Sex,Scotch and Scholarship

by Khushwant Singh

  The Giani was able to rekindle pride in Punjabiyat. From England he acquired the mortal remains of Madan Lai Dhingra who had been hanged for the murder of Curzon-Wylie, and of Udham Singh hanged for the murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, governor of Punjab at the time of Jallianwala Bagh, and he raised martyrs’ memorials over them. He sought out the long-forgotten and ailing mother of Bhagat Singh, gave her a handsome grant and had her honoured as Punjab Mata – Mother of Punjab. The road connecting Anandpur to Fatehgarh was named Guru Gobind Singh Marg; horses believed to be descendants of the Guru’s steed were taken along the marg for the populace to see and marvel at. A new township, Baba Ajit Singh Nagar, was named after the Guru’s eldest son. Massive keertan darbars were organized all over the state. In his eagerness to wrest the Akali monopoly over the affairs of the Khalsa Panth,he unwittingly set in motion a Sikh revivalism which turned into fundamentalism under Bhindranwale.

  Gianiji could not have foreseen this development, much less wished it, because his relations with Punjabi Hindus including the somewhat anti-Sikh Mahasha press of Jalandhar remained extremely cordial. And if gossip is to be believed, more than cordial with the smaller Muslim community. Giani Zail Singh achieved the incredible: he had no enemies. Besides being the Punjabi paradigm of a dostaan da dost - of friends the friendliest - he has the knack of winning over detractors. Even in the heyday of his power as chief minister and home minister he never tried to settle scores with people who had persecuted or humiliated him. He won them over by granting them favours and making them ashamed of themselves. If there was anything he could do for anyone, he never hesitated to do it. He had an incredibly good memory for names and faces. He was able to gain friends by simply recognizing people he had met briefly.

  During the Emergency, while he had put many people in jail, he went to see them. He sent a wedding gift to Badal’s daughter when her father was in prison and went to receive the barat at the house of a friend’s daughter in Kalka when her father was locked up. If he heard a friend was sick he would find time to visit him in hospital and quietly slip a bundle of currency notes under his pillow. Virtually the only man he was unable to win over was Darbara Singh who succeeded him as chief minister of Punjab.

  To describe Gianiji as a far-sighted statesman would be an exaggeration; to describe him as a cunning politician would be grossly unfair because the stock-in-trade of a cunning politician is the ability to tell a blatant lie. And the one thing no one can accuse Gianiji of is falsehood. He is best described as a shrewd judge of men and events. After Mrs Gandhi’s murder, there were many claimants to the prime ministership. Oddly enough, one of the seniormost civil servants at the time and later a confidante of the present prime minister even suggested to Gianiji that he take over the prime ministership himself. Sensing the anti-Sikh climate of the day, it was Gianiji who brushed aside this inane suggestion and decided to offer it to Rajiv Gandhi in the belief that as the descendant of Nehru and Indira Gandhi, he would be best suited to hold the country together.

  And when the opposition tried to put him up for a second term and Congress dissidents assured him of a substantial vote from the Congress party, he carefully weighed his prospects before turning it down. He was not a gambler; he played to win. It was the same when pressure was brought on him to dismiss the prime minister or permit his prosecution on charges of corruption. Gianiji had little to lose and he could have made things very hot for Rajiv Gandhi. He refused to succumb to temptation, teaching Rajiv a lesson for his bad behaviour, because he felt that the nation’s future was paramount and India was more important than Rajiv Gandhi or Zail Singh.

  He has often quoted a couplet to the effect that while he put a rose in the palms of Rajiv Gandhi, Rajiv took a stone to hurt him. There is an equally apt couplet for him to mull over in his days of retirement:

  Zakhmee hue jo hont to mahsoos yeh hua Chooma tha maine phool ko deevanagi ke sath.

  It was the bruises on my lips that made me comprehend with what thoughtlessness I had kissed the rose.

  M. Hidayatullah

  I first met him at a small dinner party given by the then West German ambassador. When he introduced himself I did not catch his name. Since he did not tell me what he did for a living I did not know who he was. In the course of conversation he casually told me that he had that morning struck down D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover as obscene. I was impressed by his modesty: he had not proclaimed himself as the chief justice of India. I was not so impressed by his literary judgement. And told him so. ‘It is by no means Lawrence’s best work, but compared to what modern novelists like Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer write, it is kindergarten stuff.’ He did not want to bandy words with me and quickly changed the subject to Urdu poetry.

  My next meeting with him was in print. I reviewed two volumes of his reminiscences for the papers. His Victorian sense of morality came through clearly. So did his familiarity with the classics of various languages: Latin, Persian, French, Urdu and English. Thereafter I met him several times in and out of the Rajya Sabha. He had an excellent memory; his conversation was invariably embellished with apt quotations and anecdotes. I do not recall any other senior Indian statesmen, barring C. Rajagopalachari, Nehru and Radhakrishnan, who more answer to Plato’s concept of a philosopher-king than he. Though an extremely modest man, Hidayatullah loved to air his knowledge of literature. He was in his element when he bailed me out in a privilege motion moved against me by a bunch of Congress (I) members whose knowledge of English was as poor as their sense of humour. While he mercilessly punctured their self-esteem, he also had a few digs at my ‘Dog Latin’.

  Predictably, at his last appearance as chairman of the Rajya Sabha most speakers spiced their tributes with quotations from the classics: Amir Khusrau, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Thackeray and Iqbal. Instead of simply thanking them for the kind words they had said, Hidayatullah proceeded to admonish them for quoting wrongly. Ghulam Rasool Mattoo had ascribed to Khusrau what partly belonged to Hazrat Nizamuddin. And Pranab Mukherjee had got his Shakespeare wrong. For once, Hidayatullah’s memory failed him. Mukherjee, complimenting Hidayatullah on his ready wit, said that he disproved Shakespeare’s saying that ‘When the age is in, the wit is out.’ Hidayatullah corrected him saying that the actual words were: ‘When the wine is in, the wit is out.’ He received loud laughter and applause. Back home I checked the quotation. It is from Much Ado About Nothing. It reads:

  A Good old man Sir; he will be talking, as they say: ‘When the age is in, the wit is out.’

  Pranab Mukherjee was right, Hidayatullah wrong. However, though I am not sure whether Hidayatullah drinks much wine, neither wine nor age had dulled his wits - only taken a toll of his memory.

  An unspoken tribute was also paid to Hidayatullah by the staff of official reporters who compile our Hansard. Few parliamentarians or press reporters noticed that this motley group of men in floppy clothes had suddenly become very spruce in their attire. This was one of Hidayatullah’s parting gift to these highly qualified but rarely noticed group of stenographers.

  With a couplet that I wanted to quote but which had at the time eluded my memory -1 am fast catching up with Hidayatullah - I say my farewell to this God’s own gentleman:

  Raah-e-manzil mein kucch aise nishaan paon

  ke chorhe hain,

  Ke jinhen dekh kar unki hamesha yaad aati hai.

  On the path of destination such footprints has he left behind, when you see them he always comes back to mind.

  Balwant Gargi

  I don’t recall when I first met Gargi, except that it was in 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 feminine gestures. He walked with a mincing gait like one afraid of slipping. He was said to be a good playwright. Since he wrote in Punjabi, and only rarely were his plays staged, few people knew his real worth. He was certa
inly an engaging talker and had the knack of surrounding himself with attractive women and persuading quite a few of them that a Dunlopillo mattress was not necessary to make bed an exciting place. I did not read or see any of his plays but 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 closest friends. He made up the loss by acquiring new admirers. In his younger days he professed communism (we all did), then jettisoned it (so did we) and landed a job to teach Indian drama at Seattle University. He produced an excellent book on the Indian theatre in English. I complimented him on writing three hundred pages on a subject that did not exist. He arrived back from Seattle with a lovely blonde American wife, Jeannie. All of Bal want’s friends fell in love with the Gargis.

  It was a misalliance. Balwant’s diet was sarson ka saag; Jeannie’s was American apple pie. Gargi wanted appreciation of what he wrote and produced; Jeannie never bothered to learn Punjabi and was therefore unable to become a part of her husband’s alaque. 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 Balwant for the simple reason that his friends might think he did not give her enough to eat at home.

  It was Balwant who took the irrevocable step to break the marriage by committing adultery. He gives an emotionally charged account of his lustful encounter with one of his girl students, in a garage from where he could see his wife and children through the window. The affair was entirely physical. ‘While making love to Raji, I always came out with the wildest truths - the sins I had committed. How I had slept with a seventeen-year-old girl when I was twenty-three. Once her mother caught us and lost her temper. When I broke down, she soothed me, “Son, you must know my daughter is to marry soon. She is innocent. I cannot allow it. . . It’s a sin.” She caressed me and held my head in her lap with a purity and affection that I had not known. At night, she seduced me, kissing me like a mother and then suddenly changing her passion into naked lust, whispering “my son, my son!” all the time. After that she would allow me to take her daughter. I began to sleep with both of them.’

  Raji laughed, “If I were your mother, I would also have seduced you!’”

  The affair with Raji, whose breasts he says had opium on them, came to a sticky end. By then Jeannie had launched on a liaison of her own. Balwant’s machismo was deeply wounded. The injured tone he adopts over Jeannie’s behaviour is hard to swallow.

  Balwant Gargi is like a cactus flower. He hurts anyone he touches. In his autobiography, The Naked Triangle, he barely conceals the identity of the people he writes about. Some are mentioned by their real names. There is the writer, 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 makes nice erotica. But one does not need much imagination to know how the lady in the episode, Mrs Bedi, her children and grandchildren, will react to this disclosure.

  Balwant Gargi’s book is largely set in Chandigarh. The Punjab University’s academic circles are up in arms against him for having portrayed them with their shirts up, pants and salwars down. Balwant Gargi will have to find new friends in Delhi. I will be one of them - till he writes about me.

  The Man Who Has Seen God

  He is unlike anyone I have befriended so far and at times I feel that I treat him more as good copy than as a friend. We have very little in common: his ambition is to make lots of money; mine to become a famous author. He has achieved what he set out to do; I am not likely to earn fame. He has hardly had any formal education and has picked up a little Urdu and English; I have exaggerated respect for men of learning. He believes in God, and God has been good to him. I don’t believe that anything is to be gained from God or prayer. Nevertheless, I look forward to his visits. I shall divulge his identity when I have finished telling you his true life story.

  I first set eyes on him on the Diwali of 1986. He came to greet me but as he had made no appointment I refused to see him. He rang up from a neighbouring house to tell me that all he wanted was to wish me well. I apologized and asked him to come over. He was upset with me and refused to sit down. ‘I wanted so much to talk to you but don’t want to any more - mera mood kharaab kar ditta.’ I apologized again and asked him to tell me why he wanted to see me. ‘Not this time,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to tell you that I have seen God face to face.’

  ‘You mean you have really seen Him?’ I asked in a voice loaded with disbelief. ‘How? Where?’

  ‘As closely as I am seeing you now. But I am not going to tell you about it today - mera mood kharaab kar ditta,’ he repeated.

  Last Diwali he surfaced again. This time after having fixed a time for his visit. And this time I held him captive till he told me of his seeing God.

  ‘In August 1947 I came out of Pakistan with my widowed mother and two younger brothers. We belonged to a half-Hindu, half-Sikh family. I being the eldest was brought up as a Sikh; my brothers remained Hindus. All we had was a hundred-rupee note and a gold bangle my mother wore on her hand,’ he began. ‘We were sent to Saharanpur refugee camp. I was only fifteen years old but the responsibility of looking after the family rested squarely on my shoulders. I got one of my brothers a job of washing dirty utensils in a halwai’s shop at seven rupees per month and the other as a cycle-rickshaw puller. I persuaded my mother to let me sell her gold bangle and trade on the money I got for it. She threw the bangle at me saying she knew I had had my eyes on it but since she had kept it for the girl I would marry, I could do whatever I liked with it.’

  ‘Where does God come into all this?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Patience!’ he counselled. ‘I am coming to it. With the seven hundred rupees I got for the bangle, I began to trade in whatever anyone suggested. Having failed in trading in dry fruit, I bought sacks of black pepper in Calcutta to sell in Delhi.’

  ‘God made you buy black pepper?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘In a way, yes,’ he replied, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘At Patna station while I was making enquiries about prices of pepper I missed my train. I felt I was ruined. I cried for help. I got a taxi to the next station, Danapur. The train had left Danapur two hours earlier. I was frantic. I begged the station master to send a message to the next station to offload my sacks of pepper. He refused to help and threatened to have me arrested for travelling without a ticket. I never bought tickets - just eluded ticket collectors or bribed them. I told him that if he did not have my goods offloaded, I would jump in front of the next train that passed. He bluntly told me to go and kill myself anywhere I liked except at his station. Then I recited Sukhmani Sahib (Guru Arjan’s hymn of peace). I pleaded with God to give me back my bags of pepper. I took a bus to the next station. I ran into the train standing at a signal. It had been there for two hours. Nobody knew why. I did. It was Sukhmani Sahib that did it. I sold the pepper at a handsome profit in Delhi and put the thousands of rupees I had earned in my mother’s lap. She thought I had robbed a bank. I have never looked back since then.’

  ‘Where did God come in?’

  He looked dismayed. ‘Who stopped that train at the signal when there were no other trains for it to let pass and there were two rail tracks? If that does not convince you about the existence of God, I don’t know what else can.’

  ‘It could be a coincidence. I need stronger proof than His concern for your black pepper. When did you see Him next?’

  ‘I will tell you at our next meeting. And if that does not convince you, nothing will.’

  It was Bakr Eid. The fourteen-year-old boy saw the village butcher leading a young heifer down the lane. ‘O Fakira, where are you taking this beautiful cow?’

  ‘To the slaughterhouse. Today is Bakr Eid. She is to be sacrificed.’


  ‘How much have you paid for it?’

  ‘Seventy rupees.’

  ‘I’ll give you hundred rupees for it,’ said the boy who didn’t have a paisa in his pocket.

  Fakira hesitated. If Muslim villagers got to know he’d sold a sacrificial cow, he’d be in trouble. But the extra thirty rupees settled the issue. The boy borrowed the money from a neighbour and took the cow to a pinjrapole. Fakira slaughtered an older animal and thought all was over. Secrets don’t remain secrets in villages for very long. Fakira and the boy were hauled up before an all-Muslim panchayat. The lambardar sternly questioned the boy about his misdeed. The boy admitted guilt. ‘I know nothing about Bakr Eid or sacrifice. I saw that it was a beautiful young animal and my heart was overcome with compassion. I borrowed money on interest to save it. You can punish me.’ The lambardar was moved by the boy’s honest admission and let him off with a warning.

  A few days later when the boy had gone to a mandi, he was stricken with fever and laid himself down on a charpai shivering with high fever. In his delirium he dreamt of the cow he had saved. ‘You have no fever now,’ the cow told him. ‘You will never have fever again. Get up and go home.’ When the boy woke, the fever had left him.

  ‘That was the last time I ever had fever,’ he concluded with evident pride. ‘I was then fourteen, today I am sixty-five. Isn’t that clear proof that there is God?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I am almost ten years older than you and I don’t remember having had fever. I know thousands of people in their eighties who have never been ill.’

  His face showed distress. Nevertheless, he continued his narrative. ‘You may call it a coincidence or whatever you like but I firmly believe that it was the cow I saved which made me take up the milk business. I started in a small way buying milk unfit for human consumption and turning it into glue. Then expanded it to a dairy. Today I have a fleet of milk-tankers plying across the length and breadth of this land. I send fresh, chilled milk to our jawans wherever they may be. I personally took a tanker right into East Pakistan past Pakistani troops to our own while the war of Bangladesh liberation was at its height. Who could have protected me except God?’