Truth, Love & A Little Malice

Khushwant Singh

Description

Born in 1915 in pre-Partition Punjab, Khushwant Singh, perhaps India s most widely read and controversial writer has been witness to most of the major events in modern Indian history from Independence and Partition to the Emergency and Operation Blue Star and has known many of the figures who have shaped it. With clarity and candour, he writes of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the talented and scandalous painter Amrita Shergil, and everyday people who became butchers during Partition. Writing of his own life, too, Khushwant Singh remains unflinchingly forthright. He records his professional triumphs and failures as a lawyer, journalist, writer and Member of Parliament; the comforts and disappointments in his marriage of over sixty years; his first, awkward sexual encounter; his phobia of ghosts and his fascination with death; the friends who betrayed him, and also those whom he failed.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Anglais
• India
• English
• Idioma inglés
• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 10 février 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351181354
• Langue: English

Extrait

KHUSHWANT SINGH
Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography
PENGUIN BOOKS in association with RAVI DAYAL Publisher
Contents
About the Author
Publishers Note
Prologue: An Apology for Writing an Autobiography
1 Village in the Desert
2 Infancy to Adolescence: School Years
3 College Years in Delhi and Lahore
4 Discovering England
5 Lahore, Partition and Independence
6 With Menon in London, with Malik in Canada
7 Purging the Past and Return to India
8 Parisian Interlude
9 Discovery of India
10 Sikh Religion and History
11 Bombay, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 1969-79 and the Aftermath
12 With the Gandhis and the Anands
13 1980-86, Parliament and The Hindustan Times
14 Pakistan
15 Oddballs and Screwballs
16 Wrestling with the Almighty
17 On Writing and Writers
18 The Last but One Chapter
Postscript: November 2001: The Harvest Years
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
TRUTH, LOVE AND A LITTLE MALICE
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 was sent on diplomatic postings to Canada and London and later went to Paris with UNESCO. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojana , and editor of Illustrated Weekly of India, National Herald and Hindustan Times . Today he is India s best-known columnist and journalist.
Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among his published works are the classic two-volume History of the Sikhs , several works of fiction-including the novels Train to Pakistan (winner of the Grove Press Award for the best work of fiction in 1954), I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi and The Company of Women -and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.
Khushwant Singh was a 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).
Publishers Note
This volume was to have been published in January 1996, but for reasons briefly explained in the postscript, that did not come to pass. Apart from the postscript, which the author added in November 2001, the text of Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography remains substantially as it was when originally completed in 1995.
Prologue: An Apology for Writing an Autobiography
I STARTED ON this autobiography with some trepidation. It would inevitably be my last book, my swansong penned in the evening of my life. I am fast running out of writer s ink. I do not have the stamina to write another novel; many short stories remain half-written and I do not have the energy to finish them. I am eighty-seven. I am made daily aware of old age creeping over me. My memory, of which I was once very proud, is fading. There was a time when I rang up old friends in Delhi, London, Paris and New York without bothering to re-check their numbers from telephone directories. Now I often forget my own number. I may soon decline into senility and try to get myself on the phone. I have cataracts developing in both eyes, I suffer from sinus headaches, I am slightly diabetic and have blood-pressure problems. I also have an enlarged prostate; at times it produces illusions of youth in the form of massive erections in the mornings; at others, it does not give me enough time to undo my fly to urinate. I will have to get the prostate out soon; with it will go fake erections and youthful fantasies. I have been on the hit list of terrorist organizations for almost two decades. Till recently my home was guarded by soldiers and three armed guards took turns to accompany me wherever I went - to play tennis, to swim, for walks and to parties. I don t think terrorists will get me. But if they do, I will thank them for saving me from the agonies of old age and the indignity of having to shit in bed pans and having nurses wipe my bottom. Both my parents were long-lived. My father died at ninety - a few minutes after he had his last sip of Scotch. My mother followed him eight years later when she was ninety-four. Her last request, made in a feeble, barely audible voice, was Viskee . It was given to her. She threw it up and spoke no more. I hope that when my time comes, I too will be able to raise my glass to take one for the long road.
When I started on my memoirs, I gave myself another four or five years of creative activity. I proposed to devote them in recording whatever I could recollect of my past. I have never disclosed my past to anyone. As the Urdu poet Hakeem Makhmoor wrote:
I told no one the story of my life
It was something I had to spend;
I spent it.
I reveal myself without shame or remorse. Benjamin Franklin wrote:
If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten
Either write things worth reading
Or do things worth writing.
I have not done things which anyone else may feel are worth recording. My only chance of not being forgotten when I am dead and rotten is to write about things worth reading. I have been witness to many historical events, and as a journalist, I have interviewed many characters who played decisive roles in shaping them. I am not an admirer of great people. The few I got to know at close quarters turned out to have feet of clay: they were pretentious, feckless, lying and utterly commonplace.
I have no pretensions to being a craftsman of letters. Having had to meet deadlines for the last five decades, I did not have the time to wait for inspiration, indulge in witty turns of phrase or polish up what I wrote. I have lost the little I knew of writing good prose. All said and done, this autobiography is the child of ageing loins. Do not expect too much from it: some gossip, some titillation, some tearing up of reputations, some amusement - that is the best I can offer.
My daughter, Mala Dayal, to whom this book is dedicated, bullied me into writing it. She may have good reason to regret her persistence in reminding me to get on with it. Special thanks are due to my niece, Geetanjali Chanda, who typed the MS many times, pointed out flaws in the text and often corrected them herself.
1 Village in the Desert
IT IS SAFEST to begin with the beginning.
Where I was born I have been told by people who were present at my birth. When I was born remains a matter of conjecture. I am told I was born in a tiny hamlet called Hadali, lost in the sand dunes of the Thar desert some thirty kilometres west of the river Jhelum and somewhat the same distance southward of the Khewra Salt Range. Hadali is now deep inside Pakistan. At the time I was born, my father, Sobha Singh, was away in Delhi with his father, Sujan Singh. When the news was sent to him, he did not bother to put it down in his diary. I was his second son. At that time records of births and deaths were not kept in our villages. Unlike Hindus who noted down the time of birth of their offspring so that their horoscopes could be cast, we Sikhs had no faith in astrology, and therefore attached no importance to the time and place of nativity. Several years later, when he had to fill a form for our admission to Modern School in Delhi, my father gave my elder brother s and my date of birth out of his imagination. Mine was put down as 2 February 1915. Years later, my grandmother told me that I was born in Badroo - some time in August. I decided to fix it in the middle of the month, to 15 August 1915 and made myself a Leo. Thirty-two years later in 1947, 15 August became the birthday of independent India.
Some time after I had been weaned, my father came to Hadali to take my mother and elder brother to Delhi, where he and his father had secured some building contracts. I was left with my grandmother. For the first few years of my life she was my sole companion and friend. Her name I later discovered was Lakshmi Bai. We called her Bhaabeejee. Like her, my mother also had a Hindu - Maharashtrian - name, Veeran Bai. The children knew her as Baybayjee.
I have hazy recollections of my childhood years in Hadali. The village consisted of about three hundred families, most of them Muslims of Baluch extraction. They were enormous men, mostly serving in the British Indian army, or having retired from it. A fair proportion of the Viceroy s bodyguard came from Hadali. Till recently, a marble plaque on a wall alongside the railway Station Master s office stated that Hadali had provided proportionately more soldiers from its population for World War I than any other village in India. There were about fifty Hindu and Sikh families engaged in trade, shopkeeping and moneylending. My ancestors - I can only trace them back to my great-grandfather, Inder Singh, and his father, Pyare Lal, who converted to Sikhism and became Sohel Singh - were tradesmen. They had camel caravans which took rock-salt from the Khewra mines, and dates, the only fruit of our desert homeland, to sell in Lahore and Amritsar. They brought back textiles, kerosene oil, tea, sugar, spices and other items to sell in neighbouring towns and villages. Later, my grandfather and father got into the construction business. They laid a part of the small-gauge railtrack and tunnels on the Kalka-Simla railway.
We were the most prosperous family of Hadali. We lived in a large brick-and-mud house with a spacious courtyard enclosing a buffalo shed and had a well of our own. The entrance was a massive wooden door which was rarely opened. It had a small aperture to let people in. A number of Hindus and Sikhs served us as clerks, and hired Muslim camel-drivers took our wares to the markets. Many Muslim families were our debtors.
Our family s