Khushwant Singh's Book of Unforgettable Women Read online

  KHUSHWANT SINGH'S

  Book of Unforgettable Woman

  Compiled and Edited by Mala Dayal

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  The Portrait of A Lady

  The Women of India

  Mother Teresa

  Sex in Indian Life

  Phoolan Devi

  Ghayoorunnisa Hafeez

  Sadia Dehlvi

  Anees Jung

  Kamna Prasad

  Amrita Shergil

  The Beggar Maid

  My Wife, Kaval

  The Sardarji and the Starlet

  Lady Mohan Lal

  Martha Stack

  Bindo

  Jean Memsahib

  Dhanno

  Sarojini

  Yasmeen

  Molly Gomes

  Nooran

  Beena

  Champak

  Bhagmati

  Georgine

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  KHUSHWANT SINGH’S BOOK OF UNFORGETTABLE WOMEN

  Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojna (1951-1953), editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1979-1980), chief editor of New Delhi (1979-1980), and editor of the Hindustan Times (1980-1983). Today he is India’s best-known columnist and journalist.

  Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among the works he has published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels (the best known of which are Delhi, Train to Pakistan and The Company of Women), and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.

  Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours he was awarded’ the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).

  The Portrait of a Lady

  My grandmother, like everybody’s grandmother, was an old woman. She had been old and wrinkled for the twenty years that I had known her. People said that she had once been young and pretty and had even had a husband, but that was hard to believe. My grandfather’s portrait hung above the mantelpiece in the drawing room. He wore a big turban and loose-fitting clothes. His long white beard covered the best part of his chest and he looked at least a hundred years old. He did not look the sort of person who would have a wife or children. He looked as if he could only have lots and lots of grandchildren. As for my grandmother being young and pretty, the thought was almost revolting. She often told us of the games she used to play as a child. That seemed quite absurd and undignified on her part and we treated it like the tales of the prophets she used to tell us.

  She had always been short and fat and slightly bent. Her face was a crisscross of wrinkles running from everywhere to everywhere. No, we were certain she had always been as we had known her. Old, so terribly old that she could not have grown older, and had stayed at the same age for twenty years. She could never have been pretty; but she was always beautiful. She hobbled about the house in spotless white with one hand resting on her waist to balance her stoop and the other telling the beads of her rosary. Her silver locks were scattered untidily over her pale, puckered face, and her lips constantly moved in inaudible prayer. Yes, she was beautiful. She was like the winter landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity breathing peace and contentment.

  My grandmother and I were good friends. My parents left me with her when they went to live in the city and we were constantly together. She used to wake me up in the morning and get me ready for school. She said her morning prayer in a monotonous sing-song while she bathed and dressed me in the hope that I would listen and get to know it by heart. I listened because I loved her voice but never bothered to learn it. Then she would fetch my wooden slate which she had already washed and plastered with yellow chalk, a tiny earthen ink pot and a reed pen, tie them all in a bundle and hand it to me. After a breakfast of a thick, stale chapatti with a little butter and sugar spread on it, we went to school. She carried several stale chapattis with her for the village dogs.

  My grandmother always went to school with me because the school was attached to the temple. The priest taught us the alphabet and the morning prayer. While the children sat in rows on either side of the veranda singing the alphabet or the prayer in a chorus, my grandmother sat inside reading the scriptures. When we had both finished, we would walk back together. This time the village dogs would meet us at the temple door. They followed us to our home growling and fighting each other for the chapattis we threw to them.

  When my parents were comfortably settled in the city, they sent for us. That was a turning point in our friendship. Although we shared the same room, my grandmother no longer came to school with me. I used to go to an English school in a motor bus. There were no dogs in the streets and she took to feeding sparrows in the courtyard of our city house.

  As the years rolled by we saw less of each other. For some time she continued to wake me up and get me ready for school. When I came back she would ask me what the teacher had taught me. I would tell her English words and little things of western science and learning, the law of gravity, Archimedes’ principle, the world being round, etc. This made her unhappy. She could not help me with my lessons. She did not believe in the things they taught at the English school and was distressed that there was no teaching about God and the scriptures. One day I announced that we were being given music lessons. She was very disturbed. To her, music had lewd associations. It was the monopoly of harlots and beggars and not meant for gentle folk. She rarely talked to me after that.

  When I went up to University, I was given a room of my own. The common link of friendship was snapped. My grandmother accepted her seclusion with resignation. She rarely left her spinning wheel to talk to anyone. From sunrise to sunset she sat by her wheel spinning and reciting prayers. Only in the afternoon she relaxed for a while to feed the sparrows. While she sat in the veranda breaking the bread into little bits, hundreds of little birds collected around her creating a veritable bedlam of chirrupings. Some came and perched on her legs, others on her shoulders. Some even sat on her head. She smiled but never shoo’d them away. It used to be the happiest half-hour of the day for her.

  When I decided to go abroad for further studies, I was sure my grandmother would be upset. I would be away for five years, and at her age, one could never tell. But my grandmother could. She was not even sentimental. She came to see me off at the railway station but did not talk or show any emotion. Her lips moved in prayer, her mind was lost in prayer. Her fingers were busy telling the beads of her rosary. Silently she kissed my forehead, and when I left I cherished the moist imprint as perhaps the last sign of physical contact between us.

  But that was not so. After five years I came back home and was met by her at the station. She did not look a day older. She still had no time for words, and while she clasped me in her arms I could hear her reciting her prayer. Even on the first day of my arrival, her happiest moments were with her sparrows whom she fed longer and with frivolous rebukes.

  In the evening a change came over her. She did not pray. She collected the women of the neighbourhood, got an old drum and started to sing. For several hours she thumped the sagging skins of the dilapidated drum a
nd sang of the homecoming of warriors. We had to persuade her to stop, to avoid overstraining. That was the first time since I had known her that she did not pray.

  The next morning she was taken ill. It was a mild fever and the doctor told us that it would go. But my grandmother thought differently. She told us that her end was near. She said that since only a few hours before the close of the last chapter of her life she had omitted to pray, she was not going to waste any more time talking to us.

  We protested. But she ignored our protests. She lay peacefully in bed praying and telling her beads. Even before we could suspect, her lips stopped moving and the rosary fell from her lifeless fingers. A peaceful pallor spread on her face and we knew that she was dead.

  We lifted her off the bed and, as is customary, laid her on the ground and covered her with a red shroud. After a few hours of mourning we left her alone to make arrangements for her funeral.

  In the evening we went to her room with a crude stretcher to take her to be cremated. The sun was setting and had lit her room and veranda with a blaze of golden light. We stopped halfway in the courtyard. All over the veranda and in her room right up to where she lay dead and stiff wrapped in the red shroud, thousands of sparrows sat scattered on the floor. There was no chirping. We felt sorry for the birds and my mother fetched some bread for them. She broke it into little crumbs, the way my grandmother used to, and threw it to them. The sparrows took no notice of the bread. When we carried my grandmother’s corpse off, they flew away quietly. Next morning the sweeper swept the bread crumbs into the dustbin.

  The Women of India

  ‘How can a woman rule this country?’ demanded my seventy-five-year-old father as he heard the announcement that Mrs Gandhi’s election as prime minister of India was assured.

  The entire family—my aged parents, my brothers, their wives and children, mostly teenagers at school or college—had gathered for lunch. The news about Indira Gandhi came on the air while we were having coffee.

  ‘Can a woman rule a country like India?’ my father asked again, switching off the radio to emphasize the gravity of the problem. None of the grown-ups took up the challenge. A few of the girls, in ponytails and jeans, began to giggle; thinking the elders weren’t looking, they shook hands and gave the boys the thumbs-down sign. The boys retaliated by thumbing their noses. Suddenly the giggling and gesturing froze under my father’s stern gaze. ‘The country will be ruined,’ he declared with authority.

  It is bad form to contradict the head of the family directly. But there are subtle ways of doing it. ‘What choice do we have in the matter?’ asked one of my brothers.

  ‘Any one of the others would be better than her,’ roared my father. ‘She’s being put there because she is Nehru’s daughter. What kind of democracy is this?’ My father did not admire Nehru. But his line of argument was soon demolished: Nehru had been succeeded by Shastri, not by his daughter. We then considered the alternatives.

  Morarji Desai? He was all for prohibition and the compulsory teaching of Hindi. He was a strong man but also a faddist. Didn’t he recommend drinking cow’s urine for health, to a visiting statesman? And didn’t he publicly boast of having had no sex with his wife for the last twenty-five years? No, definitely not Morarji Desai.

  What about Gulzari Lal Nanda—with those holy men and yogis in saffron around him all the time? He hardly made a decision without first consulting horoscopists and soothsayers. Good administrator and a good standby … like the spare wheel of a car. Arthi mantri (the pall-bearer minister), they rightly called him! Good enough to be No. 2; prime minister, no.

  Kumaraswami Kamaraj? Nice, comforting father figure and a shrewd, honest politician.

  But can’t speak Hindi or English. Perhaps some day when he had learned one language or the other.

  Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan? Politician S.K. Patil? Neither of them as a national figure yet. But they might become so in another few years.

  So who were we left with? Indira Gandhi. By then we felt we had been mean to her and a few grudging tributes were pieced together: ‘She is better educated than the others and more sophisticated … She will be able to talk to people like Johnson and Kosygin and Wilson and De Gaulle … She knows how to behave properly and she can be a great charmer when she wants to be … She is undoubtedly good-looking. Didn’t someone say he would like Indira to be prime minister if for no other reason than to look at a pretty face in the newspapers every morning? And she has a very appropriate middle name, Priyadarshini (of comely appearance) … She is not a good administrator—what did she make of the ministry of information and broadcasting when she headed it—but she can leave that kind of thing to civil servants. We have no choice; it has to be Indira Gandhi.’

  My father conceded the argument all along the line. But though vanquished, he continued to grumble. ‘Mark my words, we are heading towards disaster. No woman can possibly rule a country like India.’

  Ours is an Anglicized upper-middle-class family in New Delhi. As numbers go, the Anglicized upper class is very small. But the vast majority of senior civil servants, politicians and opinion-makers come from it.

  It is from this class that every one of India’s women leaders was and is drawn: the poetess Sarojini Naidu (‘Love to all and a kiss to the new soul of India,’ she wrote to Nehru on the birth of Indira) and her daughter Padmaja, who was governor of West Bengal; the painter Amrita Shergil; Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, first woman in Nehru’s cabinet; the family planner Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and her daughter, the author Santha Rama Rau; Mrs Vijayalakshmi Pandit, first and only woman to be President of the United Nations General Assembly, and her novelist daughter Nayantara; Sucheta Kripalani, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, chairman of the All India Handicrafts Board; the beautiful maharanis and begums elected to the Lok Sabha (Parliament) and the state legislatures.

  There is no such thing as a working-class woman leader in India. At any women’s conference, the accents of Oxford, Cambridge, Vassar and Smith and the chi chi sing-song of the girls’ schools run by European or American nuns come through distinctly. The granting of equal rights to women who are far from being the social or educational equals of men has brought a bumper harvest of important positions to the very small number of women who are capable of grasping the opportunity.

  The visitors’ gallery of the Lok Sabha is a good place to get a bird’s-eye view of the new ruling class. Once when I went there, the difference between the men and women members of the House was remarkable. While men came from all classes, ranging from the dapperly-dressed ‘wogs’, tradesmen wearing dhotis, trade unionists in open collars, and sparsely-clad tribesmen sitting cross-legged on the benches, all the women (I counted forty in the hall) were well-dressed; it was obvious they came from the upper crust of Indian society.

  Some women were on the Government benches alongside Prime Minister Nehru: Dr Sushila Nayar, minister of health; Mrs Lakshmi Menon, deputy minister of external affairs and the deputy minister of finance; the fair, buxom Tarakeshwari Sinha whose raven-black kiss-curl dangled on a cheek. (An American Senator introduced to Mrs Sinha was so overcome that all he could stutter was: ‘You are the most beautiful woman deputy finance minister I have ever met.’)

  On the opposition benches, outshining other women parliamentarians, was Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur and a member of the conservative Swatantra Party. At that moment she was needling Nehru on his foreign policy. The prime minister, who had encouraged women to enter politics, was hoist on his own petard. ‘I will not bandy words with a lady,’ he said, somewhat exasperated.

  I saw the Maharani twice again that day; first, at a private party where Jayaprakash Narayan, the pacifist leader, was giving an informal briefing on the negotiations with hostile Naga tribesmen fighting for independence from India. The meeting had begun when the Maharani made her entry, giving everyone a whiff of expensive French perfume. She was dressed in a turquoise-blue chiffon sari with silver sequins sparkling like stars on a m
oonless night. She looked around with her large almond eyes. Everyone stood up. As Hilaire Belloc once described someone, ‘her face was like the king’s command when all the swords are drawn.’

  She murmured an apology for being late, brushed the hair off her face, asked everyone to sit down and gracefully sank down on the carpet. ‘This is indeed a revolution,’ remarked Narayan, ‘a maharani sitting at the feet of the commoners!’ The Maharani replied with a charming smile. She took out a gold case from her handbag and lit a mauve-coloured cigarette.

  At the end of the briefing she asked a few questions in impeccable English. Her Hindustani, in which she had argued with some people in the room, was not so good. ‘My mother tongue is Bengali and I am married to a Rajput,’ she explained. A man sitting next to me leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Her Bengali and Rajasthani are worse than her Hindustani. She can only speak English and French.’

  I saw the Maharani again later that evening at a cocktail dance at the exclusive Gymkhana Club; She was with her husband and his son. The Prince was in military uniform and spent more time doing the twist on the floor than with his father’s party. The Maharajah and Maharani remained at their table drinking French champagne (Rs 245 a bottle). The Maharajah did not sign the bill for it; it was the gift of erstwhile subjects and admirers.

  Gayatri Devi is a princess in her own right; she belongs to the house of Cooch Behar, famous for producing the hardest drinking men and most exquisitely lovely princesses. When she married the Maharajah of Jaipur, he already had two wives with children living. Despite her education and emancipation, Gayatri Devi agreed to be his third wife because polygamy was accepted by tradition in the princely order. To this day many princes have many wives; the late Nizam of Hyderabad maintained a harem of several hundred begums and concubines.

  When ruling powers were taken away from the princes and their estates were reduced to modest proportions, many princes went into business. The Jaipurs, although still enormously wealthy, converted one of their palaces into a hotel and begin to organize tiger hunts for rich Americans. Gayatri Devi joined the Swatantra Party, trounced the Congress party candidate in the election and became a thorn in the side of Nehru’s Government. Shastri very wisely made her husband Ambassador to Spain, hoping to be rid of Gayatri Devi at the next election. But the Maharani is very much on the scene. She is today the most powerful woman leader in the state of Rajasthan in north-west India.