It is Khushwant Singh’s trademark that he does not tread softly and speak deferentially about the dead. His obituaries of the people he knew — and he has been on first name terms with the high and mighty of the land — have more often than not a dash of malice. When recalling fellow writers or those who have snubbed him, Khushwant Singh’s venom shows clearly.For instance, his obit of writer Mulk Raj Anand is catty beyond belief. ‘‘What I have written may not sound like a tribute to a celebrated author. For this I crave pardon from Mulk’s millions of admirers. But when I heard of his death in Pune at the age of 99 I was overcome with grief. I may not have held him in great esteem as a writer, but I recall him with great affection.’’ Not many are going to put much credence on Singh’s avowals of affection when his memories of Mulk are so negative. He recalls how Mulk arrogantly snubbed a group of young aspiring writers, including himself, for not lionising him when he attended their meeting. That Mulk was sued by an American professor for plagiarism of an article on eroticism in Indian art. The Communist-baiting Dosu Karaka splashed the news on the front page of Current and Mulk disappeared from the social scene for a while. Singh writes mischievously that Mulk had a way of impressing babus and persuading them to allocate grants for writers homes in Delhi and Lonavala without them checking that Mulk was in fact the sole occupant of these homes. Singh breezily relies on bazaar gossip to expound on celebrated artist Amrita Shergil’s alleged nymphomaniacal predilections, though he admits that he was one of the few people on whom Shergil did not make advances. He candidly confesses that he nursed a deep grievance towards Shergil because she dismissed his wife’s paintings as amateurish. Worse, Shergil was rude enough to describe his beautiful seven-year-old son as an ‘‘ugly little boy.’’ After that, Singh and his wife declared open warfare and he even makes snide innuendoes about the painter’s tragic death at an early age. The lacuna in this collection of obituaries, selected from Singh’s columns over the last few decades, is that while his thumbnail sketches are witty and readable, they often are a trifle too superficial. Certainly some of his subjects deserved more than they got from him. Singh invariably adds a line or two of salacious gossip about the turbulent relations between husbands, wives and mistresses, who was in love with whom decades back, who ditched whom and so on. It is doubtful whether he could have written half as freely about the living and not been slapped with half a dozen libel suits.
