Winters and the fireside have forever sprung images and memories for me. Memories that do not always belong in cosiness and comfort. Memories that also conjure images of the homeless and the bereft, of those that must huddle by fires that are dying or are toxic but there isn’t a choice — a rubber tyre or wasted plastic that can give warmth at first; the killer effects descend later, when a night, or several, have been manoeuvred past the cold.
But this one is a contrasting memory of the fireside in winter, a cuddled-coddled slice that seemed to have dropped on my lap by some happy trick of destiny. The brief evening I am about to recall was from well past Christmas, but the recollection of it has somehow acquired a yuletide texture to it. It was an evening spent with a surreal likeness to Santa Claus in superannuation mood.
To the handful who he allowed around him during his last years, urging their cherished one to a century of years had become a collective manifesto. It cannot be said for certain whether Khushwant Singh, who departed in the silence of a missed breath at home in Sujan Singh Park in central Delhi one afternoon ten years ago, shared the zest of his constituency any longer. The first and only time I ever met him, shortly after he had turned 99, he intoned to me in whispers his diminishing lust for life. “Oh I so dislike no longer being my own master, I so dislike my dependence on other people. Even to go to the loo I must wait to catch someone’s eye and they have to help me… it’s the thing I have begun to most dislike, it’s my health I’ve most begun to miss, that I am no longer my own master…”
Singh, lapsed in his sofa seat by the fireside, wore a wan grin, no longer bothered if his uncertain expression did not match what he was saying. Then he raised his glass, as if toasting the incredulity of him still being able to hold it up, and sniffed a sip. He was seldom known to have indulged himself to more than a peg a night, but that peg of single malt he missed for nothing. He never needed to say that evening how much he still loved his daily drink, but he spoke eloquently, though feebly, of how little he had begun to enjoy living. “I’ve already lived a rich and full life, you see, how much longer can one expect to go on…” For a man who had played the quirk of writing an obituary notice on himself aged 20, he had come a fair distance. He smiled infirmly, a little disagreeably, at the mention of going on to a hundred. His eye flickered, but only as if to say, just look at the state of me.
He took another sip of whiskey, dropped wrinkled lids on his eyes, and chanted the Gayatri mantra as clearly and beatifically as I have ever heard it rendered. His eyes still shut, he then said, plaintively, “The only other prayer I say to myself each morning is Om Arogyam, Om Shanti, a prayer for health and a prayer for peace.” The room was dimly lit, like a cavernous shrine; the fire gave off the most light and it picked out books everywhere, some ordered, some wantonly piled, in shelves, on the floor, on the centre table where bottles of whiskey stood nodding at volumes of words. The shrine’s deity sat closest to the fire. He wore a loose cap over his sparse, straggly hair and had a blanket thrown across his knees. It was a cold evening. On his chest he wore a stain of gravy as big as his heart. Khushwant Singh seldom bothered pretending what he was not. He was now an old man; when he ate, he often spilt food onto himself, and he was beyond caring about it.
I had known of such a long catalogue of descriptions tagged to him that I was a little taken by surprise to see that he fit, rather shrivelled, in one corner of a sofa seat. Khushwant Singh, Inner Temple barrister, diplomat, historian, novelist, editor, columnist, scion of the builders of imperial New Delhi, imp, scamp, jokester, famed raconteur of Bacchic ribaldry, much of which was myth he invented around himself. And, yet, all of that barely even completed the description of the man who wrote the most words a sardar ever did. Khushwant Singh collaborated notoriously with the Indira-Sanjay imposition of Emergency, earned the Padma Bhushan only to spurn it when Mrs Gandhi ordered the army into the Golden Temple in 1984 rendering Sikhism’s holiest sanctum a bloodied battleground. (A quarter century later, he would accept the Padma Vibhushan, the land’s second highest civilian honour, from a successor Congress government.)
If he took deep offence to Operation Blue Star, he turned with no less anger at the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992 and the communal riptide that tore across many parts of India in its wake. One of the things that he recalled to me that first and last evening with him was his sense of indignation and fright at the causes and consequences of the tearing down of the Babri masjid.
I begged one question of him before the clock ticked over half seven in the evening, time for Singh to prepare for dinner and retire. I asked what he thought of the state of the nation, having spanned all its years since Independence and before, and he threw me a quizzical glance and asked, “But I didn’t get what you said.” He probably did not want to answer that one, but I repeated the question. “Ah,” he said, rearranging his blanket, “It’s one catastrophe after another, catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe, but I’ve got used to it.”
He didn’t have long to bear with it. He went just as he had wished. “All that I hope for is that when death comes to me, it comes swiftly,” Singh wrote in his last book, Absolute Khushwant: The Low Down on Life, Death & Most Things In-Between, “without much pain, like fading away in sound slumber.”
Somewhere he had also written an epitaph, typically rascally, to himself:
“Here lies one who spared neither man nor God
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod
Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.”
It’s been ten years; wonder how many ‘catastrophe after catastrophe’ descriptions he would have thought fit to add as caption to the decade since he departed.
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in
