The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (6 page)

Rama took on the job of the manager of the health club at the Taj. She regained her youthful vitality and good looks. Since I went to the club every day for exercise and a sauna bath, I became very friendly with her. She even persuaded me to take facial massages, which I found deliciously sensuous. Rama had by then resumed some kind of undefined relationship with her first husband. Johar had a keen eye for publicity. Rama used to visit him once every week. When Johar discovered that she had befriended me, he asked her to bring me over to his apartment in Lotus Court. I was then editing
The Illustrated Weekly of India
. For many months, I was a weekly dinner guest at this set-up.

After my sauna bath, Rama and I would proceed to Lotus Court. Rama then rang up Johar, who was at the Cricket Club of India, playing bridge. She told him to bring some Chinese food from the club restaurant. I played with his miniature Penkingsee bitch named Pheeno, ‘the snub-nosed’. Snub-nosed she certainly was, and very cuddlesome. Rama would sometimes open the drawers of Johar’s bedside table (he always slept on the floor) and pull out stacks of pictures of young girls in bikinis—or less. They were of girls looking for jobs in films. Johar would arrive carrying cartons of Chinese dishes and get out a bottle of premium Scotch for me. Neither he nor Rama touched alcohol. I had my quota of three drinks before we ate dinner. Then Rama dropped me at my apartment and went home. I never got to know where she lived. All I was able to gather was that she had ditched her second husband, but I was not sure whether or not she had patched up with Johar. I often pulled her leg about being the only Indian woman I knew who could claim to have two husbands at one time.

Johar sent me the manuscript of his autobiography for serialization in
The Weekly
. It was difficult to tell how much of it was factual, how much the creation of his sick fantasies. In any case, there was more sex in it than was permissible for journals at the time. If Johar was to be believed, he started his sexcapades at the age of twelve. He was spending his vacation with his uncle and aunt who had no children of their own. One night, he had (or pretended to have) nightmares and started whimpering in his sleep. His aunt brought him to her bed. He snuggled into her bosom and soon had an erection. He tried to push it into her. She slapped him and told him to behave himself. The next morning, he was afraid he would be scolded and sent back home. However, his aunt was sweetness itself. After her husband had left for his office, she offered to bathe him. While she was soaping him, he again got sexually aroused. This time his aunt taught him what to do with it. It became his daily morning routine. Nevertheless, Johar confessed that in the years of his adolescence what he enjoyed most was being buggered by older boys.

The autobiography did not mention Rama. But in the years after their separation, he wrote of a starlet (who later became a star I won’t name) whom he set up in a flat in Malabar Hill. Whenever he felt like it, he would drop in on her, have a drink or two and then bed her. One evening, he was in a particularly horny mood. When he got to the lady’s flat, he was informed by her young Goan maidservant, ‘Memsahib baahar gaya.’ Madam has gone out.

‘Kab ayega?’ When will she return?

The maid replied: ‘Kya maloom? Bahut late hoga.’ Who knows? She will be very late.

So Johar simply pushed the girl on the bed and mounted her. The girl protested: ‘Memsahib ayega toh hum bolega.’ When Madam returns, I will tell her. At the same time, she opened her legs to her mistress’s paramour.

Even more bizarre was his story of how he bedded two sisters and their mother. One sister had been his mistress for some years before she left him to get married. She introduced her younger sister to Johar and asked him to help her get into films. He not only got her a few minor roles but also asked her to stay in his flat. One evening, she came back from the studios looking very tired. Johar asked her if she would like a hot cup of tea or something stronger to cheer her up. She replied, ‘If you really want to know what I would like best, I’d like a nice fuck.’ The girl left Johar to become a star. Her mother wrote to Johar to thank him for what he had done for her daughters and asked him if she could stay with him for a couple of days when visiting Bombay. One night, she came to his bed, stark naked. ‘I did not want to hurt the old lady’s feelings,’ wrote Johar, and ‘obliged her the same way I had obliged her daughters.’

How could I have published these memoirs without inviting the wrath of the proprietors of the journal on my head?

Johar accused me of cowardice; I accused him of making up stories. The less work he got, the more stories he made up.

One day, he rang up and asked me to come to his flat with a cameraman. ‘I’m getting engaged to be married later,’ he told me.

‘To whom?’ I asked.

‘To Protima Bedi,’ he replied.

Protima had two grown-up children by Kabir Bedi. She had not yet made a name as an Odissi dancer, but had gained wide publicity by streaking on Juhu beach. The pictures of her running across the sands without a stitch on had appeared in many papers. She had a most fetching figure. Johar was at least thirty years older than her, a grandfather in daily communication with his ex-wife, Rama. However, I went along with my photographer.

There were dozens of photographers and press people present. Johar was dressed in a beige silk kurta-pyjama, with his hair freshly dyed jet-black. Protima was decked up in a bridal sari, with a lot of gold jewellery on her. With one eye, you could see that this was a publicity lark for both of them. The next morning’s papers had them on their front pages.

They were back in the news. No marriage followed. Johar talked no more about Protima Bedi.

I had a farewell dinner of sorts before I left Bombay for good. It was like old times. Rama, Pheeno and me, with Johar joining us later with Chinese food. By now, Pheeno had taken to snuggling in my lap and grunting with contentment. ‘She seems to be fonder of you than me,’ remarked Johar. ‘Would you like to take her?’ I agreed to accept Pheeno. I would take her with me to Delhi to my family, every one of whom was passionately fond of animals. ‘It is like having to give my daughter away. I can’t do it,’ Johar said by way of explanation. I understood his feelings.

I continued to communicate with Rama long after Johar went out of my life. All said and done, I was fonder of her than her ex-husband. However, I felt a pang of anguish when I read of Johar’s death in Bombay. And I wondered what became of Pheeno.

In 2009, the twenty-fifth death anniversary of Indira Gandhi occasioned a flood of literature and huge media coverage across the country. That was as it should have been because she was, in fact, the Queen Empress of India for long years and changed the face of the country by ruthless plastic surgery. She made the Congress subservient to her wishes, nationalized banks, deprived princely families of their unearned privy purses, inflicted a humiliating defeat on Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh. Dev Kant Baruah was not much off the mark when he hailed her thus: ‘India is Indira, Indira is India. Tere naam ki jai! Tere kaam ki jai!’ However, it must not be forgotten that there were two distinct sides to her character—the public persona, and the private. She was a great public leader, but at the same time she was very petty in her private life. She was undoubtedly a most beautiful woman, but she disliked other good-looking women and humiliated them, among whom were Tarakeshwari Sinha and Maharani Gayatri Devi. And the number of people she and her family put behind bars during the Emergency makes one sick. But she was able to get away with what she did because India’s poor millions loved her as ‘Amma’—Mother.

I first met her when she was still unmarried and had stopped in Lahore on her way to Kashmir. I must have been about eighteen years old then. Indira was staying with friends who brought her over to our house. She appeared very shy and would not talk much. I remember thinking of her as a ‘goongi gudiya’—a mute doll. Years later, when I met her in Delhi, she did not seem to recollect that meeting, though I have pictures of her at our house.

Indira Gandhi was a very good-looking woman—not the pin-up kind but an indescribable aristocratic type. She reminded me of Hilaire Belloc’s lines:

Her face was like the King’s command

When all the swords are drawn

I have been asked if I ever wanted to get close to her in the physical sense; the answer is no. There was something cold and haughty about her. Not my type at all, for I like women who are vivacious and spontaneous. But she had her set of admirers. Amongst the many men who were bowled over by her looks was President Lyndon Johnson of the United States. Just before a dinner hosted by the Indian ambassador B.K. Nehru and his wife for Indira, at which Vice President Hubert Humphrey was to be the guest of honour, Lyndon Johnson stayed on tossing glass after glass of bourbon on the rocks while talking to Indira. He readily agreed to stay on for dinner, to which he had not been invited. At a reception at the White House, Lyndon Johnson asked her to dance with him; she refused on the grounds that it would hurt her image in India. The president understood. He wanted to see ‘no harm [come] to the girl’ and sanctioned three million tons of wheat and nine million dollars of aid to India.

The only person on record who made derogatory references to Indira’s looks and intelligence was her aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Indira never forgave her (or her daughters) for slighting her and denied her senior diplomatic assignments. Indira Gandhi never forgave anyone who said anything against her.

Indira Gandhi’s greatest triumph was the way she handled the Bangladesh crisis, wherein all her skills came together. She made a complete fool of the Pakistanis. India was being flooded by refugees entering the country. She tried to garner international support and went around the world, telling people what was happening. When she realized that the crisis had to reach a climax, she proved very astute. It was perhaps on her advice that the Indian Army built up the Mukti Bahini. By the time that President General Yahya Khan realized what was happening and declared war, the Indian Army was well inside Bangladesh. In less than a fortnight, the Pakistani Army surrendered. It was, by all accounts, a masterful strategy, and Indira Gandhi very deservedly got the Bharat Ratna.

At the end of the crisis,
The Illustrated Weekly
was the only Indian journal to persist in pressuring the government to release the 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war. I took a delegation of four members, including one-time Indian ambassador to the US Gaganbhai Mehta and the writers Khwaja Ahmed Abbas and Krishan Chandra, to call on Indira Gandhi in an attempt to facilitate the release of the prisoners. Mrs Gandhi snubbed Gaganbhai, calling him an American stooge, and silenced Abbas and Chandra. Then she turned on me and said that my writings were embarrassing her. I replied that the object of my exercise was indeed to embarrass her and I was glad to know that I was succeeding. She fixed me with a look of contempt and said, ‘Mr Singh, you may regard yourself as a great editor. But let me tell you, you do not know the first thing about politics.’ I said, ‘Mrs Gandhi, what is morally wrong can never be politically right. Holding prisoners of war after the war is over is morally wrong.’ She again turned her large, dark eyes on me. ‘Thanks for lecturing me on morality,’ she said and dismissed us. I was convinced that she would never speak to me again. But a few days later, when she was in Bombay, she sought me out at a large and crowded reception and chatted with me in a friendly manner. I knew then that I had driven my point home.

In 1975, with accusations of corruption in the government soaring and the opposition calling for total revolution, the country was fast sliding into chaos. Every other day, there was a bandh of some kind. Schools and colleges stayed shut for days. Large processions marched through streets, smashing shop windows and wrecking cars. Indira Gandhi was driven to despair. Her position became further vulnerable when the Allahabad high court held her guilty of electoral malpractices and disqualified her from Parliament membership. Persuaded by advisors such as Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Sanjay Gandhi, she imposed Emergency on the country. My attitude to the Emergency was ambivalent. I supported the move to clamp down on law-breakers (including Jayaprakash Narayan, whom I otherwise admired), but I felt that the censorship of the press would prove counter-productive as it would deprive editors like me, who supported Mrs Gandhi, of credibility. For three weeks, I did not publish
The Illustrated Weekly
and, when forced to resume publication, gave instructions that no photographs of Mrs Gandhi or her ministers were to be used. I was treated gently, as I was regarded as a friend by Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay, and summoned to Delhi to meet her. I had my say, protesting against the censorship, and told her before leaving, ‘My family is sure that if I spoke my mind you would have me locked up.’ She smiled and bade me goodbye.
The Weekly
was treated as a special case and I published articles by critics of the Emergency and pleaded for the release of political prisoners.

There was, as I have said, a strong streak of vengefulness in Indira Gandhi. A lot of people who were jailed during the Emergency were victims of the spite of the Gandhis. Despite repeated requests and pleas for the release of such prisoners, Mrs Gandhi refused to relent—including in the case of Bhim Sain Sachar, ex-chief minister of Punjab, then in his seventies. One thing that Indira Gandhi did not suffer from was compassion. Her pettiness was particularly evident in her dealings with her younger daughter-in-law, Maneka. After Sanjay—whom Mrs Gandhi both loved and feared—died, she made Maneka unwelcome in her home and showed a marked preference for Sonia.

Another characteristic she developed after years of being in power was to snub people who least expected to be. At my repeated requests, she agreed to see Kewal Singh, who had been her foreign secretary and ambassador in Washington. Then she proceeded to give him a dressing down till he broke down. She did the same to Jagat Mehta, whose posting as ambassador to Germany she cancelled after it had been accepted.