Over the years I have collected far too many books. My shelves contain such titles as The Uses and Indications of Bowel Nosodes, Spores of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the currently useful Morphology of Koine Greek as Used in the Apocalypse of St. John and Colonel Kesri Singh’s Hints on Tiger Shooting for which, unaccountably, I have never found the slightest use.
Our house is full of books spilling off shelves, piled on floors and tables, stacked against walls, despite which Vickie and I returned in March from our long trip to India (four literary festivals and a month in Goa) laden with more volumes, among them Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti’s investigation of the Maoist revolution that is convulsing much of India in an undeclared and untalked-about war, Pradip Krishen’s Trees of Delhi and City of Falling Angels by John Berendt, who gave us his own copy since, owing a publisher’s bungle, none of his books were available at the Jaipur Festival.
One of the great pleasures of our trip was to catch up with a lot of old friends, some of whom I had not seen since 1965, the year I left Mayo College.
In Jaipur, the Mayo old boys organised an evening at the home of Prithvi Singh of Kanota, now the Narain Niwas heritage hotel. About thirty of us sat on carved sofas and armchairs bearing the armorials of the East India Company, surrounded by cases of Ming porcelain, Rajput swords and firearms, while two of Prithvi’s great-uncles stared severely down at us from elaborately carved gilt frames.
The first of these gentlemen was Amar Singh, Thakur of Kanota, whose literary outpourings dwarf even the prodigious output of US naive painter Henry Darger (author of The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, at 15,145 pages the world’s longest and probably most tedious novel). Between 1898 and 1942, Amar Singh kept a diary, meticulously recording every tiny detail of his day. By the time he died he had filled 89 folio volumes, a total of 71,200 pages. His cookery diaries alone occupy several metres of shelf-space in the family home.
The other great-uncle was, I discovered to my delight, none other than Colonel Kesri Singh, author of Hints on Tiger Shooting and, it turned out, also an old boy of Mayo College.
Among the living Mayonians present was Rajendra Shekhar, former director of the CBI, India’s equivalent of the FBI, who has written a poignant and entertaining memoir of his life.
Defining Moments is a collection of stories that trace Shekhar’s journey from schoolboy to India’s top policeman and into retirement.
A well-read and cultured man, Shekhar quotes Gore Vidal on the art of the memoir, and begins his story with a reference to Professor Thomas Schelling, who won a 2005 Nobel Prize for ‘game-theory analysis,’ (the manuscripts that eventually won him his prize having originally been typed out by the woman on the Charing Cross Road who did all of Agatha Christie’s books and plays.)
Schelling claimed that his theories could be used for almost all social purposes, including ‘to discipline a child’. Shekhar contrasts this to the style of his earliest teacher, Mr Mansukha, ‘a whimsical sadist’ who treated his pupils ‘as punchbags he could knock about whatever-which-way.’ Mansukha had various imaginative uses for the short ruler, the pencil (insert between third and fourth finger and pull hard on digits) and the foot-rule. In vain did the young lad complain to his father, who merely held up his own calloused knuckles.
Mr Shekhar senior, Babuji to his family, was Huzoor Sectretary to the Maharaja of Bharatpur. The title was invented for him by His Highness to indicate superiority to a mere private secretary. The Huzoor Secretary was obliged to accompany the Maharaja on all important occasions. ‘Thus he was a non-performing spectator at shikar outings (shoots), he was the lone teetotaller at cocktail parties, and he was the sole vegetarian at the ruler’s preponderantly meaty dining table.’
It was a tiger shoot in the Baretha forest that finally freed young Rajendra from the sadistic Mansukha. A line of beaters had driven a tiger towards HH, who prided himself on being a crack shot. But this time his bullet found the tiger’s haunch instead of its heart and the beast turned and mauled the head-beater, who died on the spot. Overcome with remorse, the Maharaja gave his servant a state funeral and himself laid a wreath on the body. At the suggestion of his Huzoor Secretary, he took the man’s son under his care and decided to give him the best education India could then offer. He would send him to Mayo College.
‘How about your son?’ he asked Mr Shekhar, who protested that he could not afford the fees. The Maharaja promptly gave him a pay rise, and thus young Rajendra found himself delivered from the clutches of Mr Mansukha and on his way to Mayo.
Mayo College had been founded in 1875 by Viceroy Lord Mayo to devote itself ‘exclusively to the education of sons of the Chiefs, Princes and leading Thakurs of Rajputana.’ No expense was spared in its creation. The main building was constructed of white marble in the peculiar style known as Indo-Saracenic. It took seven years to finish, complete with an 108 foot clock tower surmounted by an onion dome. The school grounds extended to 430 acres and included a polo field. The first pupil, Maharaja Mangal Singh of Alwar, arrived in October 1875 on an elephant accompanied by 300 retainers and a menagerie of tigers, camels and horses. Eighty-five years later, when I arrived with my father in a horse-drawn tonga hired at the railway station, the school was no longer the exclusive preserve of the Rajput aristocracy. Rajendra Shekhar, who got there in 1942, eighteen years ahead of me, was the last commoner to be admitted under the sponsorship of a prince.
‘As it was as good as a back-door entry it was justifiably frowned upon by the scions of the landed gentry who unwittingly flaunted their pedigrees by suffixing land title to first name . . . Nahar Deogarh, Raghuraj Badnore, Gansyham Rawatsar, Ajai Kunadi, Wazir Tonk et al. Since I had no landed property to suffix my name with, initially I felt like a raw, deprived kid on being simply called Shekhar. In time though, the holders of these very names, and some of the et als too became my long lasting friends.’
His school memories are nostalgic and affectionate, with fond portraits of friends like George Muzzaffarabad and Masoom Ali, the Nawab of Tonk, who later fell on hard times. Like all school memoirs, it has tales of pranks, being caught smoking and the like, and for me was especially interesting because many of the masters mentioned were still at the school in my day.
When I was at Mayo College, in the first half of the 1960s, it was dominated by its eccentric and brilliant English principal, Jack Gibson. 2008 is the centenary of his birth and such was the loyalty he inspired that a book has been brought out in his memory by those he taught more than forty years ago. Like every one of my contemporaries, I was and remain devoted to our old teacher. An episode I had completely forgotten is quoted by Anvar Alikhan in his homage to ‘Gibby’:
‘When the Beatles first emerged, Flash Anand and Ips Sinha formed a rock band and got themselves into the Prize Giving entertainment programme to sing A Hard Day’s Night. Gibby found out at the last moment and threw a fit. He later relented, but only on one condition: that he would personally rewrite the words of the song. And so, on the night, the band dispiritedly sang:
“It’s been a hard day’s night
And I’m looki-i-ing such a fright
In my long pointed shoes
And ti-i-ight fitting trews
But you can see from my hair
That I sure ain’t square.…”
‘As the song ended, they were to bow low to the audience and their too-tight drainpipe trousers were to rip loudly from behind. Flash and gang may not have been amused, but the audience certainly was.’
Boarding school life changes little in its essentials from one generation to the next. Sudeep Chakravarti, whom I have already mentioned as the author of Red Sun, was at Mayo College in the 1970s and his first novel Tin Fish was an account of life at the school during the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi and her urine-drinking successor Morarji Desai. The slang is different, the obsessions much the same. Evidently the book is a little too raw for today’s powers-that-be at Mayo College, for Sudeep tells me that they have banned it. Of course this will merely ensure that every pupil who has not already read it will now be sure to do so.
During our visit to Mayo in January I gave a talk to the students. The principal asked if I would mind not reading from Animal’s People. ‘They are so young.’ he said, obviously terrified that I would unleash Animal’s foul tongue on innocent minds. So I told the assembled youngsters that they would have to wait until they were twenty-one.
‘Oh but we have already read it,’ chorused several voices. ‘There are three copies in the school library.’
Now this is meant to be a review of Defining Moments, but ‘the Eton of India’ has stolen the show, as indeed it does in Rajendra Shekhar’s memoir, which devotes a third of its pages to Mayo College and carries a picture of the main building on the cover.
The cover also features Mr Shekhar’s service decorations and rest of the book consists of anecdotes drawn from his career as a police officer interwoven with charming accounts of his courtship and family life.
He writes a genial and witty prose. His story of how a wrestling match between two men of different religions blew up into a communal riot is chilling, given that much of India is currently in the hands of rabble-rousing politicians with blood on their hands. But there are lighter moments, as when he unmasks a holy man whose speciality is being buried alive and emerging three days later to be showered with gifts of cash and food by credulous villagers. A midnight raid on a hut sited a short distance from the ‘grave’ discovers the holy man within smoking a chillum of hashish while an assistant counts up the takings. A tunnel, of course, links hut to grave.
Later, as Director of the CBI, Shekhar would come up against characters far more dangerous. He has a real talent for storytelling, bringing to life characters like the jovial terrorist Jinda, and for gripping narrative, as when the assassins of an army general are caught because they jotted a car registration number in a Ken Follett novel. A memoir by a top policeman is always news, and Shekhar could have written about many media-tantalising incidents like his investigation of the Bofors scandal, but he has preferred to pass over these in silence.
His friends, as well as the rajas, nawabs and thakurs of his youth, have included prime ministers and other well-known names, but unlike Gore Vidal whose memoirs are littered with sentences like “Last time I saw W H Auden…” and “As Carlos Fuentes once told me…”, Rajendra Shekhar likes to introduce us to small people of whom we have never heard, but whose acquaintance we are pleased to make.
From the small boy brutalised by a village schoolmaster to the nation’s top policeman is a long journey. Odd to think that it might never have been made had the Maharaja of Bharatpur paid better attention to Hints on Tiger Shooting.
