This Above all
Journey towards the end
KHUSHWANT SINGH

I do not subscribe to Robert Browning’s words:
"The best is yet to be
The last of life, for which the first was made".

Old age is not very pleasant. Even in good health, an old person cannot enjoy doing what he did in his younger days? The most important casualty is sex. Also, one has to watch what and how much one can eat or drink without upsetting one’s stomach. Teeth begin to fall, vision gets blurred, and hearing becomes defective. So what on earth did Browning mean by saying "the best is yet to be". The best is gone never to return again and old people have to console themselves with the little that remains. Memories, though rapidly fading, remain till the end.

Diana Athill’s biography Somewhere Towards the End is about ageing, re-living memories and waiting for the end

This is the theme of Diana Athill’s biography Somewhere Towards the End (Norton). She is 91. Having lived a colourful life, she now lives in retirement looking after her garden and dreaming of days gone by. Athill was books editor of the publishing house Andre Deutsch. She dealt with well-known writers like V.S. Naipaul, John Updike, Norman Mailer. She recorded her impressions in an earlier book entitled Stet published nine years ago. Her second set of memoirs is about ageing, reliving past memories and waiting for the end.

In her own words: "It is rumination of late old age" and undertaken because "book after book has been written about being young and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster round procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away? Why not have a go at it?" She admits she enjoyed sex. "I was a steamy girl", she confesses. Despite being proposed to by eligible men occasionally, she never bothered to look for a husband and preferred treating all men as lovers. Mostly she liked black men more than whites. She had no compunction of bedding married men? All to prove the point that "women, too, could be cheered up by sex without love".

Athill believes that old women should strive to look as attractive as they can and not lapse into dowdiness. She wrote, "the most obvious thing about moving into my seventies was the disappearance of what used to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being".

Now Athill’s formula for fitness in old age is to go driving fast in the countryside. She imbibes some from lost power from her automobile. She also thinks of her approaching end. She is not religious nor subscribes to belief in the Judgement Day, heaven, hell or rebirth. She writes: "What dies is not a lip’s value but the worn-out or damaged container of the self, together with the self’s awareness of itself: away with that goes into nothingness, with everyone else". She writes honestly lucidly and without bothering about what people may think of her.

India’s recent past

Reading literature on the partition of India in 1947 is like scratching a healed wound and making it bleed again. But it is a must because it also revives memories of the country a person left behind, the struggle of survivors to rebuild their lives in the land of their adoption. This is Pran Seth’s autobiography Lahore to Delhi: Rising from the Ashes (Punja).

Seth was a Lahoria, born in Shahalmi Gate, a Hindu enclave in the predominantly Muslim locality. He went to DAV School and graduated from Dyal Singh College. He was 22 when driven out of Pakistan, he took to journalism and traveled all over the country and abroad. He witnessed the murder of Mahatma Gandhi because as a reporter he had to attend every one of the Mahatma’s prayer meetings. He now lives in Chandigarh devoting his time to reading and writing. There is much a reader can learn from his book on India’s recent history.

Partridge calls

M.M. Khan of Howrah has reprimanded me for being unduly harsh in my criticism of the latest translation of 21 ghazals of Mirza Ghalib by two Pakistani women. He reminds me that just as calls of hill partridges sound different to different ears, words are interpreted differently by different translators. He gives four versions of the partridge calls:

Muslim: Subhan teri Qudrat

Hindu: Ram, Laxman, Bharat

Wrestler: Dand, baithak, kasrat

Poet: Ishq, mohabbat, nafrat

I had a fifth one to Khan’s four: The call has two lines:

Mine: Lehsen, pyaz, adrak

Queer coincidence

It is prophetic or incidental that A.Q. Khan, who stole formula for making atom bomb for Pakistan and sold the same to North Korea and Libya at enormous personal profit, should have the same initials as the terrorist outfit Al-Qaida?

(Contributed by KJS Ahluwalia, Amritsar)

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