bachi Kanga (later Karkaria), R.G.K., Raju Bharatan, M.J. Akbar, Jiggs Kalra and Bikram Vohra accepted her as a mother figure. Her domination did not end with office hours. She saw to it that I mixed only with people she approved of; if I wasn’t dining out, I had to dine with her family. If I wanted to spend an evening alone, she sent my dinner to me. On Sundays and holidays I played tennis or went to swim with her sons, Arshad and Fareed. Wherever they went, I had to go. Since Rafiq was then minister in the Maharashtra government, I went to a lot of places. Poona, Matheran, Aurangabad, Nagpur, and to lots of parties in Bombay. Their friends had to invite me. Faisal Essa, Consul General of Kuwait, Rajni Patel, the architect, Ibrahim Qadri, the Chudasamas. And many others. Virtually the only friends I made on my own were Ghafoor Noorani, the Palkhivalas and the Sorabjis. Also a few girls surreptitiously: Sarvu Doshi, Devyani Chaubal, Nina Merchant, Nirmala Matthan.
Also Trilochan and Bir Sahini and the Advanis who lived in the flat above me in Sentinel House in Colaba where I spent the last five years of my tenure with The Illustrated Weekly.

  It is strange that it was in the nine years in Bombay that I acquired the unsavoury reputation I enjoy today. Nothing I did in office or outside merited it. During office hours, although I had to receive a variety of visitors, the regulars were mainly the cartoonists R.K. Laxman and Mario Miranda who designed the bulb logo in which I have remained imprisoned ever since. The only explanation I can offer is that it was my writing which earned me both popularity and ill-fame. Being an agnostic, I wrote a lot against conventional religiosity and the cult of godmen. Being uninhibited I published pictures of semi-nude girls (always with a valid excuse). There were angry protests from some parents and educational institutions saying that the Weekly which had been a respectable family journal was no longer fit enough to be displayed in school libraries and drawing rooms. Some subscriptions were cancelled. Subscriptions formed a very small proportion of the journal’s buyers: it depended largely on stall sales. They doubled, trebled, quadrupled till the circulation went up from under eighty thousand when I had taken it on to over four lakh by the time I was fired. I became the most widely read journalist, the most-talked-of magazine editor, as well as a notorious iconoclast, a kind of goonda-scholar. I was sought after by politicians, industrialists and socialites. In 1975 I was honoured with the Padma Bhushan (Order of the Lotus) and by the Punjab government for a distinguished contribution to literature and journalism.

  Why they sacked me is for the proprietors, Ashok Jain and his son Samir, to say. I had been given two extensions. I expected to get a third one. Ashok Jain told me that this was not possible as Prime Minister Morarji Desai was unhappy with my continuing support for Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. I accepted the date of my departure and the induction of M.V. Kamath in my place. I hoped they would give me a farewell party and make a few speeches praising me. What I got instead came as an unpleasant surprise which has rankled in my mind ever since. A week or so before I was to hand over charge, I arrived in office and was handed over a letter asking me to quit immediately. I picked up my umbrella and walked out, asking Fatma Zakaria to tell the staff what had happened. It later transpired that someone (probably one of my colleagues) had spread the rumour that I had written a nasty piece on the management as my last contribution. This was untrue. On the contrary, I had written a nostalgic piece bidding everyone a tearful farewell. This was published in many papers afterwards. The Jains or their faithful minions did not have the courtesy to admit that they had erred. Wealth and power make people arrogant and mannerless.

  However, setbacks don’t keep me down for too long. Within a few minutes of my re turn to my apartment in Colaba, I resumed work on my novel Delhi. And a couple of months later, I left Bombay for good. By now I had become something of a cult figure. I received many tempting offers from newspapers and magazine proprietors but chose to accept the editorship of Mrs Gandhi’s National Herald without pay. It was a dead loss. The staff were usually on strike because they were not paid for months. Twice the police raided the office and took away documents hoping to implicate the manager in fraudulent deals. After six months I threw in the sponge and resigned to take over the editorship of New Delhi, a fortnightly magazine launched by the Ananda Bazar Group of Calcutta. This also proved abortive, as the magazine was printed in Calcutta and rarely appeared on time. By then Mrs Gandhi was back in power. Both she and her son Sanjay were beholden to me for the dogged support I had given them over the years. I was offered the choice of taking either a diplomatic assignment (high commissioner in London) or membership in the Upper House of Parliament and editorship of The Hindustan Times. I chose the latter. In 1980 I became a Member of Parliament as well as editor of the largest circulating paper in the capital.

  My six years in Parliament were very eventful. They coincided with troubles in the Punjab. Since Sikh members of the opposition hardly ever opened their mouths, and later resigned, it fell upon me to put forward the Sikh point of view. I was usually the only discordant voice on controversial issues like the army’s storming of the Golden Temple and the massacre of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. Though a nominated member was expected to support the government, I invariably spoke and voted against it. Mrs Gandhi was very upset with me and saw to it that my three-year contract with The Hindustan Times was not renewed. However, the proprietor, K.K. Birla, though he gave in to Mrs Gandhi, asked me to continue writing my weekly column, ‘With Malice Towards One and All’. The arrangement proved very beneficial to me as the column was picked up by almost fifty papers. My successor as editor, N.C. Menon, who did his best to get rid of me, had to suffer its appearing in the paper without his consent. He was later shifted to Washington as a subordinate to another editor.

  I had few illusions that I would be given another term in Parliament. Despite President Zail Singh’s efforts to have me renominated, Rajiv Gandhi refused to do so. By 1986 I retired fully to devote myself to freelance journalism and writing. I am also consulting editor of Penguin India.

  I am now seventy-seven - the evensong of my life. As I look back over the years, my only regret is that I wasted so much time studying and practising law -and on futile socializing. I could have written a lot more and perhaps produced some books that would be read fifty years from today.

  I am not being falsely modest when I say that I really do not know how many books I have written. In 1989 I was at the Wilson Center of the Smithsonian in Washington updating my two-volume History of the Sikhs. A Pakistani working at the Library of Congress who got me books and journals I needed asked me about my publications. When I confessed I did not know, he said he could find out easily by feeding my name in the computer. He did. The next day he brought me a long sheet of paper with fifty-eight titles to my credit. This includes some translations: Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada which I did in collaboration with Mehdi Husaini, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (The Skeleton) which I translated on a voyage from Bombay to London by a cargo boat in twenty-one days and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Ik Chaadar Mailee See (I Take This Woman). Iqbal’s Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa (Complaint and Answer) was done over a year and a half while I was still editor of The Hindustan Times and a Member of Parliament. Since then I have had at least a dozen others published, including my third novel, Delhi, which was written off and on spanning twenty years. It was published in 1990. Not too bad for a man who barely passed his school and college exams.

  I have packed my latter years with a lot of activity. I have been round the world many times, staying in the best of hotels, without ever having to pay for my travel or hospitality. I have drunk several swimming pools of hard liquor and wine. I have known the affection of dozens of women of different nationalities and still manage to be surrounded by the prettiest girls in town, most of them younger than my children. I am working longer hours than ever before and making more money than I did as the highest-paid editor in the country. I have reason to believe that I am more widely read than any other Indian journalist. I am recognized wherever I go in India, sought after by fans, pestered by autograph hunters. All this is vastly flattering to my ego.

  I am also aware it will not last very long. My inkwell is fast drying up, and many of my readers find that I am getting progressively boring. I do not have the stamina to write another novel; many short stories remain half-written and I do not have the energy to finish them. I also have symptoms of old age creeping up on me: my hair is silver-white (I dye my beard), I have four false teeth and may soon need to replace all the others with dentures.

  My memory, of which I was once very proud - I rarely needed to consult a telephone directory in Delhi, London, Paris or New York to ring up friends of olden times - is no longer the same. Now I often forget my own telephone number and may soon decline into senility. I have cataract developing in both my eyes. I suffer from serious headaches. I am slightly diabetic and have blood pressure problems.
I also have an enlarged prostrate gland - at times it produces illusions of youth in the form of a massive erection; at others, it does not give me enough time to undo my fly to urinate. I will have to get it out soon; with it will go erections and fantasies of youth. Every day I swallow dozens of pills of different shapes and colours. I know that one setback - a fall on the tennis court, a bad cold, or a slip on the bathroom floor - and I will be into decrepit old age. How much longer do I have? My parents were long-lived. My father died at ninety, a few minutes after having his Scotch. My mother followed him eight years later when she was ninety-four. Before she went into a coma, her last request made in a feeble, barely audible voice was ‘Wiskee’. It was given to her. She threw it up and spoke no more. I hope when my time comes, I too will be able to raise my glass and take one for the long road.

  I am now working on my autobiography. I give myself another four or five years of creative activity. I propose to devote them in recording whatever I can recollect of my past. I have not performed any great deeds that need being recorded for history. But I have been witness to many historical events and, as a journalist, met and interviewed characters who played decisive roles in these dramatic events. All I can say in my defence is that I have penned my impressions of people, places and events as objectively and as truthfully as I can. I am not an admirer of great people as the few I got to know at close quarters turned out to have feet of clay: they were pretentious, feckless, lying and utterly commonplace.