Sunday, February 16, 2003		Books

The Time of My Life
by Krishen Khanna. Viking/Penguin, New Delhi. Pages 184. Rs. 325.

ONE of the great joys that many people miss out on, while engaging with Mirza Ghalib’s work, is getting to the letters that he wrote. For there is, in them — apart from the wonderful elegance of language, the clarity of tone that one associates with his poetry — a delightful directness, a warmth that draws you instantly to him. Often, he would begin a letter not with the customary greetings, and inquiries about ‘khair-o-aafiyat,’ but with a sentence like: "Arre miyan, un aamon ka kyaa hua jo aap mujhe bhejne waale the?" Reading an opening line like this, you feel as if you are suddenly there, talking to him, face to face.

Something of that quality one finds in Krishen Khanna’s book, The Time of My Life, written, as he says, after having "weathered seventy-odd winters and more." In this the distinguished artist sits down with a pen, instead of a brush, and, to put it simply, reminisces: first about ‘Friends and Family,’ and then about his ‘Adventures in Art’. A delightful stream of scattered episodes — sketches, if one so likes — then follows, ‘memories, anecdotes and tall talk’ all mingling together, in Mr. Khanna’s own words. An incredible number of characters flit in and out of the pages; places and situations are evoked; incidents are recalled with great relish and precision. There is no necessary order to the ‘chapters,’ if one can so call them, and no chronology of any kind is built up. But, suddenly, one finds oneself in the world inhabited by him, making acquaintance with the people he writes about, striking up a conversation with those whom one likes. Roop Ram, the tailor of Lahore, makes an appearance, as does Ganga Ram, the shoemaker; you begin to wonder, with Krishen Khanna, the boy, what goes on in the head of the whimsical Lall Nana who would close his eyes every now and then and find himself in the ‘court of God,’ or hear from his father the story of an ancestor who set out to build a bridge over a river in Burma but ended up dead with "a small metal lota, a dhoti and a shirt" as his only possessions. A whole period comes alive in these sketches, as in P.L. Tandon’s classic Punjabi Century, but with no great structural design or effort built into the writing. Memories flow; fade in and out.

Khanna does not explain any of this at length. Only occasionally, one picks up a note in which he confides to the reader, speaks of the past setting out to impinge upon his memory: "It seems that the dead are more insistent on my writing …." Why do all these memories keep coming back? "The circle is a beautiful shape, symmetry at its most perfect. There is no beginning and no end. It is immobile and in constant motion at the same time. … Time too is round and gathers events and happenings in its circular, spiral movement."

The warmth and the humanity that run through these sketches about family and friends continue on when Khanna begins to share with us his ‘Adventures in Art’ in the second half of the book. If anyone comes looking into the book for his views on art, or his comments upon the work of his contemporaries, there would be disappointment in store. For these sketches too are more about people who make art, or used to make it with him in days past, than about art as such. There are delicious little vignettes of the life that artists like himself used to lead once, and one meets in these pages — but clearly through him — men and names that one knows well otherwise: Hussain, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, Satish Gujral, Souza, Bal Chhabda. Here again, one waits with tremulous hope, along with Krishen and Hussain, for a foreign buyer who had shown an interest in buying a Hussain once for a thousand rupees, to show up; goes through Akbar’s trials as he is hauled up on obscenity charges for his painting, ‘The Lovers’; hears the resounding slap that Anil de Silva gave on Souza’s cheek, in Paris. Strewn through all this are of course Khanna’s occasional comments on art. But, in sum, it is not about art that one learns much in these pages: it is about life.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in ‘A Letter Out of Season,’ written, but obviously not meant to be posted, to Rudolf von Leyden: critic, collector, friend, of dimming years ago, now gone. It makes for wonderful, warm reading. "Au revoir, dear friend," Krishen Khanna says, ending this piece: "may we recognize each other, even in our different shapes, in our future lives and pick up from where we had left off."