Bad Old Days

Viking

Pages: 232

Rs 399

Khushwant Singh is in his nineties,and it could be said that it is astounding that he is writing novels at all. Astounding,mind you,not necessarily admirable: in fact,little is admirable about Sunset Club,other than its quite wonderful cover design and production values. Other things that are astounding include the fact that it has been published at all.

It is not,one realises as one forces one’s way through the sludgy morass that is this novel,that Singh is too old to write a good book. You rarely are: one of the most entertaining books of the past 10 years was Bowl of Cherries,from a 90-year old ex-US Marine named Millard Kaufman. (It was,startlingly,his first novel.)

Old age merely brings out,sometimes,the self-indulgent side of us all,which is totally understandable. But what happens when you’re celebrated for little more than self-indulgence?

Khushwant Singh is described on the jacket of this book as “India’s best-known writer and columnist”,which may even be true,a rare moral triumph for book-jacket puff. But while reading Sunset Club,where Singh’s endless writing has been stripped down to its essentials — the constant Punjabi triumphalism,the smirking misogyny of the self-declared ladies’ man,the historical detail shot through with wishful,Gandhi-loving politics — one begins to wonder why he is read at all. Or why,when a new book comes out,it is greeted with respectful applause.

For Singh,it emerges ever so clearly in this book,is not a grand old man who uses his battered soapbox to puncture pretension,to speak truth to power. Quite the reverse.

Often,people,as they age,have the years winnow away all that isn’t essentially them. That causes some of them,miraculously,to become consciences of a sort; others turn into gentle self-parodies. Singh as self-parody is a more devastating critic of everything he has written for three decades than anyone else could be.

In Sunset Club,for example,he takes as his subject upper-class ageing in the sacred square mile that centres on the triangle of Lodhi Gardens,Sujan Singh Park and the India International Centre in Delhi. Three friends meet in front of a tomb in the Gardens every evening. (The tomb’s dome,naturally,looks like a breast. Cringe-worthy enough,but revealing in that Singh thinks that the resemblance is all anyone in the entire garden can think about.) These three friends are broad types: the puritanical Brahmin named Sharma who may possibly be a virgin in his eighties,and is served karela for dinner by his unmarried sister; the whisky-drinking Muslim aristocrat who lives with a giant household in a sprawling house in cramped Nizamuddin West; and the loud,boisterous,intellectual Sikh with a past in which “lady visitors” lined up outside his door,and who’s capable of quoting endless vernacular poetry and explaining how it is all actually about lust. It is possible that one of these is a self-portrait,but I have no idea which.

There is no plot. We are told of their meetings over a year,between the Republic Days of 2009 and 2010. We are told of what they eat and drink. We are invited to be titillated,quite literally ad nauseam,by reminiscences of their dodgy past with middle-aged ladies who thought they were tour guides. We are invited to share in their agonising hours-long attempts,every morning,to conquer chronic constipation,efforts with which any reader forced to finish this book will discover a deep sympathy.

And we are treated to,in effect,Singh rehashing his columns. This is done simply. The protagonists are told about each event of moment in 2009 — blasts in Pakistan,the Liberhan report,the general elections,the Chand-Fiza story,Article 377. The aristocratic Muslim claims to know nothing about it. (“I know very little about Sikhism besides Sikhs being monotheist.”) This allows Sharma to say something unsurprisingly regressive and chauvinist. (“Everything in Sikhism is taken from Hinduism,” for example,or “how could that high-caste Brahmin lawyer take up with that Bishnoi?”) And then the intellectual Sikh tries to be,in the course of a tour de force of muddled reasoning,simultaneously proud of his roots,cosmopolitan,lascivious and poetic. Then they go home to a whisky.

There are few redeeming qualities to Sunset Club,but they’re there. Singh,like everyone in laburnum-infested Lutyens Delhi,is good with trees and seasons. And for anyone unaware of the power of India’s vernacular poetry when it comes to describing the seasons,there will be a couple of nice surprises. (I went out to buy the ninth-century Amarushataka.)

Yet,overall,this is sadly a book of surpassing dreadfulness. And I say that,believe me,with no malice at all.