The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (9 page)

Menon was slim, middle-sized and dark, with sharp features and bright, shining eyes. He had a broad forehead, his curly black hair greying at the temples, a large nose and high cheekbones. Women found him handsome. He was very tense; his face was never at rest and twitched with animation. He was always very well-dressed, in suits made by a well-known firm of tailors; he could not bear others being badly dressed. Once he cancelled his morning appointments, took me to his tailor, chose the material and had me measured for two suits. I thought he meant to gift them to me and thanked him profusely. They were not gifts; I had to shell out several hundred pounds. But they were the best suits I had and lasted me over twenty years. Menon was not generous with his money, except when it came to his lady friends and children; even then, it was seldom more than bouquets of roses for the one, cheap plastic toys for the other.

Menon lived frugally in a room alongside his office. He ate very little but filled himself with cups of sugared tea and salted biscuits. However, he did not mind blowing up large sums of money buying a Rolls Royce for the high commissioner (that is to say, himself) and a fleet of Austin Princesses for the use of Indian visitors and India House officials. With his limited requirements, he had no need to accumulate wealth; nevertheless, he did so. He didn’t spend a penny of his salary but set up many sub-organizations of his India League and got money from rich Indians and his English friends as donations to those organizations; in return, he gave them contracts for the supply of arms to India. He had no scruples in business matters. He was also a congenital liar and regarded truth as good enough for the simple-minded and lying as the best exercise for the mind.

Menon’s first reaction to any proposal put to him was to reject it. Those who got to know him better learnt to put their proposals in the negative and invariably got his approval by his rejection of them. He built up a reputation of being a workaholic. He kept long hours, which he wasted on trivialities such as checking the menus of the canteen and the consumption of petrol by the office cars. He forced me to sleep in the office on many nights. There was never enough work to justify imposing this discomfort on me. He knew that I was very keen on games and looked forward to Saturday afternoons, when I played tennis or hockey. Without fail, he would ring me up before lunch on Saturdays and ask me to attend some meeting he was holding in the afternoon. He had a strong streak of sadism.

Menon’s bad temper and discourtesy had to be experienced to be believed. As with many men, he was at his worst in the mornings, before his gastric juices started flowing. I saw him hurling a file in the face of Jagannath Khosla and yelling: ‘Have you any brains in your head? Get out!’ Then he put his head between his hands to cool off and asked me, ‘I shouldn’t have spoken to him like that, should I have?’ I conceded he had been a little rough with a senior officer. He summoned Khosla back and apologized. Khosla replied, ‘Sir, it is a privilege to be ticked off by you.’ One morning, when Menon failed to get a long-distance call, he screamed at the operator. The plucky English girl shouted back: ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I am quitting. You can keep your bloody job.’ Menon ran down the stairs, put his arms around the angry girl and apologized. Once I brought David Astor, the owner-proprietor of
The Observer
, and his aide William Clarke to meet Menon. He called the English a race of brigands. On the way down, in the elevator, David remarked to me: ‘You must have quite a job doing public relations for Menon!’ His deputy, Ashok Chanda, knowing Menon’s predilection for denying anything he said if he later found it embarrassing, insisted that he put all his orders in writing. He often breezed into my office and triumphantly announced: ‘Hum shala ko phaeel mein aisa mara! Bhoolega nahin’—I gave the fellow whose sister I fuck such a hiding in the file, he’ll never forget it. Sir Dhiren Mitra, our legal advisor, never lost his cool; he continued placidly puffing his pipe and dismissed Menon with: ‘Paagal hai’—he is mad.

Those who silently suffered Menon’s tantrums were handsomely rewarded. Of them the most dramatic was the instance of Brigadier Harnarain Singh and his wife, Rani. Menon took an instant dislike to the brigadier. The latter described himself as the chief of Moron, a small zamindari near Phillaur in the Punjab. Menon always addressed him as the ‘chief of the morons’. The brigadier did not know what the English word meant and would protest in his nasal whine: ‘Sir, who cares for such titles these days!’ His wife also liked to be treated as an aristocrat. She was the daughter of Sardar Sohan Singh, a wealthy landowner of Rawalpindi; her name, Rani, confirmed her aristocratic assumptions. Menon got to know that she had been spreading scandal about his affair with Kamla Jaspal. He summoned her to the office, roundly ticked her off and called her a bitch. A very tearful Rani craved forgiveness. Thereafter, the couple assiduously courted Kamla Jaspal and became Menon’s favourites. Another two senior officers who were treated like scum but accepted their treatment without protest were Captain Srinivasan and D.N. Chatterjee. Srinivasan, a married man with children, impregnated his attractive English stenographer. It was after Menon had extracted many pounds of flesh off the hapless naval captain that he allowed him to divorce his Indian wife, marry the vastly pregnant English girl—and retain his job. Chatterjee had divorced his Bengali wife (one of Lord Sinha’s progeny) and wanted to marry a Belgian heiress. By the rules of the Foreign Service, he was required to submit his resignation before his application could be considered. Chatterjee had to suffer months of humiliation before Menon forwarded his application with the recommendation that it be accepted. Chatterjee retired as an ambassador.

Merit did not matter very much to Menon; unquestioned loyalty did. He persuaded the prime minister to constitute a panel to interview applicants living in England for the Foreign Service. He got Harold Laski appointed chairman with him and someone else to constitute it. The panel selected P.N. Haksar (the only one who merited selection), Jagannath Khosla, Kamla Jaspal and Rukmini Menon (a clerk and the sister of a junior officer in the military attaché’s department). Later, Menon also managed to get Keki Darashah and Prithi Singh, who had an English wife, in the subordinate Foreign Service. He held out similar promises to me; he would have me elected to Parliament and perhaps made a minister in the government. But my days as a Menon favourite were fast drawing to a close.

Menon was never rude to me. For many months, I enjoyed special favours and my colleagues who wanted things done by him used me as their via media. I travelled with him to distant towns in England where he was invited to speak. Kamla Jaspal briefed me on his personal requirements. Amongst items I had to carry were bottles of lemonade: he drank a glass for his nightcap. Though his English was heavily Malayali-accented, Menon was a witty speaker. He was full of acid wit and sarcasm against the English and people who could not retaliate. At his first meeting with senior army, navy and air force officers training in England, he addressed them as ‘Macaulay’s children’. He did not enjoy other speakers scoring over him and could be quite childish in the ways in which he got the better of them. Once, speaking at the Convention of Master Cutlers at Leeds, he was at his acid best and extracted much laughter from his audience—the English enjoy laughing at themselves. Unfortunately for Menon, the chief host who rose to propose the vote of thanks turned out to be a better orator than Menon; his jokes and anecdotes got even louder applause. I saw Menon beckon a waiter and ask for another cup of tea. As the speaker was building up to a climax, Menon raised his cup with a shaking hand. Just as the speaker was about to deliver his punch line, Menon dropped the cup from his hand and spilt tea all over the table. The punch line remained undelivered and the banquet came to an abrupt end.

My most memorable venture with Menon was a visit to Dublin, where we were to open an embassy—Ireland’s first full diplomatic mission. Menon decided to take his defence attachés and their wives with him. I was included in the party and asked to bring my wife along. Our party was received at Dublin airport with a guard of honour and we were put up in Dublin’s swankiest hotel. The next morning, Menon was to present his credentials to the Irish president.

My phone rang early in the morning. It was a very sick-sounding Menon asking me to come to his room at once. I found him groaning in bed.

‘I am very sick,’ Menon moaned. ‘Cancel all the day’s engagements.’

I was aghast. ‘Sir, they must have made a lot of preparations. Let me get the hotel doctor and see what he had to say.’

‘Can’t you see I am a sick man?’ he growled.

I got the hotel doctor. He could not diagnose anything wrong with Menon except that he might be suffering from exhaustion. Menon was inconsolable. ‘Get the chief of protocol on the line.’ While I was trying to get the right number, we heard the stamp of marching feet come to a halt beneath our window. ‘What is that?’ asked Menon. I looked out. ‘Soldiers drawing up. I expect they are to escort you to the Presidential Palace.’ Menon began to feel better. He went to the bathroom to shave and brush his teeth. When he came out, we heard the sounds of a military band down the road and coming to a halt outside the hotel. Menon had a quick look from his window. He got into a black sherwani and churidar and told me, ‘Sardar, go and get dressed. We don’t have much time.’ Menon was now in great form. We were taken in a convoy led by a band and a troop of soldiers. Curious Dubliners lined the roads and Menon waved to them. The credentials were presented and accepted.

President Douglas invited Menon to his home for a cup of tea in the afternoon and Menon asked me and my wife to accompany him. We were led to a book-lined study with a peat fire smouldering in the grate. The president made polite enquiries about India; Menon launched into a long harangue about India’s mineral and hydro-electric resources, its industries and agricultural potential. The president listened in silence. At the end of his long monologue, Menon asked the president how Ireland was faring. ‘Nothing much worth the talking,’ drawled President Douglas. ‘We don’t have much to export, except invisible items like poets, novelists and dramatists.’

That evening, we held a reception for the Irish president, prime minister and leaders of the Irish opposition. Amongst those who turned up was Eamon De Valera. Following classical music, as we were being shown to our box, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that Ireland’s first foreign ambassador had arrived. The audience rose to applaud him. A beam of light searched the crowded hall to pick up Menon. Instead of him, it focused on me—with my turban and beard, I looked more authentically India than anyone else in our party. I tried to dodge the beam by going to the back row, but the beam pursued me. Menon enjoyed my discomfiture and kept pushing me to the front. No one was able to acknowledge the applause of the audience.

Nothing specific happened to sour my relations with Menon. Of the two women he was close to, over time I became friendlier with Bridgette, who was very distressed by Menon’s infatuation with Kamla Jaspal. She regarded Kamla as a designing seductress who had brought Menon a bad name. I made the mistake of saying this to Menon; he snubbed me and told me to mind my own business. Then some comment on Kashmir appeared in
The Manchester Guardian
. Menon and Haksar drafted the reply; it was sent to me for my signature as the press attaché. I could have drafted a similar reply—and perhaps have phrased it better—but I was not even consulted. The correspondence continued in the paper. In all, I signed three letters I had not written. I felt slighted and let my hurt be known to everyone in the office. Then, instead of talking to me directly, Menon began to convey his orders through Kamla Jaspal. I told her not to bring messages to me as I was always available to the high commissioner on the phone. Menon accused me of being rude to Kamla; his infatuation at the time was at its peak.

The time had come to bid a final farewell to India House. When I went to say goodbye to Jamal Kidwai, who had taken my place, he told me that Menon wanted to give a farewell reception for me. I told him flatly that I wanted no reception and did not wish to see Menon. He pleaded with me and said that he would give the reception and Menon would come only for a few moments. I knew Menon would do nothing of the sort, but agreed to go to Kidwai’s party. Reluctantly, I also went to see Menon. He was courteous and said that despite our misunderstanding he regarded me as a friend. ‘You don’t have any friends,’ I told him bluntly as I left. As I had anticipated, Menon did not turn up at the farewell reception. Kidwai apologized on his behalf to say that Menon was unwell and confined to his bed. But I saw him go briskly down the steps and get into his Rolls Royce—lying was Menon’s second nature and came as easily to him as discourtesy.

Why Menon got where he did under the patronage of Pandit Nehru remains, and probably will remain, unexplained. Panditji had him elected to Parliament and sent him to the United Nations to lead the Indian delegation. His marathon thirteen-hour speech on Kashmir won India a unanimous vote against it. He was then made defence minister against the wishes of almost all the members of the Cabinet. He wrecked army discipline by promoting favourites over the heads of senior officers. He was vindictive against those who stood up to him. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the humiliating defeat of our army at the hands of the Chinese in 1962. And yet, Pandit Nehru stuck by him to the last.

The last time I spoke to Menon was on the telephone. I happened to be in London working at the India Office Library. I was sharing a flat with Sheila Lall and we had a common telephone. Every night, she would be out with one of her many lovers. The telephone would ring, but when I would pick up and say ‘hello’ the line would go dead. I complained to Sheila. ‘That must be Krishna,’ she told me. ‘He wants me to be his mistress—no strings attached.’ The next time the telephone rang, instead of saying the customary ‘hello’ I spat out with venom: ‘You bloody bastard, I know who you are! Stop ringing up at this hour or you will hear worse.’ There were no calls after that.