Harish Nambiar
“I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.”
Those are the words of Stephen Leacock, officially the world’s most popular English humourist between 1915 and 1925. Despite being forever known after his death as a humourist, of the 60-plus books he wrote, the one that made most money for him in his lifetime was his 1906 book Elements of Political Science.
I recall the irony of Leacock’s life because when Khushwant Singh died late last month, he concluded a lonely 14-year march beyond the only other Indian journalist who shared his presumable distaste of the insurance spiel and a worldview about India that was dry, wry and always, unfailingly sceptical.
Future in the Hands, Stars
Both the boisterous Sikh and the mousily wise Parsi that was Behram Contractor (whose death anniversary falls on April 9) believed, like Humphrey Bogart, their country was always three drinks behind.
Unless you’ve been to a good liberal arts, co-ed college, or attended intercollegiate festivals of the IITs in the sparse Indian urbania of the ’80s, you may not get this. The ’80s was the time when the most boastful non-readers of the world flaunted the only two books that they had read; Cheiro’s Palmistry for All and Linda Goodman’s Love Signs.
It was in those years I discovered, in a Bombay college, while chasing the finer points of the headline in the human palm, an exciting trivia in Cheiro’s treatise. The Irish palmist says that those whose headlines tend to be straight, as opposed to dipping or curving dangerously toward the bottom, a sign of insanity, are the ones who have a rational, steady and unemotional, and therefore, a more objective view of life. These straight headlines are rare, by the way.
That may not be very moving. But the line that has stuck in my head since was that some of the world’s most renowned humorists had a fairly straight headline. Mark Twain is among them, I recollect from a fast-depleting memory.
It was in the middle of such an education outside the syllabus that I lost my father in the summer of 1989, my second year in college. He was 52. After the doctor attempted to restart his heart in my presence, when my father’s lifeless body convulsed, and then went still, I realized that his vitality had been erased from earth.
I hesitated before I went to break the news to my mother, sitting worried and morose in the antechamber of my father’s hospital room. Instead, I asked the doctor if I could be alone for a while with my father’s body. What I did then was a little unorthodox. I opened his right palm to check his lifeline. It coursed past the bottom of his palm to practically invade his wrist, just as I seemed to remember. I had wanted to reconfirm this for the last time.
My father was promised a long life, by Cheiro’s Palmistry; he would live past 90. But, palmistry, like astrology, is one of the crutches that help a lot of people in nations like India, where people have moved from being nature worshippers to compulsive shoppers.
In the context of my personal experience and the rather ridiculous confrontation of my age-related literary fads, Susan Sontag clarifies far more pithily from the “post-religious” intellectual fervour of the ’60s and ’70s America.
Laugh Lines
“Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the “reality” of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.”
Therefore, Sontag concludes, that a large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.
Singh, across the country and Busybee, as Contractor was best known, in Bombay-until-it-became-Mumbai, kept alive this strain of healthy, optimistic but nonpartisan discourse in the media. In doing that, both did what Leacock, and all other good humourists do: they fought on both sides of a question. That is what good folks with a straight headline on their palms do.
And India misses, or should miss, these deadly men, who forever played the classical and archetypal wise fools to India’s teeming, unwashed masses who would anyway not read them because they wrote in English.
Singh was a strained writer of laugh-worthy pieces. Busybee, on the other hand, was an uncannily talented writer of comic prose. While Singh was always intimately involved with the historical and the cultural, if in an overly north Indian Sikh’s ebullient way, Busybee was the opposite. Busybee assessed India’s cultural complexity through a minute, observational study of Bombay’s maddening diversity of ethnicities, cuisines and the eccentricities of its denizens.