Free The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous by Khushwant Singh Page B

air force attachés with unconcealed contempt. His bete noire was Sudhir Ghosh, who was determined to run the public relations department as an independent establishment of his own.
    Sudhir regarded himself as Gandhi’s personal envoy to well-meaning Britons who had sided with the freedom movement. Most of them were Quakers. He entrusted them with official missions without consulting Menon. ‘Let Menon do his job and let him leave me alone to do mine,’ he often told me as he gloated over the photographs and letters on his table. ‘I have spent many years with Gandhiji. I have no hatred in my heart against anyone,’ he assured me over and over again. Then he resumed his tirade against Menon.
    Menon had an eye for good-looking women. He treated the husbands of good-looking women as friends. If he sensed tension between the couple, he became especially considerate towards them—he had great understanding for misunderstood wives. Sheila Lall and my wife (after the family joined me) fell in that category. Arthur and I became his number one and number two favourites. But topping us was young Kamla Jaspal, who had joined his clerical pool.
    Kamla was a Sikh—light-skinned, with curly black hair and a charming squint in one eye. She came to office dressed as if she were going to a cocktail party. She wore bright-coloured chiffon saris, with blouses that left most of her middle, including her belly button, exposed. She wore bracelets of silver, gold and glass; they covered most of her forearms and jingle-jangled whenever she brushed her untidy locks from across her face, which was often. Being scantily clad, she often caught colds and had a running nose. She dropped names of English poets, and she danced a few steps of Bharatanatyam badly; she also wrote bad prose and poetry. She was loud and aggressive in asserting herself. But she worshipped Krishna Menon as if he were an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Like a good Hindu wife she never referred to him by his name or as high commissioner but as HE—His Excellency. To Krishna Menon, who had been away from India for several decades, Kamla Jaspal represented modern Indian womanhood. He responded to her adoration with flowers and favours, including the use of his Rolls Royce to take her home. He was tiring of his ageing English mistress, Bridgette, who looked after the India League, and was on the lookout for a replacement. For a while Kamla courted Bridgette and soon discovered that she could oust her. In India House, everyone knew that in order to get on with Krishna Menon one had to get on with Kamla Jaspal. During that posting in London, I cultivated both Bridgette and Kamla.
    Menon had reason to trust me more than Sudhir Ghosh and decided to use me as an instrument to get rid of him. He did not have to wait long for the opportunity to do so. I first discovered how bad things were when I chanced to see a confidential letter Menon had written to Pandit Nehru. He described Ghosh as a ‘Patelite’. Evidently, Nehru’s relations with his deputy prime minister, Sardar Patel, were strained. He also argued that foreign publicity should be under the foreign minister (Nehru) and not under the home and information minister (Patel). Before Panditji could respond to this letter, the incident of the missing chit occurred, which proved Sudhir Ghosh’s undoing.
    One morning, Menon sent a note to Sudhir Ghosh on a scrap of paper in his own hand, asking him to send me up to see him as soon as I reached the office. Sudhir took no notice of it till a couple of hours later, when Kamla Jaspal came down to check whether or not I had arrived. I went to Sudhir’s office to find out what it was about. ‘Oh, yes, Menon wants to see you without me,’ he said, reading the chit. He crumpled it and threw it into his wastepaper basket. When I went to see Menon, he asked me why it had taken me two hours to come up. I told him I had known nothing about it till Kamla told me and I had then gone to