Of Poona, Pink Floyd and fighting Paki-bashers
Farrukh Dhondy opens this autobiography with a controversial memory, one in which he kicks the wall against which his swinging baby cot is placed. Did baby Farrukh really have legs strong enough to kick it away from the wall? And straightaway, before you turn to page 3, the author has given you grounds – and license – to question everything that might follow.
Through the patchwork of fragments that do follow, a surprisingly clear picture emerges. One of the clearest is of a no-nonsense man, one who over the years has given his all to causes; an irreverent, somewhat impatient sort of fellow, one who really never cared (much) for others’ opinions of him.
Wondering whether Farrukh Dhondy really is like that, or just wants everyone to think he is, reminded me of the only time we met. It was February 2013. We were both launching books at the Karachi Literature Festival, and were staying at the same hotel. My husband and I plonked ourselves down at his table at breakfast, and he regaled us by recounting some of the liveliest incidents from his short-story collection, Poona Company. When the festival organisers tried to wrench us off him, Farrukh waved them away with, “Oh, don’t bother me, I want to sit some more with these people who are from my city.” So: causes, check; indifference to others’ opinions, check. However, in the recounting of this book’s many anecdotes about well-known people — Kabir Bedi, Richard Attenborough, CLR James, Arundhati Roy, Jeffrey Archer, VS Naipaul, Subhash Ghai, Charles Sobhraj, Anand Patwardhan and others — while there is a relentless stripping away of vanity and a happy celebration of the ridiculous, there’s also an unswerving loyalty to friends.
Many of the stepping stones to his success arose simply from his being in the right place at the right time. A chance encounter connected him to a photographer,
Andrew Whittuck, through whom he received his first professional, post-Cambridge writing assignment, for a German news agency. One of these was an interview with a new pop group. Some of the sentences on the blurb on the back cover of Pink Floyd’s first album were, Farrukh says, quietly “borrowed” from what he had written. Later, when MacMillan published a collection of stories he had written for a propaganda sheet and made them available to the Englishspeaking world, it was because one of the editors had read the sheet and made the effort to track him down. And one day, while he was sleeping off the labours of a vegetable delivery vendor — which was how he made a living between writing gigs — came a call from a BBC producer, and an offer to write for television.
Besides his interesting life as a writer, teacher and activist in the UK, Fragments... provides takes on the Indian Independence struggle, Partition, the Indian National Army, and why Nehru’s economic policies were “definitely not Socialism”, before moving on to the Britain of the 1960s and the evolution of South Asians from a battered migrant community vulnerable to racial abuse from the police.
It’s not surprising that the framework of the revolutionary consciousness of the late 1960s, it was possible for him to become the father of five children over 12 years, some quite close in age, with three different women. And how is all this anyone else’s business? Never forget this is the same person who famously said, “I have no fear of vultures. I think we should eat them at Christmas or Parsi New Year and then they can eat us when we die and we get a merry circle.”