The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (11 page)

‘It is a passing phase,’ replied Golwalkar. ‘Agnosticism will overtake them; it will not overtake Hinduism. Ours is not a religion in the dictionary sense of the word; it is a dharma, a way of life. Hinduism will take agnosticism in its stride.’

I had taken more than half an hour of Golwalkar’s time by now. But he showed no sign of impatience. When I asked for leave, he again grasped my hands to prevent me from touching his feet.

As has become abundantly clear in the past decades, the RSS is blatantly and fiercely anti-Muslim and anti-Christian. It junks Jesus just as it rejects roza. Golwalkar even raised an objection when Abdul Hamid and the Keelor brothers were honoured by the Indian government for their bravery during the Indo-Pak war—the gallant men were non-Hindus.

I remember being impressed with Guru Golwalkar in 1972 because he did not try to persuade me to agree with his point of view. Instead, he made me feel that he was open to persuasion. I even accepted his invitation to visit him in Nagpur and see things for myself. I had thought then that I could perhaps bring him around to making Hindu-Muslim unity the main aim of his RSS. I had been a simple-minded Sardar.

In the study in my cottage in Kasauli, I have two pictures of people I admire the most—one of them is Mahatma Gandhi. I admire Bapu Gandhi more than any other man. Of all the other prophets of the past we have no knowledge. Almost everything about them is myth or miracle. With Gandhi, we know—he walked among us not long ago and there are many people alive, like me, who have seen him. He was always in the public eye. He bared himself; no one was more honest.

I don’t accept his foibles. He took a vow of celibacy in his prime, but without consulting his wife, which I think was grossly unfair. He would sleep naked beside young girls to test his brahmacharya. He could be very odd. But his insistence on truth at all times made him a Mahatma. And the principle of ahimsa—not to hurt anyone. Ahimsa and honesty should be the basis of all religion, of every life.

I have been a regular drinker all my adult life. I celebrate sex and cannot say that I have never lied. I have not hurt anyone physically, but I think I have caused hurt with my words and actions. And sometimes there is no forgiveness in me. But I consider myself a Gandhian. Whenever I feel unsure of anything, I try to imagine what Gandhi would have done, and that is what I do.

If only Mahatma Gandhi were alive today, the whole situation of the country would have been different. I don’t believe the likes of Anna Hazare can do a thing about corruption in India—his fasting is to no avail. Only Mahatma Gandhi would have been able to arouse mass consciousness to halt the tide of corruption and chaos spreading around us today.

I became a Gandhi bhakta at a young age. I first saw Bapu when I was six or seven years old, when I was studying at Modern School. He had come on a visit. All of us children—there were very few students in the school in those days—sat on the ground in the front row. Bapu bent down and tugged my uniform playfully.

‘Beta, yeh kapda kahan ka hai?’ he asked. Where is this cloth from?

‘Vilayati,’ I said with pride. It was from abroad.

He told me gently, ‘Yeh apne desh ka hota toh acchha hota, nahin?’ It would have been good had this been from our country, wouldn’t it?

Soon after, I started wearing khadi. My mother used to spin khaddar, so it was easy. I continued wearing khaddar for many years. Before I went to London to attend university, I took some khaddar to our tailor because I had been told I would need a proper English suit. The tailor laughed and told my father, who asked me to stop being a khotta.

Mahatma Gandhi was only the one person who seemed to comprehend the very seriousness of the Partition and all that would follow. He did not take part in any of the independence celebrations. When anti-Pakistan feelings were at a fever pitch and the Indian government refused to honour its pledge to pay Pakistan fifty-five crores, the Mahatma went on a fast and forced the government to abide by its word. He knew he was asking for trouble but did not give it a second thought. A calumny was spread about his having agreed to the Partition of India along communal lines. He told his secretary Pyarelal: ‘Today I find myself alone. Even the Sardar [Patel] and Jawaharlal Nehru think that my reading of the situation is wrong and peace is sure to return if the Partition is agreed upon… I shall perhaps not be alive to witness it, but should the evil I apprehend overtake India and her independence be imperilled, let it not be said that Gandhi was party to India’s vivisection.’

I was still in London when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948. I had taken leave to pack my belongings to proceed to Canada. We were invited to lunch by Sir Malcolm Darling, the retired income tax commissioner who lived in a basement flat near Victoria station. As we came out into the cold, windy day after lunch, I noted scribbled in hand on a placard by a newspaper stall the message: ‘Gandhi assassinated’. I did not believe it could be our Bapu. Who could kill a saintly man who had harmed no one? I asked the stall holder. He had tears in his eyes as he handed me a copy of
The Evening Standard
. ‘Yes, mate, some bloody villain’s got him,’ he said. Tears also welled up in my eyes. I was only able to read the headlines. Instead of going on to the shipping office to confirm our passage, we made our way to India House to be with our people. Oil lamps had been lit at the base of Gandhi’s portrait. The smell of aromatic incense pervaded the place. Men and women sat on the floor chanting Gandhi’s favourite hymns. ‘Vaishnav jan toh tainey kaheeye jo peed paraie jaane rey’—know him only as man of God who feels the suffering of others; and ‘Ishwar Allah terey naam, sab ko sanmati dey Bhagwan’—Ishwar and Allah are but names of the same God, may His blessings be on us.

Bapu was pretty certain that he would not be allowed to live. At a prayer meeting on 16 June 1947, he said, ‘I shall consider myself brave if I am killed and if I still pray to God for my assassin.’ As he had anticipated, the assassin finally got him the following year. He went with the name of Ram on his lips—a glorious end to a glorious life.

Whenever anyone asks me ‘Who influenced your way of thinking the most?’ I answer without hesitation: Manzur Qadir. Not many people in India would have heard the name of Manzur Qadir. Even in Pakistan, where he was born and is buried, most people will have heard of him as an eminent lawyer who was made foreign minister by President Ayub Khan and then chief justice of the Supreme Court. Only a small group of friends knew him as a human being. I was among that handful of people who had the privilege of being his close friends in the years we lived in Lahore.

Our friendship continued after the Partition too. Manzur took over my house and had all my books, furniture and even empty bottles of whisky sent to me. At considerable risk to his life, he dropped my Sikh servant across the border when inter-communal strife was at its worst. Since our children were about the same age and went to college in England at the same time, the close association between the families continued for many years.

Manzur was a short, bald, beady-eyed man. He was by no means handsome; and yet, men and women were drawn towards him like moths to a flame. Though he was an average student in school and college, within four years of starting practice in Lyallpur, he was acknowledged as the most up-and-coming lawyer in the Punjab. By the time he shifted to Lahore to practise at the high court, he was recognized as the best lawyer at the Bar. He was fluent in English as well as in Urdu. Though born a Punjabi, he avoided speaking the language. He had a passion for Urdu poetry and could reel off Iqbal by the hour. He also composed bawdy verse and recited it with great gusto to a purely male audience; he was extremely proper and prudish in the company of women.

What was great about Manzur Qadir? Two things. He never said a hurtful thing about anyone. And he never told a lie. Within a short span of people knowing him, he became a kind of touchstone to judge the rights and wrongs of every course of action. We would often ask ourselves: ‘Will Manzur approve of this?’ Such a combination of ability, integrity, consideration and kindness I have never found in any other human being.

Whenever I visit Lahore, one of my top priorities is to visit Manzur’s grave, stew rose petals on it, recite the Fatiha—he, like me, was an agnostic—and shed some tears.

It has been more than thirty years since I was asked to do a profile of Mother Teresa for the
New York Times
. I wrote to Mother Teresa seeking her permission to call on her. Having got it, I spent three days with her, from the early hours of the morning to late at night. Nothing in my journalistic career has remained as sharply etched in my memory as those three days with her in Calcutta.

Before I met her, I read Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on her,
Something Beautiful for God
. Malcolm was a recent convert to Catholicism and prone to believing in miracles. He had gone to make a film on Mother Teresa for the BBC. They first went to the Nirmal Hriday Home for dying destitutes close to the Kalighat temple. The team took some shots of the building from outside and of its sunlit courtyard. The camera crew was of the opinion that the interior was too dark and they had no lights that would help them take the shots they needed. However, since some footage was left over, they decided to use it for interior shots. When the film was developed later, the shots of the dormitories inside were found to be clearer and brighter than those taken in sunlight. The first thing I asked Mother Teresa was if this was true.

‘But of course,’ she replied. ‘Such things happen all the time.’ Then she added with greater intensity: ‘Every day, every hour, every single minute, God manifests Himself in some miracle.’

She narrated other miracles of the days when her organization was little known and always short of cash. ‘Money has never been much of a problem,’ she told me. ‘God gives through His people.’ She told me that when she started her first school in the slums, she had no more than five rupees with her. But as soon as people came to know what she was doing, they brought money and other things.

The first institution she took me to was Nirmal Hriday. It was in 1952 that the Calcutta Corporation had handed over the building to her. Orthodox Hindus were outraged. Four hundred Brahmin priests attached to the Kali temple gathered outside the building. ‘One day, I went out and spoke to them. “If you want to kill me, kill me. But do not disturb the inmates. Let them die in peace.” That silenced them. Then one of the priests staggered in. He was in an advanced stage of galloping phthisis. The nuns looked after him till he died.’ That changed the priests’ attitude towards Mother Teresa. Later, one day, another priest entered the home, prostrated himself at her feet and said, ‘For thirty years, I have served the Goddess Kali in her temple. Now the Goddess stands before me.’

On my way back, Mother Teresa dropped me at the Dum Dum Airport. As I was about to take leave of her, she said, ‘So?’ She wanted to know if I had anything else to ask her.

‘Tell me, how can you touch people with loathsome diseases like leprosy and gangrene? Aren’t you revolted by people filthy with dysentery and cholera vomit?’

‘I see Jesus in every human being,’ Mother Teresa replied. ‘I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus. This one has gangrene, dysentery or cholera. I must wash him and tend to him.’

I wrote a humble tribute to her for the
New York Times
and put her on the cover of
The Illustrated Weekly
. Till then, she was little known outside Calcutta; after that, more people got to know about her work. She sent me a short note of thanks, which I have in a silver frame in Kasauli. It is among my most valued possessions. It says: ‘I am told you do not believe in God. I send you God’s blessings.’

I have often thought about those three days I spent with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. We walked through crowded streets, rode in trams to visit her various hospitals, crèches for abandoned children and homes for the dying. I still remember how she tended to a very ill man who was dying. She was with him, looking after him, all the time telling him: ‘Bhogoban achhen’—God is there. The way in which Mother Teresa went about looking after and tending to the sick, the dying, the hungry—it was the same as Bhagat Puran Singh.

Some years later, during one of my trips to Calcutta, I requested Mother Teresa to meet me. But she declined, saying that she would not come to my hotel room. It was okay by me, because I respected her. I saw her last when she was in Delhi. She had come here when H.S. Sikand (of Sikand Motors) had gifted a van for her Missionaries of Charity, but this time she did not seem to recognize me. I smiled and greeted her; though she did smile back, she did so in the way you do when you don’t really recognize a person.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah knew my father. In fact, when the Partition was taking place, he had sent word to my father that I stay put there in Lahore and don’t shift, and he would appoint me a judge at the Lahore high court. He also attended my wedding reception.

To understand Jinnah’s role as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, a title conferred on him by Sarojini Naidu, one needs to know his background. He was born in Bombay in an Ismaili Khoja family, regarded by orthodox Muslims as ‘beliefless’. They were traders and merchants who had more dealings with Parsis and Hindus than with fellow Muslims. In 1897, he converted to the Shia faith. What the conversion entailed is not clear because he never conformed to any religious trends. In 1892, he proceeded to England to study law at Lincoln’s Inn. During the four years he was in England, he made it a point to go to the houses of Parliament to listen to debates. He was deeply impressed by the speeches made by Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian to be elected to the House of Commons, and John Morley. Both men were liberals. Jinnah accepted them as his role models and liberalism as his political creed. Back home in Bombay, he befriended Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Gokhale and Badruddin Tyabji. He was determined to pursue the careers of law and politics. He regarded both as gentlemanly professions. Although he married a Parsi girl, Ruttie, many years younger than him, his professional occupations left him little time to discharge his domestic obligations. He was also dour, unsmiling, tense and a chain-smoker. After some years, Ruttie left him with their daughter, Dina (the mother of Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing).