Khushwant Singh - Portrait of a Serial Killer: Uncollected Writings

Also by Khushwant Singh

FICTION

Train to Pakistan

I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale

Delhi: A Novel

The Company of Women

Burial at Sea

The Sunset Club

The Portrait of a Lady: Collected Stories

NON-FICTION

Truth, Love & a Little Malice: An Autobiography

Nature Watch

Indira Gandhi Returns

A History of the Sikhs

Ranjit Singh: Maharaja of the Punjab

ANTHOLOGIES

The Freethinkers Prayer Book

99: Unforgettable fiction, non-fiction, poetry & humour

TRANSLATIONS

Land of Five Rivers

Umrao Jan Ada (with M. A. Husaini)

Shikwa and Jawab-i-Shikwa

Celebrating the Best of Urdu Poetry (with Kamna Prasad)

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

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First published in India in 2015 by

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Copyright Devdutt Pattanaik 2015

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eISBN: 978-93-84067-05-2

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

The marble plaque installed in Khushwant Singhs first school in Hadali, Punjab (now in Pakistan)

Fakir Aijazuddin, a family friend, had taken his ashesby train to Pakistan and had them interred and groutedpermanently behind the plaque.

This book is dedicated to
Nandini Mehta in gratitude for the gift of friendship.

CONTENTS

This book will be published on the hundredth anniversary of my fathers birth, and a little over a year after he passed away. In death, as in life, my father cast a long shadow, especially when it came to those of his friends and fans who admired his honesty and courage as a journalist, and his forthrightness and lucid style as a writer. This was evident from the obituaries written at his death, not only in India and the UK, but perhaps even more so in Pakistani newspapers, both English and Urdu. Article after article mentioned his strong advocacy of Indo-Pak friendship and cited incidents of how he stuck his neck out for his beliefs.

The affection he commanded in Pakistan was also evident at a special session held in his honour at a literary festival I attended in Lahore in February 2015. The hall was packed with perhaps a thousand people. The panel discussion was chaired by Fakir Aijazuddin, who had taken some of my fathers ashes by train to Pakistan and interred them at Hadali, where my father was born. My fathers warm welcome to visitors from Pakistan, his love of Urdu poetry and scholarship were mentioned by all the panellists. One of them recounted an incident that occurred after the 1971 war: My father went to see Mrs Indira Gandhi and pleaded for the release of the 93,000 prisoners of war. He told her that holding these prisoners was morally wrong. She snubbed him, saying, Thanks for lecturing me on morality. He was undeterred and continued to ask that they be released. Nor was he bothered when he was referred to as an unpaid agent of Pakistan.

The audience clapped and cheered.

I returned to Pakistan two months later for the Islamabad Literary Festival. This time my brother and I were able to go to Hadali. The village came out to welcome us, overwhelming us with warmth and hospitality. We saw the place where my father was born; the house was now just a pile of bricks, but the government school where he studied, though dilapidated, was still functioning. Our friends Shahnaz and Aijazuddin accompanied us on this trip and showed us where my fathers ashes has been mixed with cement and placed behind the marble plaque so that he could rest where his roots were. They had brought rose petals to put on the ledge of the plaque and, like my father had done some thirty years before, I was overcome and broke down.

As is to be expected, this collection has more than one piece on Pakistan. But it also has pieces on a number of other subjects that my father was interested in. Throughout his very long career as a writer, editor, journalist and columnist, his work had a few distinguishing characteristics that made it impossible to mistake it for that of any other writermost noticeably a dislike for humbug, flowery phrases and hyperbole. He usually wrote several drafts of every piece that was eventually published. Each of these drafts was diligently typed out by Mr Lachman Das, his long-time assistant, on a manual typewriter, and delivered to my father, who would then correct and revise the piece for it to be typed out again by Mr Das. When I was going through his manuscripts and papers to put together this book I often found more than one draft of a piece. In such cases, I chose to include the version that seemed to be the most distinctive and polished. Several of the pieces have been lightly edited. To the extent possible, the pieces are chronologically arranged within the sections in which they appear. The multiple drafts of a number of the pieces also made it difficult to accurately date them and identify the magazine or newspaper in which they eventually appeared. It would, however, be safe to say that versions of the majority of the pieces in the book appeared in Yojana, The Statesman, the New York Times, New Delhi, the Hindustan Times, the Illustrated Weekly of India and The Tribune. To the best of my knowledge, most of these pieces, or at any rate these versions of these pieces, have never been collected in book form before. A few of the pieces have never been published before.

The book is divided into four sections: Unforgettable People, Memorable Places, The Indian Way and A Matter of Politics. The first section contains character sketches of people as diverse as the serial killer Raman Raghav who terrorized Bombay before he was caught; the pre-eminent biographer of Mother Teresa, British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge; and one of Indias most popular singers, Lata Mangeshkar. Included in this section is An Evening with Dev Anand whose photograph with my father has been put up at Government College, Lahore, with the heading Pride of Subcontinent.

During the first phase of his career as a journalist, when he edited and wrote for magazines and newspapers like Yojana, the Illustrated Weekly of India, New Delhi and the Hindustan Times, he was an indefatigable traveller, making trips to some of the most far-flung places in the subcontinent, and overseas. The journeys he made when working for Yojana generated some of his finest work, transforming what could have been dreary reports on steel plants and dams into lyrical prose. These essays appear in the section Memorable Places.