Not a Nice Man to Know Page 5

  Her self-portraits were exercises in narcissism. She probably had as nice a figure as she portrayed herself in her nudes but I had no means of knowing what she concealed beneath her sari. What I can’t forget is her brashness. After she had finished talking, she looked around the room. I pointed to a few paintings and said, ‘These are by my wife; she is an amateur.’ She glanced at them and scoffed, ‘That is obvious.’ I was taken aback by her disdain but did not know how to retort. More was to come.

  A few weeks later I joined my family in Mashobra. Amrita was staying with the Chaman Lals who had rented a house above my father’s. I invited them for lunch. The three of them—Chaman, his wife Helen and Amrita, came at midday. The lunch table and chairs were lined on a platform under the shade of a holly oak which overlooked the hillside and a vast valley. My seven-month-old son was in the playpen teaching himself how to stand up on his feet. He was a lovely child with curly brown locks and large questioning eyes. Everyone took turns to talk to him and compliment my wife for producing such a beautiful boy. Amrita remained lost in the depths of her beer mug. When everyone had finished, she gave the child a long look and remarked, ‘What an ugly little boy!’ Everyone froze. Some protested at the unkind remark. But Amrita was back to drinking her beer. After our guests had departed, my wife said to me very firmly, ‘I am not having that bloody bitch in my house again.’

  Amrita’s bad behaviour became the talk of Simla’s social circle. So did my wife’s comment on her. Amrita got to know what my wife had said and told people, ‘I will teach that bloody woman a lesson she won’t forget; I will seduce her husband.’

  I eagerly awaited the day of seduction. It never came. We were back in Lahore in the autumn. So were Amrita and her husband. One night her cousin Gurcharan Singh (Channi) who owned a large orange orchard near Gujranwala turned up and asked if he could spend the night with us, as Amrita, who had asked him over for the weekend, was too ill to have him stay with her. The next day, other friends of Amrita’s dropped in. They told us that Amrita was in a coma and her parents were coming down from Summer Hill to be with her. She was an avid bridge player and in her semi-conscious moments mumbled bridge calls. The next morning I heard that Amrita was dead.

  I hurried to her apartment. Her father, Sardar Umrao Singh Shergil, stood by the door in a daze, mumbling a prayer. Her Hungarian mother went in and out of the room where her daughter lay dead unable to comprehend what had happened. That afternoon no more than a dozen men and women followed Amrita’s coretge to the cremation ground. Her husband lit her funeral pyre. When we returned to her apartment, the police were waiting for her husband. Britain had declared war on Hungary as an ally of its enemy, Nazi Germany. Amrita’s husband was therefore considered an enemy because of his nationality, and had to be detained in prison.

  He was lucky to be in police custody. A few days later, his mother-in-law, Amrita’s mother, started a campaign against him accusing him of murdering her daughter. She sent letters to everyone she knew asking for a full investigation into the circumstances of her daughter’s sudden death. I was one of those she sent a letter to. Murder it certainly was not; negligence, perhaps. I got details from Dr Raghubir Singh who was our family doctor and the last person to see Amrita alive. He told me that he had been summoned at midnight. Amrita had peritonitis caused perhaps by a clumsy abortion. She had bled profusely. Her husband asked Dr Raghubir Singh to give her blood transfusion. The doctor refused to do so without fully examining his patient. While the two doctors were arguing with each other, Amrita quietly slipped out of life. But her fame liveth evermore.

  R.K. Narayan

  It must be over forty years ago that I first met R.K. Narayan in his hometown, Mysore. I had read some of his short stories and novels. I marvelled how a storyteller of modern times could hold a reader’s interest without injecting sex or violence in his narratives. I found them too slow-moving, without any sparkling sentences or memorable descriptions of nature or of his characters. Nevertheless, the one-horse town of his invention, Malgudi, had etched itself on my mind. And all my South Indian friends raved about him as the greatest of Indians writing in English. He certainly was among the pioneers comprising Raja Rao, Govind Desani and Mulk Raj Anand. Whether or not he was the best of them is a matter of opinion.

  Being with Narayan on his afternoon strolls was an experience. He did not go to a park but preferred walking up to the bazaar. He walked very slowly and after every few steps he would halt abruptly to complete what he was saying. He would stop briefly at shops to exchange namaskaras with the owners, introduce me and exchange gossip with them in Kannada or Tamil, neither of which I understood. I could sense these gentle strolls in crowded bazaars gave him material for his novels and stories. I found him very likeable and extremely modest despite his achievements.

  We saw a lot more of each other during a literary seminar organized by the East-West Centre in Hawaii. Having said our pieces and sat through discussions that followed, we went out for our evening walks, looking for a place to eat. It was the same kind of stroll as we had taken in Mysore, punctuated by abrupt halts in the middle of crowded pavements till he was ready to resume walking. Finding a suitable eatery posed quite a problem. Narayan was a strict teetotaller and a vegetarian; I was neither. We would stop at a grocery store where he bought himself a carton of yoghurt. Then we would go from one eatery to another with R.K. Narayan asking, ‘Have you got boiled rice?’ Ultimately we could find one. Narayan would empty his carton of yoghurt on the mound of boiled rice. The only compromise he made was to eat it with a spoon instead of his fingers which he would have preferred. Such eateries had very second-rate food and no wines. Dining out was no fun for me.

  One evening I decided to shake off Narayan and have a ball on my own. ‘I am going to see a blue movie. I don’t think you will like it,’ I told him. ‘I’ll come along with you, if you don’t mind,’ he replied. So we found ourselves in a sleazy suburb of Honolulu watching an extremely obscene film depicting all kinds of sexual deviations. I thought Narayan would walk out, or throw up. He sat stiffly without showing any emotion. It was I who said, ‘Let’s go.’ He turned to me and asked kindly: ‘Have you had enough?’

  We should get Narayan in the proper perspective. He would not have gone very far but for the patronage of Graham Greene who also became a kind of literary agent. He also got the enthusiastic patronage of The Hindu of Madras. N. Ram and his former English wife Susan wrote an excellent biography of Narayan. Greene made Narayan known to the English world of letters; The Hindu made him a household name in India.

  Narayan was a very loveable man, but his humility was deceptive. Once when All India Radio invited a group of Indian writers to give talks and offered them fees far in excess of their usual rates, while all others accepted the offer Narayan made it a condition that he should be paid at least one rupee more than the others. In his travelogue, My Dateless Diary, he writes about a dialogue at a luncheon party given in his honour. ‘I blush to record this, but do it for documentary purposes. After the discussions (between two publishers declaring which of Narayan’s novels is their favourite one, and rank him with Hemingway and Faulkner as the world’s three greatest living writers) have continued on these lines for a while, I feel I ought to assert my modesty—I interrupt them to say, “Thank you, but not yet . . .” They brush me aside and repeat, “Hemingway, Faulkner and Narayan, the three greatest living . . .”’ Narayan goes on at some length about the argument between the publishers over whether to include Greene or Hemingway, besides Narayan himself, among the three greatest.

  I was foolish enough to write about this in my column. Narayan never spoke to me again.

  R.K. Laxman

  Long before I got to know him, I had sensed that Laxman had a touch of the genius. I had sent a story, ‘Man, How does the Government of India Run?’ to the then editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, C.R. Mandy. He sent the story to Laxman for a suitable illustration. Without ever having seen me or my photograph, La
xman drew a caricature of a Sikh clerk (who was the main character of my story) and it bore a startling resemblance to me.

  By then he had established the reputation of being India’s best cartoonist and most people took the Times of India because of his frontpage cartoons and its last-page crossword puzzle. The rest of the paper was like any other national daily. And however distinguished its editors, few people bothered with the contents of its edit page.

  I knew Laxman was the youngest of R.K. Narayan’s six brothers. His illustrations of his brother’s short stories put life into the narrative and highlighted the fact that they were Tamil Brahmins settled in Mysore. We struck up a close friendship almost from the first day I took up the editorship of the Illustrated Weekly of India. I told him that in my opinion he was the world’s greatest cartoonist. I meant it because I had lived in England, the USA and France for many years and seen the works of cartoonists there. Laxman did not protest: he evidently agreed with my assessment of his worth. Almost every other morning he came to my room and asked me to order coffee for him. He never bothered to ask me if I was busy. Far from resenting his dropping in unannounced, I looked forward to the gossip sessions. However, while he thought nothing of wasting my time every other morning, he never allowed anyone to enter his cabin while he was at work.

  Laxman was as witty a raconteur of people’s foibles as he was adept in sketching them on paper. I discovered that he was a bit of a snob and did not deign to talk to the junior staff. My son Rahul once told me that he had run into Laxman at a cinema. When Laxman discovered that Rahul was not in the most expensive seats, he ticked him off.

  He was a great socializer and could be seen at cocktail parties of consulates, the rich and the famous. He loved driving through congested streets and gladly accepted my invitations for drinks, driving all the way from Malabar Hills where he lived, to Colaba, five miles away from my flat. Unlike his brother who was abstemious, Laxman loved his Scotch. It had to be of premium quality. However, he never returned the hospitality. Other characteristics I noticed about him which he shared with his brother was an exaggerated respect for money. R.K. Narayan was the doyen of Indian authors. He drove a hard bargain.

  Once when AIR invited ten of India’s top authors to talk about their work and offered what seemed to be more than adequate fees, Narayan accepted only on the condition that he be given at least one rupee more than the others. Likewise, Laxman and I were asked by Manjushri Khaitan of the B.K. Birla family to produce commemoration volumes on Calcutta’s 300th anniversary. We were given five-star accommodation. I accepted whatever Manjushri offered me for writing the text. Laxman demanded and got, twice as much. His cartoons sold many more copies than my book did.

  Underneath the facade of modesty, both Narayan and Laxman conceal enormous amounts of self-esteem and inflated egos. Once again I have to concede that neither has anything to be modest about. They are at the top in their respective fields.

  Manzur Qadir

  My closest friend of many years lay dying; I could not go to his bedside. His wife and children were only an hour-and-a-half’s flight from me; I could not go to see them. I could not ring them up nor write to them. And when he died, I was not there to comfort them. They are Pakistani, I am Indian. What kind of neighbours are we? What right have we to call ourselves civilized?

  I had missed the news in the morning paper. When a friend rang me up and said, ‘Your old friend is gone,’ the blood in my veins froze. I picked up the paper from the wastepaper basket and saw it in black and white. Manzur Qadir was dead. At the time he was dying in London, I was drinking and listening to Vividh Bharati in Bombay. And when he was being laid to rest in the family graveyard at Lahore, I was wringing my hands in despair in Colaba. He was Pakistani, I am Indian.

  It is believed that when a person is dying, all the events of his life flash before his mind’s eye. I must have occupied many precious seconds of Manzur Qadir’s dying thoughts as he also regarded me as his closest friend. I spent the whole morning thinking of how we met and why I was drawn close to him. At our first meeting thirty years ago we had talked about death. I had quoted lines from the last letter his wife Asghari’s brother had written to his father, Mian Fazl-i-Husain:

  I am working by candlelight,

  It flickers, it’s gone.

  Manzur Qadir was a man of contradictions. He showed little promise as a student; he became much the most outstanding lawyer of Pakistan. Next to law, his favourite reading was the Old Testament and the Quran. Nevertheless he remained an agnostic to the last. He was an uncommonly good poet and wrote some of the wittiest, bawdiest verse known in the Urdu language. At the same time he was extremely conservative, correct in his speech and deportment. Although born a Punjabi he rarely spoke the language and preferred to converse in Hindustani which he did with uncommon elegance. He was long-winded but never a bore; a teetotaller who effervesced like vintage champagne.

  The dominant traits of his character were kindliness—he never said a hurtful word about anyone. And integrity which surpassed belief. He made upwards of Rs 50,000 a month; income-tax authorities were constantly refunding tax he had paid in excess. He did not give a tinker’s cuss about money. It was commonly said, ‘God may lie, but not Manzur Qadir.’ Though godless he had more goodness in him than a clutch of saints.

  The respect and admiration he commanded amongst his friends was unparalleled. Some years after Partition a group of us were discussing G.D. Khosla’s Stern Reckoning. The book, as the title signifies, justified the killings that took place in East Punjab in the wake of Partition as legitimate retribution. We were going for Khosla’s partisan approach; he and his wife were arguing back. Suddenly a friend asked Khosla, ‘Would you present a copy of this book to Manzur?’ Khosla pondered for a while and replied, ‘No, not to him.’ That ended the argument. We came to judge the right or wrong of our actions by how Manzur Qadir would react. He was the human touchstone of our moral pretensions.

  Manzur Qadir had no interest in politics and seldom bothered to read newspapers. His ignorance of world affairs was abysmal. Once in London we happened to see a newsreel of Dr Sun Yat Sen. He asked me who this Sen was. When I expressed my amazement at his lack of information, he retorted testily: ‘Hoga koee sala Bangali daktar’ Later in the evening, when I narrated the incident to his daughter Shireen, she chided her father. He made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t till I read in the papers that President Ayub Khan had made him foreign minister of Pakistan. I sent him a telegram of congratulations, ‘Greetings from Dr Sun Yat Sen, the Bengali doctor.’

  I spent a short holiday with him when he was foreign minister I stayed as a guest in my own home. (I had put him in possession when I left Lahore in August 1947. He not only saved the life of my Sikh servants whom he brought to the Indian border at night at considerable risk to his life, but sent back every book in my library, every item of furniture and even the remains of liquor in my drink cabinet.) He told me how he had become foreign minister. He had criticized Ayub Khan’s dictatorship at a meeting. That evening an army jeep came to fetch him. Believing that he was being arrested he said good-bye to his family. He was driven to the President’s residence. Said Ayub Khan: ‘It is no good criticizing me and my government unless you are willing to take the responsibility for what you say.’ Manzur Qadir returned home as foreign minister.

  True to his character, Manzur never canvassed for any job nor showed the slightest eagerness to hold on to power. He strove with none, for none was worth his strife. He allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by unscrupulous politicians. After four years as foreign minister, during which he made a desperate bid to improve relations with India, he quit the job with no regrets. He was forced to become chief justice and, when he desired to throw that up, persuaded to take up briefs on behalf of the government. He was engaged as government counsel in all the important conspiracy cases and represented his country before international tribunals. Whether it was Iskander Mirza or Ayub Khan, Yahya Kh
an or Bhutto, no ruler of Pakistan could do without Manzur Qadir.

  Last year I spent a day with him in Nathiagali near Murree. He was a very sick man afflicted with phlebitis. But for old times’ sake, he drove down to Islamabad to pick me up and drove me back the next evening. I saw for myself the affection and esteem with which he was held by everyone from General Tikka Khan down to the humblest tradesman in the bazar. It was a continuous shaking of hands and salam alaikums.

  He bore the pain of his illness with incredible courage and without the slightest attempt to find false props offered by religion. He knew he had a short time to go but had no fear of death. I forget the Urdu couplet he used to quote but it was very much like Wesley’s:

  If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in my arms.

  At our final farewell, the tears were in my eyes, not his.

  When summoned hence to thine eternal sleep, oh, mayest thou smile while all round thee weep.

  An English friend kept me informed of his deteriorating state of health in the London hospital. Apparently she too was not with him when the end came. Tributes to such a man as Manzur Qadir can only be written in tears which leave no stain on paper. He shall be forever honoured and forever mourned.

  Prabha Dutt

  It would have been more appropriate if Prabha had written this piece on me rather than I on her. Her pen was still rapier sharp; mine is somewhat blunted with age. She would have used royal-blue ink to write my obituary; I can only use my colourless tears to write hers. For Prabha it was not yet time for the noonday prayer; for me bells peal for evensong. None of these considerations counted with the Divine Reaper: early-one morning when He set out to gather blossoms from the media’s flower-bed of lilies, he plucked one still in the prime of her youth and the fairest of them all.