THIS ABOVE ALL
To Bangladesh with love
KHUSHWANT SINGH

Last week Hasna Maudud, the only Bangladeshi friend I have, dropped in to spend the evening with me. She used to come every year on her way to Ajmer on pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, Gharib Nawaz. For the last three years she did not come, neither did she write to me. She told me why. When the Army staged a coup, it put her husband, who had been the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, behind bars. He was tortured and freed to sign documents.

He was a barrister with a handsome practice at the High Court and Member of Parliament for six consecutive terms. Hasna herself had also won elections to the nation’s Parliament. She was also a professor of academic distinctions from foreign universities. After he was released, Maudud stood for election again for the seventh term from his constituency. His being imprisoned without trial for two years made him a hero, and he expected to win back his seat without difficulty.

The Army command saw that he was defeated. Hasna was bitter about her experiences. I asked her what had brought her to Delhi. "To see you and tell you about my new book", she replied coyly. Her book, to be published soon, is Where Women Rule: South Asia. I looked over her list of women rulers — Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Khalida Zia, Sheikh Haseena, Sonia Gandhi, Bandaranaiyke, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Mayawati and, oddly enough, Phoolan Devi, the dacoit queen.

She does not include women rulers of the Philippines. I did not question her choice. She admitted that most of the women rulers inherited their crowns from their fathers or assassinated husbands.

My introduction to Hasna’s family had an interesting start. Long before Bangladesh became independent, I ran into her father Jasimuddin, a distinguished poet, at a writers’ conference in Edinburgh. We were lodged in the same boarding house along with other writers and poets.

We introduced ourselves to each other. On the first day he was a little cautious in his approach towards me. Then he realised I was a harmless sardar. He greeted me in his Bengali accent: “Shordarji, aap ko boro baj gaya”. I acknowledged my personal clock had struck 12. "It is a beeg joke in my country", he explained to others. We became friends and sat alongside each other all the sessions.

When Dhaka was liberated in 1971, I followed the Indian Army to report the event for The New York Times. The first thing I did was to ask my escort to put me in touch with Jasimuddin. He was a celebrity known to every Bangladeshi as Kobi Joshimuddin. I was invited for dinner and introduced to the rest of the family, including Hasna and her husband barrister Maudud.

When Maudud was elected Prime Minister of Bangladesh, my wife and I were invited to be state guests. We spent a week going round Dhaka and its environment.

Jasimuddin had died but we were royally entertained by Hasna’s mother and the rest of the family. That was good reason for me to have warm feelings for all Bangladeshis.

Anagrams and antigrams

Some weeks ago, I published an anagram made of letters in the name of George Bush. It was ‘Bugger Shoe’. Krishnan Aiyar of Dombivli (Thane, east) has sent me some made out of the name of Osama bin Laden. Here they are—‘A bold man in sea’; ‘One is a bald man’; ‘Bad man is alone’.

He has also written about the differences in anagram and antigram: "While in anagram, the re-arranged letters of a word phrase or sentence produce another new word, phrase or sentence, in antigram, the rearranged letters of a word, phrase or sentence produce a new word, phrase or sentence having an opposite meaning to the original. For example, ‘real fun’ is an antigram of funeral. He has also composed a small poem of antigrams, which is reproduced:

Real fun, you will miss, at a funeral;

Evil fast is broken at festival;

Dirty room is not found in a dormitory;

Happiest inscriptions in epitaphs of cemetery;

Nice love may end in violence;

Woman Hitler is mother-in-law in a sense (in essence);

No more stars can influence astronomers;

Bad credit is incurred by debit card users;

Evil’s agent masquerades evangelist;

Direct I pay cash for purchases not availing credit.

Punjab’s new CM

Santa was elected Chief Minister of Punjab. He had no difficulty in forming the Cabinet. He followed the tradition of his predecessors and appointed his wife, sons, daughters and sons-in-law as ministers. His only trouble was that only a few people outside his constituency knew him. He sent for his Press Adviser and asked him to do something about it. “No problem, sarkar”, he replied. “I will have your photograph with your Cabinet sent to all the papers which rely on government advertisements, and order them to put it on their front pages”.

Santa sensed that might be counter-productive. “No, don’t do that. People will accuse me of kunbaparasti (nepotism). I will have myself photographed with my herd of prized buffaloes. People will know I am a progressive farmer and cattle breeder”. So Santa was photographed standing in the midst of the herd of buffaloes, and the photograph was sent to all journals. Next day it appeared on the front pages of newspapers. The caption beneath read: “The new CM can be seen standing third from the left”.