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THIS ABOVE ALL
End of a friendship
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Khushwant Singh
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A close friendship
of over 70 years came to an end on Tuesday, May 31, of this
year, with the death of Shakuntala Khosla, wife of Justice GD
Khosla, who died a few years ago. Shakuntala was over 101 when
her life came to a close. I was closer to her than I was to her
husband. I got to know them in 1940 when I moved to Lahore to
practice law. The first thing I got to know about GD, as
everyone called him, was his love for decorum.
Wherever he was
posted, he made it a point to wear a dinner jacket when he sat
down to dine. People made fun of him — not-so-brown an Indian
sahib — who imitated white sahibs. By the time I came to
befriend him, he had given up wearing jackets when dining at
home, or with his Indian friends.
I also sensed that
he was keener to become a writer than make his mark as a Judge.
His first chance came when he was commissioned by the government
to write on the Indian point of view of the huge-scale communal
violence that occurred with the division of the country in 1947.
His first book, Stern Reckoning, justifies the Hindu-Sikh
violence against Muslims in northern India as legitimate victims
to what Muslims had done to Hindus and Sikhs to drive them out
of Pakistan.
GD Khosla’s book, Stern Reckoning, justifies the
Hindu-Sikh violence against Muslims in northern India during Partition |
I was pained to
read it and asked him if he would present a copy of Stern
Reckoning to a Muslim friend. After a pause, he admitted he
would not. I was not aware of the anger that he harboured in his
person. He wrote a short story, which he showed to me, before he
sent it to The Tribune. He did not tell me it was a concealed
diatribe against Justice Sikri and his wife. Sikri filed a
complaint of criminal libel against him.
He fled India and
stayed abroad as long as he could, hoping the matter would be
forgotten. Sikri pursued him till he made an abject apology. My
turn came later. At the Delhi Gymkhana Club elections, I found
myself behind him in a queue of voters. I tapped him on the
shoulder and asked him if he had read my novel on Delhi
published a couple of weeks earlier. He gave a one-word reply:
“Filthy.” I was taken aback and protested: “It has made it
to the top of the bestsellers’ list.” “It is filthy
stuff,” he repeated.
I did not meet him
again and read of his death in the paper. Shakuntala asked me to
pay him a tribute at a meeting of his relatives and friends
convened at Mata ka Mandir. I did. It was a tearful tribute.
Thereafter, I made it a point to ring up Shakuntala every
afternoon. I invited her to every launch of my books.
She also came once
a week to have a drink and talk of our days together in Lahore.
Then my hearing let me down. I got deafer and deafer by the day.
That took a heavy toll and Shakuntala became a distant
dream.
On the morning of
May 31, Shakuntala’s youngest son rang me up to say his mother
had died. I felt dejected. All my contemporaries have gone. I
feel they have let me down — most of all Shakuntala Khosla.
Death
Death, you are
a monster proud and vain;
Tragedy is the
mark of your reign;
However deep
one’s despair;
You listen to
no prayer;
You never undo
your vicious act;
No matter how
mournful its impact;
Unconquerable
is your might;
Irrevocable
your acts;
You heed no
supplication;
You are moved
by no grief;
You know not to
give relief;
Death you are a
monster, proud and vain;
And tragedy is
the mark of your reign.
(Courtesy:
Sanjay Yadav, Bhopal)
Some good
slogans
Sign at a beauty
parlour: Don’t whistle at the girl going out from here. She
may be your grandmother.
At a barber’s
salon: We need your heads to run our business.
A traffic
slogan: Don’t let your kids to drive if they are not old
enough, or else they never will be.
Indian Army’s
slogan: It is God’s responsibility to forgive terrorists.
It is our responsibility to arrange the meeting between them and
God.
On a bulletin
board: Success is relative. More the success, more the
relatives.
(Contributed by
J.P. Singh Kaka, Bhopal)
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