NEW DELHI — This book, he insists, will be his last. It’s a novel about two old men, written by a 96-year-old who says he can’t have much time left.
So after this one, the man who has been a force in India’s literary world for more than 60 years, a famously grumpy writer known for everything from beautifully wrought novels to fart jokes, vows to go silent.
Khushwant Singh says it is time to try something different.
“I have to teach myself to do nothing,” he says. “In the last phase of a man’s life, according to the Hindu tradition, you’re meant to be a forest dweller.”
Then Singh, sitting beside a fire on a cold night in a colonial-era apartment building built by his father and named for his grandfather, began to laugh. It was a gravelly, heartfelt laugh; the laugh of a man who enjoys life.
Because he knows he can’t really go silent, let alone retreat into the forest. Old age is slowing him down, he acknowledges, with its medicines and hearing aids and constant doctors.
But there will still be his newspaper columns and the occasional interview. He knows there will still be a constant stream of visitors who dare to face his apartment door despite the sign beside it warning: “Please do not ring the bell unless you are expected.”
“I am trying hardest to see no one because I find it tiresome,” he said. “I have people descending on me and flattering me. I fall for flattery.”
They come because Khushwant Singh has been a loud and public presence in India for decades, coming onto the scene just after India got independence from Britain in 1947. A lawyer turned diplomat turned writer, Singh ran one of India’s great magazines, wrote one of its great 20th-century novels and has opined about everything from masturbation to government incompetence.
“With Malice Toward one and All,” his column is called, and along the way he has denounced: right-wing politicians, left-wing politicians, the supreme court, corrupt businessmen, corrupt politicians and corrupt businessmen-politicians. He has ridiculed actresses and publishers.
And in a country where kissing is rare in Bollywood movies, he has been talking openly about sexuality for decades.
His books, particularly his later ones, are full of lengthy, graphic sexual descriptions, and his greatest regret is that he didn’t sleep with enough women.
“It’s considered bad form to write about these things,” he said. “But I’ve never bothered about such things.
“I’ve been called a dirty old man, and it doesn’t bother me one bit,” he said.
Riding on the edge
In 1956, Khushwant Singh’s now-classic “Train to Pakistan” was released. It is a novel about the horrors of partition, when colonial India was carved into modern India and Pakistan and about 1 million people died amid the chaos. He has written more than 30 books and penned many newspaper columns. Photo: Manish Swarup, The Associated Press
