Khushwant Singh’s final journey was by train, to Pakistan. He did not require any documents to cross the border. Ashes do not need visas.

He was cremated in New Delhi on 20 March.  A portion of his ashes were interred under his favourite tree in the garden behind his flat at Sujan Singh Park. Some will be taken to his home in hilly Kasauli. The remainder was given to me by his daughter Mala for interment in the village of Hadali (now Distt. Khushab, Pakistan), where he was born ninety-nine years ago.  

There is no direct train link anymore between New Delhi to Lahore. I caught the Shatabdi Express that took me to Amritsar. It is a six hour journey, time enough to refresh my familiarity with Khushwant’s works. These included his autobiography Truth, love and a little malice (written prematurely at the age of 87), his evocative translation of The Japji and the Rehras – the morning and evening prayers of the Sikhs (published last year), and Death at my doorstep - a cemetery full of the obituaries he had written of people he had known but not always liked or admired. He dismissed Lord Mountbatten as ‘Lord of Baloney’, back-handed Sanjay Gandhi as the ‘Young Dictator’, lauded his mentor Manzur Qadir as ‘The Role Model’, and described movingly Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s final days ‘From the Death Sentence to the Gallows’.

To travel from New Delhi to Lahore now, one has to go to Amritsar, change to the Samjhota or Friendship Express for the Wagah/Attari border, change trains again there, and then complete the journey to Lahore in a Pakistani train. The goodwill in the train’s title evaporates over the short 42 kilometre distance between Amritsar and Lahore. 

I took the less troublesome route and walked across the border at Attari/Wagah. No officials on either side of the divisive white line seemed interested in the contents of the stainless steel urn I carried. Whatever attention Khushwant did receive was to be at his birth village of Hadali, some 250 kilometres northwest of Lahore.

There, he is still a household world in a community consisting entirely of Muslims. Hadali, in Khushwant Singh’s days a ‘tiny hamlet with less than 300 families’, is now a congested compression of almost 50,000 persons.

Its most prominent building would appear to be its Government Boys’ School. Its spacious dusty grounds were overrun by six hundred boys in identical uniforms but (like some detergent advertisement) with differing shades of cleanliness. The main hall is, according to the bearded headmaster, still as Khushwant left it as a young pupil in 1920. Khushwant Singh visited it sixty years later. He remembered the high roof supported by sagging timbers, the chapel-shaped classrooms on either side, and the rugged plaster. It was too much for him. He recalled afterwards: ‘Overcome by emotion, I broke down.’

Could there have been a better location for the marble memorial plaque I had brought with me?  A niche was gouged quickly out of the external wall of the school hall and the marble slab grouted in it. The inscription on it read: ‘In memory of Sardar Khushwant Singh/ A Sikh, a scholar and a son of Hadali (Punjab).’      

After the mason had applied the finishing touches to the cement surround, smoothing the edges with his fingers, I read the opening lines from Khushwant Singh’s translation of the Japji: ‘There is one God. He is the Supreme Truth. He the Creator, is without fear and without hate.’ I ended with the Shloka or Epilogue, one line of which seemed particularly poignant: ‘The toils have ended of those that have worshipped Thee.’

While I was reciting these verses, I knew that Khushwant would not have minded being exposed as an arm-chair agnostic. Which truly believing agnostic would have laboured as he did to translate the Sacred Writings of the Sikhs?

Which agnostic would have straddled the spiritual divide and translated with such understanding Allama Iqbal’s epic remonstrance Shikwa as well as God’s riposte Jawab-e-Shikwa?      

Which self-respecting agnostic would have, in the final year of his long life of disbelief, translated the Japji and the Rehras with such undeniable feeling and sensitivity?

Khushwant Singh did not need to make peace with his Maker with such gestures of conciliation, no more than he needed to be viewed as a literary enfant terrible by his peers. Khushwant Singh had outgrown his contemporaries. He had overwhelmed them with his expansive humanity.

If there was anything he did not outgrow it was his enduring loyalty to Hadali. It was of this cradle, this crucible of his life that he wrote: ‘This is where my roots are. I have nourished them with tears of nostalgia.’

And those are the closing lines you can read on his memorial plaque at Hadali.   

(C) F.S.AIJAZUDDIN.

DAWN, 24.4.14