Finally death stepped across his doorstep

 I had reviewed his book for a publication long back. I am posting it here with some lines added at the end. An apt obituary? I don't know. Khushwant Singh's personality had so many layers and his writings such a wide range of hues that no obituary could be comprehensive or completely apt.

Death at my doorstep by Khushwant Singh

Roli Books, N. Delhi. Pages: xxii + 170. Price: Rs. 295/-.

Way back in 1960s, as the then popular Illustrated Weekly’s editor, he became the iconic sardar-in-the-electric-bulb when self-caricaturing was not really in fashion. He can laugh at himself and also lampoon others’ foibles. However, Khushwant Singh is quite capable of writing sensitive prose too.

This collection of articles and obits that had appeared in his syndicated columns over the years shows him in a different light. Here he strives to unravel the perennial mystery of death. The obituaries to people he loved, hated, respected or despised cover a whole gamut of emotions. He can be sentimental without being maudlin, and witty without being crude. There is certain attraction even in so-called malicious pieces.

This collection is divided in two parts. The first part dwells largely upon the nature of death and possibility of life thereafter. The second part is larger and has obituaries written by him to such wide range of creatures as his dog, his mali, his mother and various people from high society. He sets the tone of the book in the preface itself by including a rib-tickling obituary to himself, which he’d written as a young man, wherein he discovers that he is not held by his friends and society in the same esteem he thinks he deserves. The only time sex appears in his writings is in his write-up on Amrita Shergill, and that too in a lighthearted manner.

At the end of the volume is a dirge-cum-epitaph to the grand old man of Indian literature.

Today, he is no more. He died of heart attack on 20 March 2014. He has left behind, along with a rich corpus of his eclectic writings, something that is unique and typically Khushwant Singh, viz., irreverence and the ability to laugh at oneself – he singlehandedly developed and popularized Sardarji jokes as a distinct genre. He was that rarest of rare litterateurs who willfully allowed his image as serious scholar be overshadowed by that of a lighthearted raconteur who naughtily mixed ribaldry, gossip and imagination to serve juicy pieces in his columns. Through his writings, he managed to rile his coreligionists with the same aplomb as he needled his friends and foes alike. In fact he had perfected the art of shocking his readers so well that people felt impelled to read his columns as well as his books. They were drawn towards him as addicts to the purveyor of narcotics. Love him or hate him, you just couldn’t ignore him. 

He may never be rated as the greatest writer of India, but certainly the most read.