Malicious Gossip

by Khushwant Singh

  Poland was very different from what I saw and experienced in East Germany. The Germans had switched from Fascism to Communism without much apparent protest. The Poles remained free of taint of either ideology; the tumultuous welcome they gave to the Pope last year left no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Catholic church in Poland is stronger than Communism.

  I was not unduly surprised when Gomulka was replaced by Gierek in 1970, nor when Polish trade union solidarity defied and forced Gierek to resign a few months ago. And now it is Kania. Of that no matter. Whether it is Gomulka, Gierek or Kania or anyone else, they will soon find out that there are things you cannot destroy in a people without killing them; one is their religious belief, the other their spirit of freedom.

  Ugandan Memories

  I have very pleasant memories of the week I spent in Uganda over ten years ago. Milton Obote was President. He was putting gentle pressure on the Indian community to make their choice to either opt for Ugandan nationality or get out. Most of them were for getting out while the going was good. They were selling their shops, spreading their businesses to neighbouring countries or packing up to go to England or Canada. No one could blame Obote for his attitude towards the Asians; they owned just about every industry and every store in Kampala and Jinja (the two cities I visited) and yet disdained mixing with the Blacks. At the time, there were three enormously rich Indian Ugandan families living in palatial mansions and owning their own aircraft: the Mehtas, the Madhvanis and the Gills. All others were extremely well off. There was no such thing as a poor Ugandan Indian.

  Idi Amin ousted Obote in 1971. Indian settlers hoped they would be able to stay on in the land of milk and honey. Amin was said to have had a soft corner for Indians—particularly one, a comely Lohana lass. This six-foot-seven-inch monster of a man desired this lady for his already well-stocked harem. Knowing that saying “no” would be of no avail, the lady slipped out of the country. It is said that had she responded to Amin’s overtures, the fate of the Ugandan Indian community would have been quite different.

  Uganda was a very green country of rolling hills and dense tropical forests, with more bird and animal life than I have ever seen. In a short stretch of the Nile at Murchison Falls I saw in a couple of hours hundreds of wild elephants, lions, zebras, giraffes, hippopotami, herds of antelope, crocodiles, pythons, lizards and a baffling variety of birds.

  The most cherished of my Ugandan memories is of my host Sardar Chanan Singh—a small-time carpenter who had become a prosperous builder. He had been too busy acquiring wealth to be able to spare time to learn English and spoke nothing save rustic Punjabi and a few words of African tribal patois. However, he insisted on escorting me everywhere and sitting through all the lectures I delivered. His comment on my performances was charming: “Sardarji, samajh taan kuchh nahin aya, magar anand bahut aya” (I didn’t understand a word but I enjoyed the experience).

  Blossoms

  As you read these lines in Delhi or wherever else you get your copy of the Hindustan Times, I am in Tokyo or Kyoto or Okinawa scanning the columns of The Japan Times. While the dhak (flame of the forest) is in flower on the ridge and the rocky ravines around Surajkund (the best place to see it), I will be in Ueno Park or the gardens around Yasukuni shrine inspecting the first wild cherry blossoms shimmering in the sun. It is Sakura or cherry-blossom time in the Land of the Rising Sun. While you contend with rowdy gangs of urchins armed with pichkaaris and buckets of coloured water, I will be making obeisance to Shinto gods amongst overdisciplined, overcourteous, ever-smiling, ever-bowing Japanese gentlefolk, all armed with cameras photographing each other. For you the bawdy songs of Holi; for me the quiet, vision-provoking brevity of a haiku.

  The ancient pond

  A frog leaps in

  The sound of water.

  And while you may be dousing each other with coloured water or rubbing gulal powder on the cheeks of your favourite girlfriend or taking other liberties licensed during the Holi festival with her, I may be suffering agonies trying to sit on my heels in Japanese style confronting a comely geisha girl daintily placing slices of raw fish with chopsticks in my hirsute mouth. While you may be guzzling bhang laddoos, I will be washing down Sukiyaki with hot sake.

  The first time I visited Japan was more than twenty years ago. I was looking for material on the Indian National Army. I called on Major Fujiwara, Rash Behari Bose’s daughter, and met many old Indian residents. I found nothing new except Japan. And promptly fell in love with everything I saw and everyone I met. Since then I have been to Japan many times and each time felt more involved in it than before. This was surprising because I found the Japanese to be the most impossibly uncommunicative people on the face of the earth and was unable to make a single friend. Being in love with the Japanese has to be strictly a one-way traffic; it gains in intensity because it is unrequited. I was often tempted to give up the quest and dismiss them as others had as a nation of “perturbed Chinamen”. But no, the Japanese compel attention and admiration. Despite the frustrations, there is no country I would choose to go to again and again more than to Japan.

  Almost everyone who goes to Japan learns to admire the Japanese: their industriousness, their unfailing though somewhat exaggerated courtesy, their calmness: even when hurrying they never seem to be in a hurry. They never raise their voices nor quarrel; I never saw a brawl and once was nonplussed at the way drivers of two cars which had run into each other kept insisting on taking the blame. There is much else which makes the Japanese a kind of race apart from other races of the world.

  The Japanese are the world’s worst linguists. When it comes to English, they mix up their Ls and their Rs—at times with hilarious consequences. They take their democracy very seriously. So you must not smile or snigger when they discuss their elections. A simple word like Hullo becomes a “Harro”. In any case instead of saying Hullo, Hullo on the phone like the rest of the world, the Japanese say “Mushy, mushy”. Let me narrate a true incident during my first visit. It was a winter morning. I was sauntering along the Ginza looking at the shop windows of the department stores when I felt somebody wanting to draw my attention: “Hurro, Hurro;” “Excuse me, excuse me,” said a diminutive gentleman out of breath. “Velly solly to disturb you.” He bowed many times as he made his apologies. I bowed in return and replied as many times, “Not at all, not at all!” We continued bowing to each other, almost blocking the pedestrian traffic. “Excuse me,” he said for the fiftieth time before he came out with his proposition. “You like a nice Japanese gull? Yes?” I bowed and replied politely, “No, thank you.” He bowed another dozen times as he repeated “excuse me” before he disappeared into the throng. A minute later I saw him trotting up to me again. We went through the bowing ceremony all over again before he came out with his second proposition: “Excuse me, sir, if not a nice Japanese gull, may be you like a nice Japanese boy.” I wondered who were my compatriots whom he had entertained earlier.

  The seemingly unbridgeable communication gap appeared even more unbridgeable on my second visit to Japan. This time I spent almost four months lecturing (believe it or not) on contemporary Japanese literature at the Keio University to a group of American students. My assignment was not as bizarre as it sounds. There are not very many books in Japanese prose or poetry translated into English. I was given almost a year to prepare myself and was able to read almost all that was available from Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji and Chikamatsu (the Japanese Shakespeare) to Kawabata, Mishima and Tanizaki. I could not get to terms with any of these masters of the pen. Even the modern novelists much influenced by Western writers eluded my grasp. A lot of uninhibited sex and violence had come into their fiction, but of a very unfamiliar brand. For the first time I came across the big toe of a woman as an object of lustful ministration: an ageing man who lusted after his daughter-in-law was content to suckle her toe discreetly put out of the curtain while she took a shower. Japanese poetry proved even more elusive. The best were the Haiku and Tanka, rigi
dly straitjacketed in the number of syllabi and lines to be used. Most were like colour snapshots of the spring, autumn and the moonlight. To wit, these lines from Basho (1644-94):

  The Peaks of Clouds

  Have crumbled into fragments—

  The moonlit mountain.

  Basho used this Japanese brush-painting technique to suggest the outlines of a picture and to leave the rest to be filled in by the reader-viewers’ imagination. These two depict the autumn:

  On the withered branch

  A crow has alighted—

  The end of autumn.

  And

  Such stillness

  The cries of cicadas

  Sink into the rocks.

  Another master of the Haiku was Yosa Buson (1716-84) who also made pen-pictures, but with greater skill:

  As the spring rains fall

  Soaking in them, on the roof

  Is a child’s rag ball.

  And

  Night ends so soon:

  In the shallows still remains

  One sliver of the moon.

  Then there was the Japanese theatre—Kabuki, Noh, and the Bunraki—all three left me totally bewildered by their stiff conventionality, their masks and the discordant song, flute and stringed lute, the Koto. Westerners who rave about them fool themselves and the rest of the Western world. The same went for the tea ceremony Ceremonious it certainly was—hours of pretentious flourishing of hands to clean cups, place tea leaves in the pot and pour boiling water into it. And then with much bowing with both hands you were offered a thimble full of bitter, undrinkable fluid.

  Homecoming

  I am back. Three months ago when I arrived in Washington, snow lay thick on the ground. During most of my stay, the temperature remained well below freezing point. All I saw of the city was in a crowded subway from my temporary abode in Arlington (Virginia) to the Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian where I worked. Rarely was a soul to be seen on the sidewalks. It looked like a dead city petrified by icy winds. A week before I was due to leave, summer took over from the winter without waiting for spring. One day it was snow everywhere; the next day it had vanished. It was green lawns with crocus, daffodil and tulip. Cherry and magnolia were in full bloom. The three-mile-long Mall from Capitol Hill to Washington Monument was full of picknickers in T-shirts and shorts—basking in the sun, kites of bizarre shapes and sizes soaring into the blue skies. If you have not seen Washington in April, you have yet to see the glory of God.

  For me, these three months were very fruitful. Although I saw very little of the city, I finished my assignment. I also met a large number of fascinating people. First I name old friends. There was Carol Laise Bunker, widow of the former Ambassador to India and herself ambassadress in Nepal. How beautifully she had aged! A mop of snow-white hair covering a cherubic, pink face. And full of the restless energy of a college girl. She has become a kind of American Mother India for visiting Indians. Then there were the Boorstins, Dan and his wife, Ruth. He had just retired as librarian of the Congress and is perhaps the most erudite of scholars living. If you have not read his Discoverers you can look forward to enjoying a truly gourmet feast of learning. Through the Boorstins I befriended the celebrated pianist Eugene Istomin, and his beautiful wife Marta, who had earlier been married to the renowned cellist Pablo Casals, fifty years older than her. One night at dinner at their house (rooms full of original Picassos, Pissarros, books signed by Rudyard Kipling, etc.), Eugene turned to me and said, “You want proof of God’s existence? Listen to this.” He played something by Mozart. It was beautiful but I did not have darshan of the Divinity. Then there were Senators Fullbright and Sherman Cooper, names that any congenital name-dropper like me will keep bringing up at the slightest excuse.

  Inevitably, I saw more of my countrymen and women than I did of Americans. There was Amir Tuteja, who I had not known before. I practically lived off him. Every time he dropped in, he came loaded with liquor, food and flowers. I wore his overcoat, muffler and gloves against the cold. He drove me to homes I was invited to and dropped me back when the party was over. He is one of the rare givers who ask nothing in return. There were doctors Manohar Gulati and Abul Hasan Ansari—well into the millionaires’ club. As is Nanak Kohli, known as Mr Rolls Royce for his custom-built limousine. I met scores of Indian and Pakistani cab drivers. Almost every American and Canadian city has a sizeable complement of Indo-Pak cabmen. Although most of them have acquired foreign citizenship, their hearts remain in their vatans.

  Returning to the West after an absence of four years, the thing that struck me most was that smokers are on the way to extinction. I rarely saw anyone light a cigarette. As a Sikh I should have welcomed this development, particularly since elimination of tobacco has not been imposed by the government but achieved by persuasion. Another thing that has gone up in smoke is the propaganda for Khalistan. I met scores of Sikhs. They are still very gussa with the Indian government over Operation Bluestar and the non-punishment of criminals who organized the killings of Sikhs after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, but hardly anyone talked of a sovereign Sikh state. Ganga Singh Dhillon, who first put across the Sikh two-nation theory in 1974, is thoroughly discredited and the name of Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan, self-styled president of the republic of Khalistan, is heard no more. I will write in greater detail of my meeting with Ganga Singh, and with Yogi Bhajan.

  My one regret on returning home was that while the support for Khalistan is almost dead in foreign countries, it is being revived in India by the government extending patronage to its propagators in the Punjab. What has gone wrong with our brains?

  A habit I picked up in the States was to keep the radio on all night. Not music, but dialogues in which listeners rang back to express their views. Believe it or not, it helped me to get better sleep. I heard, I slept, heard more and slept more. I also picked up a headache every afternoon. A thorough check, including a catscan by a panel of four doctors, revealed nothing and I decided that I had to learn to live with it for the rest of my days. On my way home I stopped in Ottawa and told my host, S.J.S. Chhatwal, of my new ailment. “Why is it”, I asked him, “that the medical profession takes no notice of symptoms such as I have. For half a century I’ve suffered from athlete’s foot but only on the right foot, never on the left. When I have arthritis, it is the right knee not the left; the right eye has poorer vision than the left; ear-ache is only in the right ear. And now I have this daily headache but only on the right temple.”

  After a pause he replied, “I don’t know about allopathy but homoeopathy, which is symptom based, takes note of this one-side phenomenon. Let me give you something for it. It may not cure your headaches, but it will do you no harm.”

  Unknown to me, the study of homoeopathy has been Chhatwal’s abiding passion for many years. He gave me three doses of something called Lyco 1M. After suffering daily headaches for over three months, I had total relief from the affliction for some days. Has one-sided sickness any rational explanation?

  The day I returned home, the ammunition dump between Islamabad and Rawalpindi blew up, taking a heavy toll of human lives. I wondered what the first reaction of the Pakistanis was. A letter from a friend in Pindi a couple of days later confirmed that I was not wrong in guessing that they thought that we Indians had launched a pre-emptive strike against their nuclear installations at Kahuta. Such is the state of suspicion in the minds of people on both sides of the border. I have little doubt, if something of the kind were to take place in India, our first reaction would be to point an accusing finger at Pakistan.

  Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in our minds that we have to sow the seeds of peace. Although we have fought four wars since we became an independent nation, all of them were of short durations and as a people we have not yet been exposed to the horrors that wars entail. I have seen the havoc caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Warsaw, Berlin and Dresden flattened to the ground; the miseries of people living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria; pictures of corpse-stre
wn streets in Iran subjected to poisonous gas bombs dropped by Iraqi planes. And never, never want to see such things happen in India or Pakistan. Do you know that currently twenty-two wars are being waged in different parts of the globe; that it is rare for the aggressor to win with a quick strike; and that in every war now, more non-combatants including women and children are killed than soldiers at the front!

  How do we sow the seeds of goodwill in our minds? I do not think it was good enough for our President and the Prime Minister to send messages of sympathy to the rulers of Pakistan. The response should have come from the people—offers to fly in medical supplies and all the blood that they needed. There is no better antidote to bad blood than an offering from people in good health.

  Return to Delhi

  I return to Delhi as a man returns to his mistress when he has had his fill of whoring in other cities. What a welcome my beloved city gives me! It is a hot, sticky night. As soon as I am in my apartment, I peel off my clothes, go into the bathroom and turn on the tap. A muddy ooze oozes down into the bucket followed by a trickle of muddy water. Then a fart. No water. I give up.

  I go to my study, pick up the phone and dial the caretaker. Two girls are on the line yapping away about their Daddyji and Uncleji. I put down the receiver to try again. They are still on the line now discussing their Mummyji and Auntieji. I make an obscene reference to their parents. “Some dirty fellow on the line,” says one, “buzz you later.”

  I dial my number. Engaged. I dial again. Engaged. I dial “complaints”. She tells me to dial “assistance”. I dial “assistance”. She tells me “number out of order, dial complaints”. I dial “complaints”. The telephone is dead.