The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (3 page)

The last time I met Bhagatji was a few weeks after Operation Blue Star, which had taken a heavy toll of lives and caused extensive damage to sacred property. My reaction was immediate. Within twenty-four hours of the army assault on the Golden Temple, I had returned my Padma Bhushan to President Giani Zail Singh as a mark of protest. Bhagatji asked me if he should do the same with the Padma Shri he had been awarded in 1979; a week later, he relinquished the honour bestowed on him.

When Bhagatji died, I paid a tearful tribute to him in my columns. A few years later, I persuaded my brothers and sister to make a substantial donation on behalf of the Sir Shobha Singh Charitable Trust to the Pingalwara. It was graciously accepted by Dr Inderjit Kaur, who had taken over its management. Some months later, Dr Manmohan Singh, then minister of finance, accompanied our family to Amritsar to inaugurate a new block for patients in the Pingalwara.

It was impossible to meet Bhagatji and not feel inspired to contribute towards his mission in some manner, however modest—and his legacy of dedicated service to suffering humanity must be kept alive for generations to come. In living memory, Punjab has not produced as great a man as Bhagat Puran Singh.

During the years I spent at Government College, Lahore, in the early 1930s, I got to know a lot of people who later made it to the top—or near the top—in the film industry. Two years senior to me was Balraj Sahni; his younger brother Bhisham, B.R. Chopra and Chetan Anand were in the same class as me. Of them, closest to me was Chetan, who was quite a character.

Chetan was a pretty boy with curly hair and soulful eyes. He was much sought after by tough lads who fancied effeminate males; Chetan avoided them like the plague and attached himself to me. We walked from our hostel to the college together, sat side by side in our classes, played tennis and went to the pictures. Although tongues wagged, there was nothing homosexual about our relationship. Like me, Chetan too aspired to get into the ICS and came to England to sit for the exams. Neither of us made the grade. I returned to Lahore with a law degree; he had no more than the BA he had taken from Punjab University. Desperately looking for a job, Chetan spent a summer at my apartment. It was then that I saw another side to him.

Women found Chetan very attractive, and he had a unique method of ingratiating himself with them. On the hottest days in June, he would go out wearing his overcoat; with a stubble on his chin and a single flower in his hand, he would call on his lady friends. Inevitably, the dialogue would open with the young lady asking him why he was wearing an overcoat. ‘This is all I possess in the world,’ Chetan would reply as he presented her with the flower. He had phenomenal success with this approach.

In due course, Chetan succeeded in winning the heart of the most sought-after girl at the university, Uma Chatterji—though she was a Christian, she defied her parents and agreed to marry a Hindu boy who had no job. I threw a large party to celebrate their engagement, and discovered the fickleness in Chetan’s character: he flirted outrageously with all the other girls at the party! The next morning, when I reprimanded him and called him a ‘haraami’, he smiled disarmingly and brushed away my protests. Chetan and Uma were married and had two children. But Uma could not take his philandering after a point and left him; she later married the producer and arts collector Ebrahim Alkazi. Chetan, in the meantime, shacked up with a Sikh girl young enough to be his daughter.

Chetan and I kept in touch over the years. I wrote to him about his films (he only made one good one), and he produced the son-et-lumière programmes at the Red Fort in Delhi, based on a script written by me. I heard from others that he had claimed to have written the text as well, but when I questioned him he denied ever having made such a claim. Later, of course, there were others who made similar claims.

When I moved to Bombay to take up the editorship of
The Illustrated Weekly of India
in the late 1960s, I was eager to renew my acquaintance with friends from my Lahore days, who had by now become big names in the film world. Most of all, I was looking forward to reconnecting with Chetan, since he had enjoyed my hospitality on innumerable occasions and had been one of my closest friends. I spent many weekends at Balraj Sahni’s villa in Juhu; B.R. Chopra asked me to his home a couple of times, as did Kamini Kaushal; once a week, I dined with I.S. Johar and his ex-wife, Rama Bans; even Dev Anand invited me to his large cocktail parties. But Chetan Anand, whom I had expected to see more than anyone else, remained mysteriously unwelcoming. He only rang me up a few times, when he wanted publicity for something he was doing. Usually, he ended the dialogue with a vague ‘Kabhi humare ghar aana.’ I was very disappointed and angry.

A few months before I was due to leave Bombay, I ran into Chetan and his lady friend at a party. ‘Why haven’t you come to our home?’ she asked.

I exploded: ‘Because I have never been asked by that kameena friend of yours!’

People can be divided into givers and takers, suckers and spongers—Chetan Anand was the biggest taker and sponger I have met in my life.

I first met Dhirendra Brahmachari when he had recently installed himself in Delhi as teacher of ‘hatha yoga’ and was eager to cultivate people in high positions. A senior official from the ministry of education (he was seeking a grant from the ministry for his ashram) brought him to my apartment, and he instructed me on the appropriate asanas for the imaginary ailments from which I have always suffered.

I was very taken with Dhirendra Brahmachari’s unusually handsome appearance: tall, ramrod–straight, with the cleanest and clearest eyes I had ever seen. His gossamer-thin dhoti worn on the coldest day of the year could not fail to impress anyone about his physical fitness—he was the living example of what he taught and practised. He had more charisma than any other yogi, sadhu or swami I had met.

We struck up a passing acquaintance and I met him on several occasions. He even sent me the manuscript of his book
Yogasanas
for corrections. I spent a New Year’s morning at his ashram to interview him and his patients for an article for the
New York Times
. By then, he had become a prosperous and powerful man. Despite being a semi-literate yoga instructor from Bihar, Dhirendra Brahmachari had managed to acquire considerable influence with Indira Gandhi and was one of her advisors and confidantes on domestic affairs. He had his own aircraft, imported cars, a herd of Jersey cows, a gun factory and other real estate. He was even cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case.

To be fair to him, though, Dhirendra Brahmachari did not exploit his chelas, only the people who exploited him to forward their own interests. However, it was clear as daylight that he had his feet in two different boats, the spiritual and the material, and would inevitably come to grief. I believe that it was this ambivalence in his character—the desire to get the best of both the worlds—that roused people’s ire and jealousy. They rejoiced when he was taken off television and chortled with pleasure when they read of the seizure of his gun factory. Many of us felt that his fortune was undeserved.

My
New York Times
piece on sadhus was a rather critical one. Soon after it was published, Dhirendra Brahmachari called me and said, ‘Aapne kuchh aisa likha hai, ki chott lagai hai’—you have written something that has hurt me. But I did not give a damn, for his stuff was all humbug.

Dom Moraes’s interest in poetry was born very early in his life. In his preface to a collection of his poems, he wrote, ‘I was about ten years old when I started to read poetry… I had an instinctive feel, even at that age, for the shape and texture of words.’ By the time he was fourteen, Dom—Domsky to his friends—had begun to write poetry himself, and he learnt French in order to be able to read Villon in the original. Poetry became a lifelong passion and he continued to write till the end of his life.

Dom was my friend from his years at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a complex character who disliked everything about India, particularly Indians—the only exceptions he made were the good-looking women he took to bed. Although he was born in Bombay and dark as a Goan, Dom considered himself English, spoke no Indian language and wished to be buried in the churchyard of Odcombe, a tiny village in Somerset. Never a practising Christian, he selected Odcombe because one Thomas Coryate, who hailed from the village, had travelled all the way from England to India in the seventeenth century and died in Surat, where he is buried—and Dom went to Odcombe with Sarayu Srivatsa, his companion during the last decade and a half of his life, to collect material on Coryate’s background for his biography. Despite his distaste for India, however, Dom’s descriptions of the Indian countryside—of the heat and dust storms of summer, of the monsoons—were lyrically beautiful. His characters too came alive in his writing; notwithstanding his ignorance of the Indian languages, Dom was able to comprehend what people said in their dialects and in Indian-English.

Like his father, Frank Moraes, Dom was a heavy drinker. Because of his love for the bottle, Dom could not be depended on for meeting deadlines or sticking to the subject he was commissioned to write on. Ram Nath Goenka of
The Indian Express
sacked Dom for spending his time in a Calcutta hotel, drinking and consorting with a lady, instead of going on his assignment to the Northeast. His friend R.V. Pandit fired him for drinking in his office in Hong Kong.
The Times of India
appointed him editor of a magazine they intended to bring out, but they fired him before the first issue came out; Dom vented his anger on poor Prem Shankar Jha, who was appointed in his stead, by grabbing his tie and demanding: ‘Fatty boy! What do you know about journalism?’

I had got Dom an assignment from the Dempos, shipping magnates and mine-owners of Goa; Dom produced a very readable book on Goa without mentioning the Dempos—I had to add four pages on the family. He was commissioned by the Madhya Pradesh tourism department to do a book on the state’s historical sites; he did a creditable job of describing the beauty of the landscape and the state’s full-bosomed tribal women, without bothering about historical sites. Dom never allowed facts or truths to stand in the way of his writing. He did not write reference books; instead, he painted pictures in vivid colours to the songs of flutes.

Dom is said to have married thrice. When he was married to the actress Leela Naidu, I stayed with them in Hong Kong; they, in turn, visited me several times in Delhi. At the best of times, Dom spoke in a low mumble, hard to understand—when I had asked Indira Gandhi, whom he interviewed many times to write her biography, if she understood what he said, she had beamed and replied, ‘No, Leela Naidu translated for me.’ Dom’s second wife, Judy, bore him a son, although I don’t think Dom paid for his education; neither am I sure if he had church or civil weddings and court divorces. In any event, he certainly did not pay any alimony to his former wives—he never earned enough to do so.

Dom was not choosy about his women: if any of them were willing, he was always ready to oblige. The only real love of his life, I think, was Sarayu, a Tamilian Brahmin married to a Punjabi and the mother of two children.

Sarayu was instrumental in Dom’s overcoming of the writers’ block that plagued him for seventeen long years, from 1965 to 1982. In partnership with her, Dom wrote
Out of God’s Oven
, perhaps the most fascinating example of his condemnation of all things Indian that he hated. Between them, Dom and Sarayu traversed the length and breadth of India, interviewing poets, writers, editors, film producers, Naxalites, Ranbir Sena leaders, dacoits and politicians—and Dom decried the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, the Hindu Vishwa Parishad, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, exposing their vandalism, their penchant for violence and their pathological hatred of Muslims.

While his prose was limpid and lyrical, Dom’s verse was not easy to read. His words had resonance, but one had to read every line two or three times before one could comprehend its meaning—people brought up on simple rhyming verse such as ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ would likely find Dom’s poems difficult. One could, however, detect a few themes that recurred consistently in his poems: he was obsessed with death; the hawk was the symbol of doom; his mother’s insanity haunted him all his life; and he sought escape in hard liquor and making love. He summed it up in ‘A Letter’:

My father hugging me so hard it hurt,

My mother mad, and time we went away.

We travelled, and I looked for love too young.

More travel, and I looked for lust instead.

I was not ruled by wanting: I was young,

And poems grew like maggots in my head.

With Sarayu’s arrival, Dom turned to writing about love. In poetry he said of her:

Fourteen years, the same mixture

As when first I met her:

… Her breasts always ready:

Mindmarks and handmarks on each other:

I study the landscape of her body

As architect, husband, and brother.

... We have been more than married. It was meant.

We’ve lived in each other. It was meant to be.

When Dom was stricken with cancer, he refused to undergo chemotherapy. It was as if he almost wallowed in the prospect of an early end, with the ghost of his insane mother hovering over him.

From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy,

glare down like a gargoyle at your only son.

… That I’m terminally ill hasn’t been much help.

There is no reason left for anything to exist.

Goodbye now. Don’t try to meddle with this.

Dom Moraes died in his sleep on the evening of Wednesday, 2 June 2004, and was buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery in Bombay. He was only sixty-eight. With him died the best of Indian poets of the English language, and the greatest writer of felicitous prose.