Farewell, Happy Time Lion

Fearlessly honest, brash, sexist, joker... Khushwant Singh was someone we'd all love to hate

I am not quite sure if you're going to get the moniker you see in the headline right at first shot, when you translate it into Hindi. I did, but that was simply because I knew that the contents of the joke book I was reading had been compiled by one of India's most celebrated, albeit controversial journalists, someone who doubled up as a humorist and a story-teller par excellence. The indefatigable Khushwant Singh who, till his mid or late eighties, was still swimming, playing tennis and drinking whisky, and whose last written work was published at the age of 98.

Happy Time Lion was the name a village bumpkin gave the man those of us who grew up on a diet of The  Illustrated Weekly of India and With Malice towards One and All, loved to hate. Fearlessly honest to the point of being brash, unafraid of using expletives and refreshingly sexist (pardon me, but I quite liked his brand) that he was, you could love him for his forthrightness, or hate him for his controversial views. But you could never ever ignore him. I remember how much the late Bal Thackeray despised him for using the B-word to describe Shivaji Maharaj.

My own two encounters with the man, if you want to call them that, were very brief and long distance. The first involved my father-in-law, who had compiled handwritten poems in English that took up almost all the sheets of a 200-page notebook. He also had a bunch of Urdu verses scribbled on loose sheets of paper that he had carefully preserved in an old wooden trunk. It was during Kishen Prasad Taunk's last days that one of my wife's relatives decided to send photocopies of some of his poems to Khushwant Singh to review. My father-in-law, who died at age 88 in the year 2001, had expressed a desire to see his work in print before he left.

When they sent the parcel to KS in Delhi, I thought it was just a waste of time and money. Why would someone so well-known as Khushwant Singh even bother about a non-entity former railway employee like my father-in-law? I was proved wrong. Khushwant Singh did respond, and in his own handwriting -- no typewritten text, no computer printout. And you could tell that he had indeed gone through the work intently as he made specific references to poems that he particularly liked. Was it because Kishen and Khushwant were both alumni of St Stephen's College? I will never know. What I do know, however, is that he made it a point to remind my father-in-law in the letter that he wrote to him, of the common bond they shared.

The other 'encounter', if you will, is more recent. A two-page note Happy Time Lion wrote on maintaining good health and living a long life had gone viral on the net and was passed on to me by more sources than one. The tenets of good health that KS was expounding sounded quite simple, but were quite difficult to follow in practical life. How long, for instance, can you survive on food that isn't cooked in a drop of oil? And switching off at 9:30 pm latest? KS wouldn't entertain anybody beyond that 'unearthly' hour, not even his daughter. But for others, this harbours on the unthinkable, unless you've made it your mission to acquire a pink slip. Normally, that's the kind of gyan that would end up in anybody else's recycle bin, but since I do have a health issue, I have tried switching off at 10:30 instead of an hour earlier, and I bung in some extra salt (rock, not the refined variety) to add some taste to the oil-free vegetables that make up my diet. And it has worked. I'm not saying everything is hunky-dory with me, but I'm certainly better off than I was two years ago.

Anyway, fast-forward to March 20, 2014. I learn, with some trace of regret, that the old lion has quietly given us the slip, just 11 months short of his 100th birthday. Accolades and obituaries will be written, some quarters will even slam him for his excesses. But that's okay. I know the old lion, he'll take it all in his stride wherever he is. Might even let out a chuckle, you never know.

I must have last read 'With malice towards...' more than a decade ago. Now, suddenly I'm begining to miss it.