Thank the one up there that you have so much to do that you have to race against time to complete your work – which I am sure you will. Hope to buy your latest book and come to get it signed by you.
The latest jokes that had me in splits were:
A boy sitting in front of a girl asks her: ‘Tere tango ke beech mein kya hai?’
‘Lakeer. Aur tumhare tango ke beech?’ she asks.
‘Lakeer ka fakeer!’
Love
Amrinder
14 Nov. 2003
Dear Amrinder
For the first time I knew your joke.
My vertigo is better but now I have pain in the groin and walk with difficulty. What is life?
Love
Khushwant
47
25.11.2003
Dear Khushwant Singhji
These days I have been so busy living life that I hardly have the time to write about it. With my practice going great guns, my sex life revived (thanks to a detailed study of your Kama Sutra and the fact that I’ve cast off the negative emotions generated by the fake diamonds) and I barely have time to write the mandatory fortnightly columns for Woman’s Era. The progressive frailty of your physical form is worrying me. Please look after yourself for all of us. Now, what is this about the pain in your groin? Is it hernia or the after-effects of your fall? My arm/shoulder is always available to you in lieu of a walking stick, if you so wish.
I guess my stock of exclusive jokes is over though I will continue to try my best to humour you.
A teacher was taking the viva of computer engineering students. His area of interest was CDs (compact discs), therefore his questions were:
‘What do you call the sex organ of:
Small men – compact dicks
Aliens – laser dicks
Old men – floppy dicks
Young men – hard dicks
An immigrant officer was helping an Arab to fill a form, as the latter could not read English.
‘Name?’ asked the officer.
‘Abdullah.’
‘Sex?’
‘Twice a week.’
‘No. I am asking whether male or female.’
‘Both. Sometimes camel too.’
A group of boys at a restaurant avidly watched an old couple celebrating their 50th anniversary. The wife wanted to do everything in exactly the same way they did it 50 years ago at this very place. After the dining and wining was over, she said, ‘Do you remember how we made love behind the wall of the restaurant?’
‘Yes. Are you game for it now?’
‘Oh yes,’ she breathed, aroused.
Intrigued, the boys followed them and watched the proceedings from a vantage point.
She stood holding the wall while he did it from behind with such convulsive fervour that put the youngster to shame. Finally exhausted, they both fell on the ground. When they came to, the boys asked the old gentleman the secret of his prowess.
‘Well, the wall was not electrified in our times!’
Love
Amrinder
What do you make of this poem I just wrote?
SHE CAME TO ME
In flowing black robes
And ash-white face
Death came to me
In a dream one night
And said, ‘I’ve come
To grant a boon.’
Incredulous, I asked,
‘You who are the
End of all ends,
The one thing that
Saints and sinners
Fear alike.
The one name that evokes
Terror and dread;
Do you have it in you
To give me something good?’
‘Certainly,’ replied the ghostly one,
‘I may be the final visitor in each life
But of you, the chosen one, I ask:
Should I come in youth or age,
With pain or serenity?
Should I ravage like a storm
Or, alight on your lids like sleep?
Should I take you bit by bit
Or in one fell swoop?
Should I bring the twin sisters
Sorrow and Suffering along
Or come alone as a welcome guest?
So you see I have much to offer
And to you alone I offer a choice.
In your case, if and when she decides to come, I hope she reads the notice at your door and takes an appointment beforehand; and she’d better be punctual about it lest she be ticked off for wasting your time.
Do you think this poem can find a place in your column?
Love
Amrinder
***
3 Dec. 2003
Dear Amrinder
No hernia, no pain, no vertigo, just old age and there is nothing I can do about it but mope.
I’ll take your poem on death not for HT but the Tribune which is also picked up by over a dozen other papers including MidDay (Delhi), Telegraph (Calcutta), Deccan Herald, etc.
I have no new bawdy jokes in my repertoire. Do keep me alive with new ones.
Love
Khushwant
On 27 December 2003, my poem appeared in Khushwant Singh’s column ‘This Above All’ in the Tribune. My part began with:
DEATH AT THE DOORSTEP
I have written so much about death and dying in the recent months that the contagion has spread to my readers. The following poem written by a young lady doctor, Amrinder Bajaj, full of the zest for life, came as a gloomy surprise.
This was followed by my poem on death.
48
On 1 January 2004, as was my practice, I rang up Khushwant Singh to wish him a happy new year.
‘Bade din hue tainu mille. Dus kad aa rahee hai?’
‘Mera vas chale te main roz aa java.’
‘Come tomorrow, day after … whenever it suits you.’
His voice was husky.
‘You don’t sound too well,’ I commented.
‘I may be keeping poorly but I am well enough to embrace you.’
‘In that case, I will definitely come.’
Two days later, dressed in a black satin silk sari with a patola border, I drove through the chilly afternoon for my rendezvous with Khushwant Singh. It was the first time in so many years that I would be visiting him in winter and anticipated the cosy warmth of a wood fire in the hearth by his chair. I rang the bell and waited a while.
Once when I pressed the bell twice, he had reprimanded me: ‘Creaky old bones take time to move, you need to have patience.’ This time, I stood staring at the closed door long after the time it took creaky old bones to reach it. That was unprecedented. The second and third bells, after decent intervals, also elicited no response. I tried ringing him up, but nobody picked up the phone. My uneasiness grew into alarm. What if, at this very moment, he was lying helpless on the floor with a broken limb with no one around? What if he had suffered a heart attack? He should not be allowed to stay alone at this age.
Even as I despaired, his manservant returned from his afternoon break and opened the door for me. Instead of Khushwant Singh, I was confronted by his portrait on the wall facing the main door. Before I construed the worst, I heard his voice summoning me inside. It was the first time I was entering any other part of his house. The servant ushered me into a small room cluttered with heavy furniture that was as antiquated as its owner.
Khushwant Singh sat on a chair facing the door, framed by the window behind him. On the wall by the window was a mantelpiece piled with books; on the right stood a single unmade bed. To the left was a wooden console on which he kept yellowing old pictures. There were no memories of his wife in this room. A heater filled the room with suffocating warmth. Where was the log fire I had anticipated? A table littered with an assortment of things: his trademark lined yellow paper pad, the front page filled three quarters with his genius. Next to it was a chair on which I rested my posterior after giving him the customary kiss and an apology o
f an embrace. It is well-nigh impossible to align body with body when one person is seated and the other bending over him.
I was appalled at the change in his appearance. He had shrunk to a shrivelled caricature of his original self – haggard and worn, as if he had lost the race against time. My heart went out to him. Never tidy to begin with, his shabbiness touched an all-time low. Remnants of the last meal clung to his maroon cardigan. The juice of the tobacco he chewed constantly rolled down his coarse grey-brown beard to disappear into the wool of his sweater, giving the phrase attached to him – ‘dirty old man’ – a completely different twist. Why, he almost looked like my ninety-four-year-old father-in-law during his last days, complete with the faint smell of urine. While I was filled with disgust at my father-in-law’s deterioration, with Khushwant Singh, there was an overwhelming tenderness and an irrepressible desire to tidy him up.
‘How is your love life going?’ he asked, unaware of the effect his appearance was having on me.
‘Nothing very exciting at this stage, with ardour cooled and emotions trod upon.’
‘What can you expect in a love affair that old?’
We began discussing books and he talked about the latest he had read, Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee.
‘I have read Disgrace after he won the Booker. It’s about a professor who is disgraced for seducing his student.’
‘Yes. In this one, the older hero picks up a dirty beggar woman from the street and brings her to his house. He then proceeds to wash her and give her an oil massage. It is written aesthetically and with infinite sensitivity. When he does this over and over again, the girl tells him that he might as well finish the job and get over with it, but he is unable to do so. What I could not understand was that he goes to a prostitute and it is implied that he is able to perform there. It is a satire on who the real barbarians are.’
‘Indeed. The cheek of the whites! Just because they had a gun and could navigate the seas, they “discovered” America! As for India, it has been a flourishing civilization for thousands of years and the barely civilized invaders had the gumption to call us barbarians! Which civilized person will enter another’s home as an uninvited guest, receive cordial treatment from the hosts and repay their kindness by enslaving them in their own home? They push the natives to the periphery, impose their mores on the conquered and destroy their culture as they did with the Native Americans in America and the Aborigines in Australia,’ I reeled off an impassioned speech.
‘That is exactly what he is trying to say. If you want to read it, you can take it from the shelf up there.’
I thanked him and put the slim volume in my bag.
‘Do you know any new jokes?’
‘Yes. Have you heard this one? “Doctor, how many times a week should I have sex?” “Well it depends upon the age, but remember the word tri-weekly. In the initial stages, you can have it tri-weekly; after the age of forty, you can try weekly; once you touch fifty, you can try weakly.”’
He chuckled. ‘I have people in splits with your joke on the sardar who drew the female genitalia on a paper and asked, “Teri maa di hai yaa teri behan di?”’
This pleased me no end.
The helper entered the room with steaming mugs of tea, a pot of sugar and a plate of cookies on a tray. He asked me to put half a teaspoon of sugar in his mug, but wanted none of the cookies; I had one. I opened the box of kaju–kishmish and silvered cardamom for him. He took a few cashew nuts and asked me to close the lid to retain the freshness. As we were having tea, his granddaughter walked in.
‘This is Amrinder,’ he said by way of introduction.
‘Hello. And you must be Naina.’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking at her grandfather. ‘I have come to tell you that Humra rang up. She was trying your phone but no one picked up.’
‘Does she want to come over?’
‘She would have liked to come but did not want to do so without fixing an appointment. Since she could not contact you, she rang us up and asked me to convey the message.’
‘Humra,’ I said, rolling the word on my tongue, after Naina had left. ‘The name sounds familiar.’
‘She is Humra Qureshi. She writes for the Hindustan Times.’
‘I remember reading her column.’
‘Yes, it augments her income. But how much can one earn by writing?’
‘In India, people who make a living out of writing can be counted on the fingertips. One has to be a Khushwant Singh to live off the talent.’
‘All put together, I get about a lakh. How much do I need at this age? I never bargain with the newspapers regarding money for my columns, but they are fair and pay me substantially.’
‘You have got the birthdate of Guru Gobind Singhji wrong in your column.’
‘Sikhs follow two calendars – the Vikrami that gives the date as the twenty-sixth and the Nanak Shahi, according to which his birthday falls on the fifth. That is the one they have agreed to follow now. Have you seen the doctor lately?’
I could almost follow his line of thought. Religion made him think of my deeply religious uncle and hence this seemingly unrelated question.
‘I met Mamaji yesterday at my sister’s place.’
‘You know he has charged me Rs 10,000 as medical fees!’
‘Ten thousand? You must have told him that you earn more than a lakh per month,’ I joked.
‘He paid a medical visit to me just once. My servant and cook visit him at his clinic.’
‘But why don’t they go to the charitable dispensary he runs free in the gurudwara at the back?’
‘Phite hue hann, aur ki. They think he will not give them personal attention there.’
Then it was justifiable, I thought, but kept my opinion to myself.
‘This when my father gave him the flat he lives and practises in almost for free,’ he continued.
I had no answer to that, so I changed the subject.
‘Have you stopped going out altogether?’
‘Yes. I throw all invitations I get into the dustbin without even opening them. I have stopped receiving people who want to visit me for the first time. They ring me up with some ulterior motive but invariably begin the conversation with wanting to pay their respects to me. I tell them that they have paid their respects on the phone and ask them to get straight to the point, but they don’t.’
‘Why don’t you ask someone to screen your phone calls?’
‘That will mean another presence in the house. As it is, the letters take up a lot of time. There is a sardar who sends twenty-page letters in Urdu and I reply by postcard.’
‘That is one thing I really appreciate. You do reply.’
Glancing at the writing pad on his table, I asked what he was writing.
‘It is about Nehru’s affair with the tantric Shraddha Devi!’
‘Nehru and a tantric? I thought he had more refined tastes … like Lady Mountbatten.’
‘This was later. Did you know, Padmaja Naidu was after his life, egged on by Sarojini Naidu? Now that their love letters have been published, it is public knowledge.’
‘Who was Padmaja Naidu?’
‘Sarojini Naidu’s daughter. Nehru heaved a sigh of relief when she accepted the post of a governor he offered her and moved out of Delhi.’
‘What about Shraddha Devi ?’
‘When the book by M.O. Mathai on his days in the prime minister’s office came out, he created quite a furore by exposing Nehru’s affair with Shraddha Devi. She was in her early thirties then, big-bosomed, big-assed.’
‘Quite like the sculptures at Khajuraho.’
‘Initially, she had a tough time getting to meet Nehru during his Lucknow visit. He finally gave her fifteen minutes at the end of the day, and it lasted two hours. What a man does with a buxom lady clad only in a tiger skin around her waist is anybody’s guess.’
‘And her chest?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘Well, she did have a tiny cloth wrapped around it.�
�
‘They met several times after that. Mathai in his book went even further to imply that an illegitimate child had been conceived out of the liaison. Shraddha Devi went to Madras, registered in a hospital under a false name, gave birth to a son and vanished, leaving him behind.’
‘What happened to the baby?’
‘Some say it was a stillbirth. Others say he is still alive.’
‘Have you met her?’ I asked.
‘Several times. When I learnt that, now in her sixties, she was living in Nigambodh Ghat, I went to meet her. She was sitting on a raised platform, alone, surrounded by dogs. I bent down to touch her khadaus.
‘“Kaun ho tum?” she asked.
‘I told her my name.
‘“Kya kaam hai?”
‘“Darshan ko aya hoon.”
‘“Sadhvi se jhooth bolte ho. Tumhe sharam nahin aati?” She gave me a dressing-down, but we got on famously. “Tum Illustrated Weekly ke editor ho aur poochne aaye ho ki jo us haramzaade ne likha hai … sach hai ki nahin?”
‘“Haan,” I conceded.
‘After that I went to meet her several times.’
‘And you replaced Nehru as the man in her life?’ I made bold to say, and almost bit my tongue.
‘No. She did invite me to stay the night once, but her being a tantric scared me off.’
‘What of her illegitimate offspring?’
‘There was none according to Shraddha Devi. Though she did concede to the affair. She said, “Agar shaadi karta to mujh se hi karta magar maine usey kaha ki tum Brahmin ho aur main Kshatriya. Hamare beech vivah nahin ho sakta; sirf sambandh ho sakte hain.”’
‘And you wrote about all this in your novella?’
‘I have made Nehru out to be the biggest industrialist of India but people will surely know whom I am talking about.’
I had purposely led him to believe that the dried fruits that I had handed him as soon as I entered were the only gift I had brought for him in order to see his eyes widen excitedly later. Now I brought out the actual gift – a little torch-cum–bed lamp that my brother had brought from England. It had a powerful beam and would be of use while reading in bed or even on his very chair when the lights went out. He told me to keep it on the table by his side and it merged with the clutter as if it belonged there.
The Afternoon Girl Page 18
