The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous

by Khushwant Singh

  Our friendship continued after the Partition too. Manzur took over my house and had all my books, furniture and even empty bottles of whisky sent to me. At considerable risk to his life, he dropped my Sikh servant across the border when inter-communal strife was at its worst. Since our children were about the same age and went to college in England at the same time, the close association between the families continued for many years.

  Manzur was a short, bald, beady-eyed man. He was by no means handsome; and yet, men and women were drawn towards him like moths to a flame. Though he was an average student in school and college, within four years of starting practice in Lyallpur, he was acknowledged as the most up-and-coming lawyer in the Punjab. By the time he shifted to Lahore to practise at the high court, he was recognized as the best lawyer at the Bar. He was fluent in English as well as in Urdu. Though born a Punjabi, he avoided speaking the language. He had a passion for Urdu poetry and could reel off Iqbal by the hour. He also composed bawdy verse and recited it with great gusto to a purely male audience; he was extremely proper and prudish in the company of women.

  What was great about Manzur Qadir? Two things. He never said a hurtful thing about anyone. And he never told a lie. Within a short span of people knowing him, he became a kind of touchstone to judge the rights and wrongs of every course of action. We would often ask ourselves: ‘Will Manzur approve of this?’ Such a combination of ability, integrity, consideration and kindness I have never found in any other human being.

  Whenever I visit Lahore, one of my top priorities is to visit Manzur’s grave, stew rose petals on it, recite the Fatiha—he, like me, was an agnostic—and shed some tears.

  MOTHER TERESA

  (1910–1997)

  It has been more than thirty years since I was asked to do a profile of Mother Teresa for the New York Times. I wrote to Mother Teresa seeking her permission to call on her. Having got it, I spent three days with her, from the early hours of the morning to late at night. Nothing in my journalistic career has remained as sharply etched in my memory as those three days with her in Calcutta.

  Before I met her, I read Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on her, Something Beautiful for God. Malcolm was a recent convert to Catholicism and prone to believing in miracles. He had gone to make a film on Mother Teresa for the BBC. They first went to the Nirmal Hriday Home for dying destitutes close to the Kalighat temple. The team took some shots of the building from outside and of its sunlit courtyard. The camera crew was of the opinion that the interior was too dark and they had no lights that would help them take the shots they needed. However, since some footage was left over, they decided to use it for interior shots. When the film was developed later, the shots of the dormitories inside were found to be clearer and brighter than those taken in sunlight. The first thing I asked Mother Teresa was if this was true.

  ‘But of course,’ she replied. ‘Such things happen all the time.’ Then she added with greater intensity: ‘Every day, every hour, every single minute, God manifests Himself in some miracle.’

  She narrated other miracles of the days when her organization was little known and always short of cash. ‘Money has never been much of a problem,’ she told me. ‘God gives through His people.’ She told me that when she started her first school in the slums, she had no more than five rupees with her. But as soon as people came to know what she was doing, they brought money and other things.

  The first institution she took me to was Nirmal Hriday. It was in 1952 that the Calcutta Corporation had handed over the building to her. Orthodox Hindus were outraged. Four hundred Brahmin priests attached to the Kali temple gathered outside the building. ‘One day, I went out and spoke to them. “If you want to kill me, kill me. But do not disturb the inmates. Let them die in peace.” That silenced them. Then one of the priests staggered in. He was in an advanced stage of galloping phthisis. The nuns looked after him till he died.’ That changed the priests’ attitude towards Mother Teresa. Later, one day, another priest entered the home, prostrated himself at her feet and said, ‘For thirty years, I have served the Goddess Kali in her temple. Now the Goddess stands before me.’

  On my way back, Mother Teresa dropped me at the Dum Dum Airport. As I was about to take leave of her, she said, ‘So?’ She wanted to know if I had anything else to ask her.

  ‘Tell me, how can you touch people with loathsome diseases like leprosy and gangrene? Aren’t you revolted by people filthy with dysentery and cholera vomit?’

  ‘I see Jesus in every human being,’ Mother Teresa replied. ‘I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus. This one has gangrene, dysentery or cholera. I must wash him and tend to him.’

  I wrote a humble tribute to her for the New York Times and put her on the cover of The Illustrated Weekly. Till then, she was little known outside Calcutta; after that, more people got to know about her work. She sent me a short note of thanks, which I have in a silver frame in Kasauli. It is among my most valued possessions. It says: ‘I am told you do not believe in God. I send you God’s blessings.’

  I have often thought about those three days I spent with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. We walked through crowded streets, rode in trams to visit her various hospitals, crèches for abandoned children and homes for the dying. I still remember how she tended to a very ill man who was dying. She was with him, looking after him, all the time telling him: ‘Bhogoban achhen’—God is there. The way in which Mother Teresa went about looking after and tending to the sick, the dying, the hungry—it was the same as Bhagat Puran Singh.

  Some years later, during one of my trips to Calcutta, I requested Mother Teresa to meet me. But she declined, saying that she would not come to my hotel room. It was okay by me, because I respected her. I saw her last when she was in Delhi. She had come here when H.S. Sikand (of Sikand Motors) had gifted a van for her Missionaries of Charity, but this time she did not seem to recognize me. I smiled and greeted her; though she did smile back, she did so in the way you do when you don’t really recognize a person.

  MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH

  (1876–1948)

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah knew my father. In fact, when the Partition was taking place, he had sent word to my father that I stay put there in Lahore and don’t shift, and he would appoint me a judge at the Lahore high court. He also attended my wedding reception.

  To understand Jinnah’s role as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, a title conferred on him by Sarojini Naidu, one needs to know his background. He was born in Bombay in an Ismaili Khoja family, regarded by orthodox Muslims as ‘beliefless’. They were traders and merchants who had more dealings with Parsis and Hindus than with fellow Muslims. In 1897, he converted to the Shia faith. What the conversion entailed is not clear because he never conformed to any religious trends. In 1892, he proceeded to England to study law at Lincoln’s Inn. During the four years he was in England, he made it a point to go to the houses of Parliament to listen to debates. He was deeply impressed by the speeches made by Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian to be elected to the House of Commons, and John Morley. Both men were liberals. Jinnah accepted them as his role models and liberalism as his political creed. Back home in Bombay, he befriended Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Gokhale and Badruddin Tyabji. He was determined to pursue the careers of law and politics. He regarded both as gentlemanly professions. Although he married a Parsi girl, Ruttie, many years younger than him, his professional occupations left him little time to discharge his domestic obligations. He was also dour, unsmiling, tense and a chain-smoker. After some years, Ruttie left him with their daughter, Dina (the mother of Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing).

  Jinnah was quite clear about the role of Indian politicians. They must never mix religion with politics: one was a private matter, the other public service. Political differences should be settled by debate and not taken to the streets to create mob hysteria. The right to vote should be restricted to the educated tax payer and not be extended to the illiterate and those who do not contribute to the cost of administration. Primary edu
cation should be compulsory. What is truly amazing is that he found many takers for his ideas and was acceptable to the Indian National Congress as well as the Muslim League. For some years, he straddled both parties and was accepted by them as their spokesperson. He used his diplomatic skill to reconcile the Muslim League’s demands and persuaded the Congress to accept them: separate electorates with weightage for Muslims in states where they were in a minority, and Muslim hegemony in Sindh, Punjab, the NWFP and Bengal, where they formed a majority. He succeeded in bringing about political unity between Hindus and Muslims so that they could jointly pressurize their British rulers to hand over the governance of the country to Indians. In a speech at the Muslim League Conference in Lucknow in 1917, he urged Muslims not to look upon the Hindu majority as a bogey, saying: ‘This is a bogey which is put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from the cooperation with the Hindus which is essential for the establishment of self-government.’ Unlike most other Indian politicians, he was not overwhelmed by English governors and viceroys: he spoke his mind to them without mincing his words. He carried on verbal warfare with Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay and then Viceroy of India. In short, he was for a time India’s top political leader, till Mahatma Gandhi arrived on the scene. Gandhi not only infused religion into politics but also took politics to the streets through his call for non-cooperation and boycott of government-run institutions, including schools. Jinnah found this distasteful and difficult to digest. Besides these, Gandhi showed a marked preference for Jawaharlal Nehru as the future leader of the country. Gradually, Jinnah was pushed off the centre stage of Indian politics to become more and more a leader of the Muslims.

  In any event, Jinnah was elected to the Legislative Council from a Muslim constituency. He was among the Muslim delegates at the Round Table Conference in London. He stayed on in England for a few years and toyed with the idea of fighting elections to the House of Commons. No party was willing to accept him as its candidate. It was not surprising. As The Manchester Guardian summed him up: ‘The Hindus thought he was a Muslim communalist, the Muslims took him to be pro-Hindu, the princes declared him to be too democratic, the British considered him a rabid extremist—with the result that he was everywhere but nowhere. None wanted him.’ Reluctantly, Jinnah returned to Bombay to resume his legal practice and his political career, now as a spokesperson of Muslim interests.

  MULK RAJ ANAND

  (1905–2004)

  Mulk Raj Anand was one of the first three Indian writers of fiction in English to be published in England. It is common knowledge that both Mulk’s and R.K. Narayan’s first novels were turned down by a number of English publishers, till they found sugar daddies whom they could persuade to risk their money on them. And so, Graham Greene became a sponsor for R.K. Narayan; Mulk had the Bloomsbury group, which included T.S. Eliot, to back him. Only Raja Rao’s Kanthapura made it without any sifarish. Needless to say, all the three were lionized by their countrymen.

  Mulk’s chief patrons were socialists and communists. They were English men and women who suffered from a sense of guilt over what the British Raj had done to India. Mulk was well aware of what India’s rich and powerful had done to the poor and powerless and the humiliations the lower castes had suffered at the hands of the privileged higher castes. These became the theme of many of his novels and short stories. He became the chief spokesperson of the progressive writers who wrote to serve social purposes and did not bother so much about style and turn of phrase. Over time, Mulk’s writing became progressively propagandist.

  Mulk returned to India after the publication of his first two novels, Untouchable and Coolie. He was accorded a warm reception by literary groups across the country. The reception he got at Lahore was tepid. A literary circle comprising some judges of the high court, a couple of ICS officers, professors of English literature and lawyers invited him for tea. They had read his novels and felt they could write as well as he did. Mulk sensed the condescending attitude but kept his cool till someone blurted out: ‘We can write as well as you, but who will publish us?’ Mulk exploded: ‘First write, then talk.’ Then he walked away in a huff. Many in that circle wrote. Not one was able to break the apartheid of the publishing houses. There were hardly any Indian commercial publishers worth going to. Most of these aspiring writers published their books at their own cost.

  Though born in Peshawar, there was nothing Pathan-like about Mulk. He was short, with fuzzy hair, and, like the son of a Punjabi bania, dressed in khadi kurta-pyjamas. He had a strange way of speaking: a lot of lisping and sentences ending in squeaks. But he loved holding forth, and was warm and friendly. He liked living well and enjoyed the company of women. After his marriage to his English wife broke up, he had a Sri Lankan mistress, followed by a Parsi one. He lived in a ground-floor flat on Cuffe Parade, Bombay, facing the sea. I called on him one morning and saw him at work. He was perched on a high chair especially designed for him, with his feet resting below. He was bending over a writing pad.

  Mulk had a setback in his later years. He was commissioned by the Evergreen Review of New York to do an article on the erotic in Indian art. It was very well-received till the magazine got a legal notice alleging that the article was a copy of one article translated from German to English. Mulk’s explanation was naïve beyond belief. Dosu Karaka, editor of the weekly Current, who hated the communists’ guts, had the news splashed in big headlines: ‘Commie Author Caught Plagiarising’. It took some months of retirement to his villa in Lonavala for Mulk to bounce back. But bounce back the man did, and resumed pontificating to audiences across the country. He never took notice of the topic under discussion nor the time set for speakers. He would go on and on about how his father used to beat his mother. He ignored the chairperson’s bell and taps on the back. He had his say and never ever repented it. One particular conversation between Mulk and Eliot relays much about the way he could carry on.

  ‘A piece of cake, Mr—?’ asked Eliot.

  ‘Anand,’ Mulk supplied.

  ‘Oh, like the Scotch Anand.’

  ‘No, it’s a derivation from Ananda, one of the names of the Hindu supreme God, meaning bliss. My full name is Mulk Raj Anand, which means “King of the country of happiness”—and I try to look it.’

  Friends and admirers of Mulk Raj Anand noticed how Chacha Mulk mellowed with age and how the once acerbic-tongued critic had only the nicest things to say about everyone in the last decade of his life. A great one for dropping names, once upon a time he did not spare anyone. But in his saintlier anecdotage, his compassion turned him into a crashing bore.

  PHOOLAN DEVI

  (1963–2001)

  Sometime in 1982, when I was the editor of the Hindustan Times, I got a call from the commissioner of police of Lucknow asking if I could send a reporter to cover the arrest of Phoolan Devi. Instead of sending a reporter I decided to go myself. I was able to reconstruct Phoolan Devi’s past from talking to her parents, sisters and one of her lovers, and cross-checking what they told me with the statement she made to the police on 6 January 1979, the first time she was arrested.

  It was at Gurh Ka Purua village I that I got a whiff of the romantic life of Phoolan Devi. Recall that nostalgic film song ‘Nadi kinarey mera gaon’? Everything that the song evokes was there in Phoolan’s story. Young Phoolan—sixteen or seventeen—left her forty-five-year-old husband, who aroused her appetite for sex without fulfilling it. One afternoon, she spied a young mallah bathing in the river. She watched him for some time and then asked if she could borrow his cake of soap to bathe herself. He turned out to be a distant cousin, Kailash, married but willing to have an extramarital affair. They got talking. The bathing and soaping gave Phoolan excuses to show Kailash something of her form and figure, setting his passions aflame. They arranged to meet—as most lovers in the region did—in the arhar fields the next day. They had sex—surreptitious, hurried and unfulfilling. But it was enough to make them yearn for more. Kailash was thoroughly confu
sed; he had a young and attractive wife, who had borne him four children—and here was Phoolan, who was giving him something he had never experienced with his wife. Phoolan agreed to let him have more on the condition that he married her. How could he? Meanwhile, the village gossip mill started grinding: Phoolan Devi had been discarded by an old husband and was available. The sarpanch’s son approached her. He entertained close friends with the same feast of flesh. Phoolan did not mind, but it was not doing her reputation any good.

  When Kailash asked for more, she forced him to marry her. They went to Kanpur, where a lawyer wrote out something on a piece of paper, took fifty rupees from Kailash and told them they were man and wife. They spent two days and nights at the lawyer’s house; the days at the movies, the nights making love. Then they returned to Kailash’s village, Teonga. Kailash’s parents and wife gave Phoolan a sound thrashing and turned her out. She returned crestfallen to her village, Gurh Ka Purua. The sarpanch’s son got to hear of her escapade to Kanpur, sent for her and gave her a shoe-beating. At a fair in the neighbouring village, she ran into Kailash’s wife, Shanti Devi, and her children. Shanti Devi grabbed Phoolan by the hair, clawed her face and abused her in front of the crowd as a raand ,bitch, home-breaker.

  By now, all the mallah villages had heard about Phoolan’s misadventures. Among them was Bikram Singh, a gangster friend of Kailash. Bikram Singh arrived in Gurh Ka Purua and gave Phoolan the choice of coming with him or having her only brother, Shivnarain Singh—who was only twelve—join his gang. Phoolan went with Bikram to become his mistress. And thus she was launched into her career of crime.

  What did Phoolan Devi look like? There were no photographs available. But from my interviews I could construct her image in my mind. Phoolan’s younger sister Ramkali was said to resemble her. Ramkali was a sexy and saucy lass, who knew how to strike poses and used her large eyes like sidewinder missiles. She was thick-lipped, big-bosomed and altogether seductive—as they say in Punjabi, well worth a crime. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—nor could any of the men in the party accompanying me. In fact, our photographer, Premi, clicked an entire reel on her.