Four Encounters

It happened during one of our lazy afternoonconversations in September 2005. Before disengaging for a 30-minute siesta, mysenior colleague Krishna Prasad slipped a phone number into my hand and said:"Why don't you interview Sham Lal?" This was for the mediasection of the 10th anniversary special issue of the magazine. By then, we hadlisted tall names like Harold Evans, the legendary former editor of the SundayTimes, and David Remnick, the editor of New Yorker, as people to beinterviewed. The editorial logic working in Krishna's mind seemed to be that weneeded to match some equally big Indian names to balance the section and whoelse could we think of other than stalwarts like the benign Sham Lal and the malicious Sardar,both in their 90s, but not frail in their minds.

Krishna gave me no time to think: "Why don't you dial the numbernow?" I tried to build an excuse: "He is an old man, could be resting.Let's do it around 5. I am also not sure if he would want to speak to us. He isvery shy and haven't seen him write or give an interview anywhererecently." The excuse didn't seem to convince Krishna and he persisted. SoI picked up the phone and dialled. To my utter surprise, Sham Lal himselfanswered the phone and asked if I would want to meet him the same evening at5.30 p.m at his Gulmohar Park residence. With some hesitation, I asked if hecould give me time the next day. He gladly agreed and before putting the phonedown asked me to spell my first name. "A Buddhist name," he murmuredand hung up. I felt like an autograph-seeking school boy.

My hesitation, first to seek the interview and then to seek a postponement,had many reasons. Quite legitimate for a journalist of my generation. Sham Lalwas from another generation and by the time I was born he was in his final yearsas an editor and by the time I began my career he had almost stopped writing.There was a deep disconnect, not with the ideas but the manner in which thoseideas were presented. The labyrinth luxury of the word had been replaced by whatSham Lal himself called the "ersatz cheer" of the proliferating andquickly changing television images. The paper that he edited had abandonedslowness and had tried to reinvent itself as a quickie product. In the processit had chopped off the books page, something that gave Sham Lal his identity andintellectual laurels. And Sham Lal's modesty, perhaps, had not allowed him tocollect his articles into a book till about 2001, when he was on the thresholdof his 90th year. So as a student of literature and the media, we had heard ofSham Lal, but read very little of what he had written.

In fact, when we began in journalism, there was nobody at all in thenewsrooms who could recall inspiring or even quirky stories of legendaryeditors. When I joined Deccan Herald, it took me a couple of years toknow anything beyond Pothan Joseph's name, although his portrait hung in thenewsroom wall and was religiously cleaned and garlanded during the dasaraseason. I had to wait until I discovered a biography written by T.J.S George ina second-hand bookstall to know a little more about the great newspaper's firsteditor. So if I were to interview Sham Lal, I did not know where to begin, howto engage and continue. There was this mortal fear of being dismissed as ashallow upstart, a description so often given to those of my generation.

When I sought postponement of the interview by a day, the idea was to quicklyrevisit A Hundred Encounters and Indian Realities - In Bits and Pieces.These two bulky tomes had adorned my shelves and on an occasion or two I hadeven quoted from them, but had not had the patience to dedicatedly unearth theirdepth and vistas. In fact, I used the two books more as reference volumes. Ifyou were reading or re-reading an author, you quickly wanted to see what ShamLal had written about any of the author's books and use that to form your ownopinion. The two books never came across as an integral whole, they had too widean assortment of ideas and disciplines to be able to connect with them from pageto page and hence I never felt that I knew the two books. Claiming to know thetwo books was like claiming to know the dictionary. So 24 hours was a decenttime to revisit the tomes, build some talking points and questions.

That night when I flipped through the pages, I saw howthe high and mighty in the world of ideas and politics had been made into mincemeat in the books. I vividly remember reading the acidic remarks on Marxisthistorian D D Kosambi's book - Introduction to the Study of History:

"We need not dilate too long on the slant or the bias in Kosambi's judgments. All that he wants to tell us is that all we have is the earth. The sky is there, but its deep blue is a fiction... Those who look for the heartbeats of an age not in its wage bills and sale deed but in its art and religion may at times get impatient with Kosambi...Those who look for poetry in history itself will search in vain."

On Indira Gandhi and the Emergency he said: "There was an all tooobvious note of psychosis in what she did." On a book of translation ofSanksrit plays he had these devastating lines: "While Coulson may not haveturned Kalidasa or Bhavabhuti into minor English poets, he has with the bestwill in the world, made them into rather indifferent playwrights." On Henry Miller's Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, there wasplain contempt:

"Apparently, the cat in the fable who went on a pilgrimage after devouring nine hundred mice was no figment of imagination. Miller is only an improvement on that feline creature. He has had enough of taking women to bed in all kinds of seedy places, got bored with lacing his talk with four-letter words, and wants to stone for his past. He prays now not only for his own salvation but also for the redemption of the dead souls in the young bodies he once abused recklessly."

The confidence I was desperately seeking for the next day's interview was notto be had from these passages. So I held on to some calmer ones, where he wrotewith sadness and love. In an obituary for Boris Pasternak, he held back histears:

"The last torment of the flesh was, however, nothing compared to theearlier travail of the spirit. Before he went to coma his mind was at peace. Hehad borne in silence for so long like a tumour in the brain. It was a peacefulend."

On Cesare Pavese's This Business of Living, he wrote:

"His journal moves us not because it gives final answers to thequestions that trouble our sleep but because it tells us that no one else cananswer these for us. There are no proxies in the business of living."

And in a farewell to Hemingway:

"All that he could do was snatch what little happiness he could from shooting ducks, watching bullfights, fishing for marlin and hunting for big game."

There was nothing positively uplifting the spirit that I could find from myrandom reading selections from the two volumes. They either intimidated me ormade me sad.

At the appointed minute, the next day, I opened theorange coloured gate and went past the portico to reach the calling bell. Thedoor opened without me having to ring the bell, it appeared that there wasinformation with the help that I would be spending time with the owner of thehouse. With a familiar nod, I was straight led to a dimly lit room where the manwas reclining, supported more by the whitewashed wall than the pillow. There wasthe BBC Radio playing on his Worldspace, at a very low volume, and there was nosound of anybody else in the house. The book spines in the room were theintercepting halo and he looked like a columnist-philosopher. I was seeing ShamLal for the first time (I had not even seen a photograph) and did not expect hisbody to have shrunk so much. I was truly taken aback. The sparrow-likeappearance made me wonder if this was the man who had intimidated me theprevious night with such sharp prose. I wondered if this was the man who hadlived the lore of having read every important book ever published in the world.He looked like carrying the burden of all the knowledge he had acquired over thedecades.

He shook hands, held them for an extra ten seconds, made me feel comfortablewith an unsure smile and in a voice that had drowned asked like an elder where Istudied, what my parents were and where all I had worked before landing at Outlook.That was the human bonding happening beyond books and abstract ideas. Then camehis apologies: "I am very old. My eyesight and hearing is very poor. I havenot been able to read anything in the last couple of years. You have to be slowwhen you ask your questions and repeat them the second time so that I am sure ofwhat I am hearing. You then transcribe the answers and read it out to me and Iwill make corrections." I shook my head in agreement and repeated itverbally with an "okay".

"Are your questions ready?" He asked "Yes sir. Can I read outthe first one?" "Read all of them at one go. I will remember to answerthem in the same order. Are your recording? Take this pillow and keep therecorder on it so that it can catch my feeble voice."

So I read out the questions and he began to answer. When he began to answer,I realised that the conversation between us had ended. He had transportedhimself mentally into the writing mode. He was writing sentences in his mind.Reading it out to me. Going back and rephrasing it. Again going back andchanging a word. He dictated even the punctuations. "That will be arhetorical question, not an interrogative one," he would say without atrace of arrogance. "Did you put a comma there, insert a semi-colon insteadof a conjunction," he would softly interrupt his answers. I did not want toremind him that I was not writing down but recording. At points he would gentlysay: "Let us phrase the question this way." But this marvelouscommunion went on for nearly two hours.

After he had methodically answered all my questions. I asked him if I couldtranscribe them and show it to him before sending them to print. He seemed tohave changed his mind and that gave me a collapsing feeling inside. "What Ihave said today as answers need some more thought. I would suggest that you comeagain at the same time tomorrow and I will be in a better position to give youthe right answers. These are important issues and we should not do a shoddyjob." I simply said "okay" and left.

Again at the appointed hour the next day for the secondencounter. He asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. Then, he quoted from aBuddhist work, which had a reference to my name and went straight to the job ofanswering my questions. There was no need for me to prompt the questions. Theanswers simply flowed one after the other. Punctuations all in place again. Hestopped only twice to say that he had dropped two questions because the answersfor them had been covered in the previous questions. I again felt like a schoolboy attending tutorials where the teacher was dictating notes. As we drew to aclose, I started getting anxious that he may want to revise his answers again.But luckily he asked as to when the transcription would be ready. I took a day'stime.

So the third encounter was with a printed transcript. I thought he would befinicky, but he cleared it without major changes and said that he would havedone a better job had he been able to write the answers himself. Out of fear ofmore changes, I acted deaf and diverted the topic to his friendship with OctavioPaz. In a halting 15-20 minutes he described his association with the Nobellaureate. He also spoke fondly of Stephen Spender, his little magazine Encounter,and Neruda. He asked if I read literature in my mother tongue. He said A. K.Ramanujan always met him whenever he came to Delhi. "What do you think ofhis writing in Kannada?" He asked. Happy that he was finally making someconversation I rattled off my opinion. Then, finally I asked him if he wouldallow himself to be photographed. I thought he would deny permission. But heasked: "When would you want to do that?" I attributed it to theRamanujan-charm and said: "Same time tomorrow?" He agreed and lookedhappy and relieved that the interview was over. He even made an effort to cometo the door.

The man's humility had a deep effect on me. He had not shown an ounce ofcondescension in all our three meetings. He looked a little lonely but the manalso seemed to be genuinely seeking anonymity and creative solitude. Soessential for writers to remain writers. I wondered how he had quite simplycalled himself 'Adib,' for decades. It was a disyllabic noun with no frills andno ostentation. I walked a small distance in a mild trance before hailing for ataxi. I went back and re-read his essay "Remembering Paz" and wasstupefied that he had not spoken about the man to me, but in those 15-20 minuteshad quite literally read out the pages of the essay from memory!

I looked forward to the next day's meeting, which was to be our final andfourth encounter. I had told my photo editor-friend T. Narayan to be ready agood thirty minutes in advance. On our way to Gulmohar Park, Narayan asked mequestions in order to be able to plan his frames. I simply kept saying he isvery old and we shouldn't trouble him too much. At his place, what I had notdone in my previous three encounters, Narayan did with absolute ease—he movedin and out of the corner room looking for a location to shoot. He finallydecided to do it in the living room with an endless rack of books as thebackground. Sham Lal moved slowly to the place with help. To avoid reflection,Narayan asked if the veteran editor would take off his glasses, Sham Lal refusedand I was immensely happy at the refusal. One location, a few shots, and hesimply moved out of the frame.

I was not being made to feel like a school-boy anymore, but I had the intensedesire to be one. So I took out A Hundred Encounters for an autograph."I would love to autograph. But I cannot even see the page," Sham Lalsaid. I offered to help and as I guided the direction of the pen he wroteillegibly: "For Sugata/with regards/Sham Lal."

The three lines formed an arrow in the direction of the sky.