02 April 2014, 12:14 PM IST
While I wouldn't dream of trying to step into Khushwant's shoes, I have sat on his potty in his bungalow in Kasauli. Since Khushwantji's prodigious reputation revolved largely around his seeming preoccupation with either end of the alimentary canal, I feel that my enthronement on this lordly perch could give me a unique insight into the man behind the myth. Despite not knowing me from Adam, my absent host had not objected to my inclusion in the house party staying at his bungalow. This bespoke magnanimity, a kindness which strangers could depend on.
The house itself reflected the man as revealed in his writings; capacious; rambling; obdurately enduring, through with frequently cantankerous plumbing; crammed with memories and anecdotes, often repeated, like family portraits taken at different times; comfortably well worn, like the books on the shelves. Marcus Aurelius higgledy-piggledy with Over Sex-teen, or an old armchair moulded, a posterior, to accommodate a reader at ease with both. Pottering about that house, the presence of the host was made palpable by his momentary absence, as though he'd just stepped out of the room, mid-story.
An anthology of his writings 'Not a Nice Man to Know: the Best of Khushwant Singh' gives glimpses of his life like a tour of his house. There he pays tribute to his old friend and erstwhile typewriter borrower, "Nirad C Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary" who can "write the English language... as few, if any, living Englishman could write." And there's "Mother Teresa, Apostle of the Unwanted," based on a profile (for the New York Times) done 20 years ago ("In my little study... I have only two pictures of the people I admire most – Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa." ) And the emotional "Farewell to The Illustrated Weekly" and to Bombay. ("I will miss the ladies and pimps of the Colaba lanes whose bawdy language has enriched my vocabulary and the pye-dogs who wag their tails when they see me." )
The task of packing and crating this assorted memorabilia of a long and crowded life went to one of KS's numerous protégés, Nandini Mehta, who did a good job as editor, irrepressible printer's devils notwithstanding ("compliment" instead of "complement", "Vale of Heath", etc.) Another chela, Vikram Seth, contributed an acrostic Foreword ("King of the columnists and price of hosts, /Hero of cats (20 at least) who feed/Under your aegis..."etc.) The result is a portable Khushwant, handy for perusal on the potty or elsewhere.
Which leaves unanswered the question: 'Why do people read Khushwant Singh? As he himself admitted with uncharacteristic – and unbecoming – modestly, he wasn't a great writer; he didn't have to be, for he belongs to that even rarer breed: the consistently readable writer. Like a serviceable Punjabi tractor cutting a straightforward furrow through fertile soil, his prose yields regular harvests long after flashier sports models lie abandoned by the verge with overheated radiators.
Khushwant's phenomenal success as a columnist and writer sprang from a most unwriterly virtue; he wrote for the reader, not for himself. He had the knack of seeming to speak directly to the reader, shrugging himself out of the confines of the printed page, putting his arm across your shoulders so that you almost sensed the knobbly feel of a tweed sleeve, almost smelt the tart whiff of Scotch as he leant forward to impart a particularly juicy confidence. Trust the guy? You were ready to buy a second-hand car off him, don't bother with the registration papers.
Like a literary version of Osho Rajneesh, Khushwant always told the reader not what the reader felt he should want to hear, but what he really wanted to hear. Thus the buffoon bored of buffoonery would read Khushwant for his scholarship, and the scholar stooped with pedantry would turn to him for jest; the prude would read him for bawdiness, and the sated libertine would swallow his bromides like ethical Eno's salts.
Khushwant was like everyone's uncle. Not the real-life goody-goody uncle who became a vegetarian and joined a monastic ashram, never to be heard of again. But the large, rumbustious, Rabelaisian black-sheep-of-the-flock uncle, who shoved off for far-flung lands, where he had many adventures and amours, made pots of money, which largely redeemed him in the eyes of the family on whom he would periodically descend, laden with gifts of a shrewd generosity, a fund of improper stories and a disquieting trail of luggage never fully unpacked before it was ready to be on the road again.
Unfortunately, they don't actually make them like that. Which is why Khushwant Singh had to be a real sham – probably the realest one around.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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