THE MAN WHO BROOKED NO NONSENSE
My father, Khushwant Singh, passed away a little over three years ago. He was 99, but clear-minded right till the end. He was doing his usual morning crossword puzzle when his heart gave way. As word got around, a succession of people turned up at his modest two-bedroom New Delhi flat to pay their last respects, from top politicians like Dr Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and L.K. Advani, to leading academics and writers, right down to the humblest of folks. His appeal cut through political, religious and social differences. He had the knack of bridging all kinds of chasms. He felt just as at ease with a prime minister or a president as he did with a simple villager. And they felt at ease with him too, a rare trait in a class-ridden and communally-divided society like ours. As Kipling put it, “He could walk with kings, yet had the common touch.”
I was once driving in south India when my car had a puncture in a small town. As it was being repaired, I was chatting with the locals when a retired jawan realised I was Khushwant Singh’s son. He asked me to wait and went scurrying home, returning proudly with a hand-scrawled postcard from my father. Over the decades, my father would write several postcards, often scores every day, to all those who communicated with him.
Though he was a proud Sikh, retaining the symbols of a turban, long hair and beard, he rarely went to a gurdwara. And though he called himself an agnostic, he made a deep study of all religions. However, he abhorred fundamentalists of all faiths with a passion, including his own, missing no opportunity to poke fun at them. He received death threats after he ran down the hate-spewing preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and had to be given 24-hour security, a tent with armed policemen posted outside his flat. Yet, he returned his Padma Bhushan award in protest when Indira Gandhi sent troops into Amritsar’s Golden Temple (he was later awarded the Padma Vibhushan). He was profoundly troubled by the growing intolerance and communalism in the country in recent years, and wished more people were bolder in speaking out. The only way religious extremists would be countered, he felt, was by moderate members of the same faith condemning them.
He was always full of fun, while being candid to the core. He was provocative and often outrageous. He loved to puncture inflated egos and expose hypocrisy and what he called “humbug”. His readers adored him for it. They loved his honesty, his outspokenness and his fearlessness. He wrote and spoke from the heart, though he could sometimes be politically naive. But he never took himself seriously. Once, he got a letter from abroad, addressed simply to ‘Khushwant Singh, Bastard, India’. He showed it to everybody gleefully, commenting that even the postal department knew where to deliver it! At the end of his column, there would invariably be a joke, often at the expense of his own community. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, the highest spiritual authority of the Sikhs, though clearly with little sense of humour, once sent my father an official and sternly worded warning that he should desist from writing ‘Santa Banta’ jokes. He replied to them in three words: “Go to hell.” He never heard from them again.