Leery Singh Live

At 90, he is resolutely agnostic, remarkably opinionated8212;and all ready to serve up the 8216;8216;Scotch and sex8217;8217; combo that has become his literary trademark. In March, Burial at Sea, Khushwant8217;s first novel in five years, is due to be released by Penguin India.

Given his previous novel The Company of Women was greeted by an army of lustful readers but singularly turned off literary critics, the yawns and leers are both equally predictable.

So too is a pattern to Khushwant8217;s recent writing. In 2002, he wrote The End of India in a mood darkened by the Gujarat riots. That book was, really, India, RIP, a somewhat over-the-top account of how everything that could have gone wrong had, of the ancien reacute;gime8217;s worst nightmare8212;Nehruvian India overwhelmed by Hindutva Bharat.

Burial at Sea seems to follow a similar trajectory. Its hero is Victor Jai Bhagwan, a brilliant young Indian, Anglophile and all that, who becomes Gandhi8217;s closest disciple but disagrees violently with the Mahatma8217;s cottage industrial doctrine. After Independence, he pushes for modern industry, not village fetishes, as the answer to India8217;s problems.

VJ Bhagwan has Jawaharlal Nehru written all over him8212;but he8217;s not Nehru. In a wicked twist that leaves even Khushwant chortling, Bhagwan becomes free India8217;s richest business tycoon. Nehru8217;s alter ego belongs to a species Nehru despised!

Typical of a man who says he became a writer because he 8216;8216;flopped in everything I tried8230; I was a hopeless lawyer8217;8217;. Burial at Sea is an accidental novel. It was inspired8212;if that be the word8212;by long hours of watching religious preachers on the plethora of spiritual channels that is the lot of every Indian household with a cable TV connection.

8216;8216;I keep watching these pravachans discourses: 8216;Yeh rudrakhsha pehno, iske liye draft bhejo8230; Hanuman ke mandir mein jao.8217; I get so irritated.8217;8217; So why doesn8217;t he switch the damned thing off? 8216;8216;But this is my country, I have to know how it8217;s thinking.8217;8217;

Yup, you8217;ve touched one hot button. 8216;8216;There8217;s only one preacher who talks sense,8217;8217; he tells you, naming a name that shall not be named, 8216;8216;even if he looks like a hijra.8217;8217; As for the others: 8216;8216;Can you imagine someone saying, 8216;Sab pichle janam ka paap hai.8217; Kisi ke baap ko malum nahin pichla janam hota hai ki nahin.8217;8217;

This book then is a remembrance of things past, of the time when rooted religiosity had still not effaced rationality, when astrology was, to the Nehruvian aristocracy at least, more mumbo-jumbo than university text. 8216;8216;The present rulers,8217;8217; Khushwant says, 8216;8216;are backward looking8230; astrology, superstition, the perversion of religion, I was working on a much larger novel on these themes.8217;8217;

That 8216;8216;much larger novel8217;8217; eventually led to episodic narratives that Khushwant 8216;8216;found difficult to link8217;8217;. Finally, he settled for a collection of short stories. One of the stories was a bit of a long short story and, on the suggestion of Ravi Singh, executive editor, Penguin India, became 8216;8216;a novella8217;8217;. That8217;s how Burial at Sea came to be.

IT all sounds sombre and serious, very, if one may put it, unKhushwant. But Leery Singh Live doesn8217;t disappoint his devoted readers. Late in life hero Bhagwan falls in love with a 8216;8216;tantric god-woman, who keeps a tiger as a pet and has a dubious past8217;8217;. That8217;s where the sex and scandal come in, and come on strong.

The woman of God who becomes the woman of Bhagwan is inspired by Shraddha Mata, a sanyasin reputed to have had an affair with Nehru, the story most famously told by MO Mathai, the first prime minister8217;s private secretary, in his Reminiscences Of The Nehru Age.

Khushwant knew Shraddha fitfully, first meeting her in 8216;8216;about 1975 or 19778217;8217; at Delhi8217;s Nigambodh Ghat. It was a bizarre introduction. He 8216;8216;walked past burning corpses to a ragtag tent8217;8217;, where sat the coarse-tongued Shraddha Mata 8216;8216;surrounded by dogs who barked at me8217;8217;.

She asked him his name, correctly identified him as 8216;8216;the editor of Illustrated Weekly8217;8217; and obviously left an imprint on a committed non-believer. 8216;8216;She must have been in her sixties,8217;8217; Khushwant recalls, 8216;8216;but good-looking, full-bosomed and attractive.8217;8217;

In one of those occurrences that lesser people would describe as karmic destiny and Khushwant would bluntly ascribe to coincidence, as he was finishing the book, Khushwant received a letter from a judge in Jaipur who had known Shraddha Mata.

The judge pointed to a bunch of letters that made a piquant revelation about Nehru and the sanyasin. Khushwant passed on the story to a news magazine and engineered the sort of salacious gossip that the man just loves.

OVER the years, Khushwant has been many things to many people. One description of him8212;probably of his own coinage8212;has him as 8216;8216;a Sardar among intellectuals, an intellectual among Sardars8217;8217;. Others see him as a Nehru-Gandhi groupie, who got foreign office postings in the Nehru years, editorships and a Rajya Sabha nomination in the Indira years. Certainly, for such a fiercely independent mind, his fondness for Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency came as a surprise.

To his family, he8217;s the loose cannon. Only the other day, he blew up his brother when he the brother, a 8216;8216;former brigadier, was embarrassed that his grandson had married a Pakistani Muslim8217;8217;. A furious Khushwant hosted a reception for the couple and advised the young woman to stay true to her faith, perform the namaaz five times a day if she wished8212;and just not surrender her identity. The brother must have squirmed.

Khushwant is best-known, of course, as India8217;s most prized dirty old man. If you go by his books, he must have been Valentino. Friends insist he spent most of his life in mortal fear of his wife, playing out every act of infidelity strictly on a mattress in his mind.

For someone capable of scholarship, why does he bring the basic instinct into all his writing? 8216;8216;That8217;s me,8217;8217; he grins, adding, 8216;8216;Sex is an integral part of any relationship.8217;8217; As for his sex-fiend rep, he waves it away, 8216;8216;Fantasies of an octogenarian.8217;8217;

FOR a man who gets up at 5.00 am, makes his own tea while the world sleeps, and ensures his visitors vamoose by 8.00 pm8212;8216;8216;The first two times, it8217;s a gentle hint. If they still don8217;t get it, I tell them to bugger off8217;8217;8212;writing is simply a matter of routine. 8216;8216;If you write a page a day,8217;8217; he says, 8216;8216;you have a book in six months.8217;8217;

To his publishers, this is a formula entirely in character. 8216;8216;There is a great simplicity to Khushwant8217;s writing,8217;8217; says Ravi Singh, 8216;8216;he writes for the reader, not to the reader.8217;8217;

He also tots up the numbers. The Company Of Women, panned by reviewers, has sold 28,600 copies in five years. Truth, Love And A Little Malice, his autobiography released after a court injunction was lifted a year and a half ago, has already sold 30,000 copies.

In a country where 5,000 units sold make a bestseller, Khushwant8217;s epic novel Delhi is touching 25,000 copies in English alone. Even the almost morbid End Of India has done 8,000, indicating just how much of a pick-me-up ol8217; KS is.

In a sense, Khushwant was the first to crack the idea of making money writing middlebrow Indo-Angrezi. He can8217;t remember how many books he8217;s written, ranging from the authoritative History Of The Sikhs to 8216;8216;brochures for Asian Paints and the Tatas8217;8217;, but years ago, a search at the US Congressional Library arrived at a 8216;8216;figure of 110 or so8217;8217;.

Now comes the most poignant part of the Khushwant story. He treasured the printout from the library, even getting it replaced when it frayed. 8216;8216;When I feel I have wasted my life,8217;8217; he says, 8216;8216;I look at the list8230;8217;8217; In that printout lies Khushwant Singh8217;s janam patri.