THIS ABOVE ALL
By George, what a charmer
Khushwant Singh

I have always had a soft spot for George Fernandes. I have known him for almost 40 years in his many incarnations. He has everything I do not have. When I first saw him, he was a handsome, well-built young man with zest for life, which attracted the most beautiful of women. I was a flabby, paunchy sardar, more seeking than sought for.

I recall my first sight of him during a hot summer afternoon on a small platform at Kala Ghoda Chowk in the midst of hundreds of Bombay’s cab drivers, exhorting them to fight for their rights. Later, the same evening, I met him at a cocktail reception given by Mota Chudasama. He was the centre of attention with all the bejewelled glitterati of Bombay’s elite society.

He was just at ease chatting with them as he was talking to sweaty taxi drivers. The one thing we had in common was disdain of all religions. He was born Catholic but totally non-conformist. I lost track of him for a while after he married Humayun Kabirdaughter Leila, a Bengali Muslim. Though she bore him a son, the marriage did not work out.

George was never a one-woman man. I heard of many women who befriended him, including a starlet in Bangalore. George was outspokenly critical of Indira Gandhi. When she imposed the Emergency, the police went looking for him. He went underground. He grew a beard, learnt to tie a turban and passed off as a Sikh. When he travelled around the country by air, he booked himself under my name for no better reason than he could not think of another Sikh name.

When I questioned him later and said: "But you can’t even speak Punjabi, and here many people know me." He smiled and replied: "I said I was born and brought up in Canada. And no one ever asked me whether I was Khushwant Singh."

However, the police got him. He was given third degree treatment and even taken out to be "shot in an encounter." After the anti-Sikh violence of November, 1984, following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, I saw more of him. He set up a relief organisation to rehabilitate the families of victims. I received a lot of donations from Sikhs living abroad. I passed them on to George’s organisation for disbursement.

I saw a great deal of his new companion Jaya Jaitley. I had known her as a school girl as June Chettur. The family lived in the neighbouring block. She was the heartthrob of all the boys with her in school and college, including my son Rahul.

Then I saw George as Defence Minister. There was not the slightest change in his behaviour. No red light on his car, no sirens blowing, no escort. He walked in without any fuss, and chatted as casually as before. More women came his way. One I knew well was the dusky, curvaceous beauty Olga Tellis, much to the chagrin of Russy Karanjia of The Blitz, whose friend she was.

Who, besides George, a South Indian, could win elections from Bihar? Who, besides George, could charm anyone he met? It is a thousand pities that he has been stricken by Alzheimer’s disease. I know because my wife suffered from it for five years before she died. Your memory goes, you can’t tell one person from another. And you gradually sink into oblivion.

So Leila Kabir and her son have taken over. Jaitley, who was his closest companion for 25 years, has been declared a persona non-grata. Fortunately, George Fernandes is blissfully unaware of what is going on around him.

One evening I was holding forth in my evening mehfil, reciting passages of Ghalib’s poetry I know by heart. After receiving the customary acclaims of wah, wah, irshaad, mukkarar, I said: "Isn’t it a great tragedy that this language is dying out in the very country in which it was born?" Professor Mushirul Hassan, sitting next to me, contradicted me. "Languages never die out; they change with time but never become extinct. In India it is not Urdu which is dying but the Arabic script in which it was usually written. It is now reappearing in other Indian scripts," he said.

He is right. In the last few years we have seen more books published on Urdu poetry in northern Indian languages than during British Raj of over a century and a half. I am only aware of what has appeared in Punjabi, Hindi and Roman. The names uppermost in my mind are TN Raz of Panchkula and Kuldip Salil, a retired professor of English from Hansraj College, Delhi. I have gone over Raj’s selections of Ghalib in the Gurmukhi script at least 100 times.

Last month he came out with two more of Urdu poetry — Hindustan tay Pakistan dee Behtereen Urdu Haas Viyang Shairee (The best of Indo-Pak light verse) and Parveen Shakir dee Chunnee Shairee (Selected verses of Parveen Shakir) — both published by Unistar Books. Kuldip Salil I respect as a teacher, and use his verses in my columns. He has also come out with translations of Allama Iqbal in Devanagari and English rendering (National Book Trust) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Rajpal & Sons).

Having translated some of both poets, I was engrossed in seeing how Salil’s renderings differed from mine. He knows the original languages much better than I do. I give one example from Faiz, which is my favourite:

Jaisey beemar ko beyvajah qaraar aa jaaye.

Salil translates it as follows:

Your memory crossed my mind last night.

I have rendered the same lines as follows:

Santa: "What is inflation?" Banta: "I will explain it to you with an example. A few years back, your figure was 36-24-36, and now it is 42-46-48. Now you have everything more, but your value is less. This is inflation."

(Contributed by J.P. Singh Kaka, Bhopal)