By Jug Suraiya

Rs 495

Jug Suraiya is an exile many times over. He lives in Gurgaon but his heart is in Calcutta, the city he once called home but a city that has since disappeared. It’s been replaced by something called Kolkata, which one suspects has neither time nor space for the memories and the intellectual zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s that Suraiya describes in this breezy, enjoyable book.

If Suraiya is a geographical exile, he is also perhaps in an intellectual and professional limbo. What was once plain old journalism is today a monster called the media. Suraiya does not understand this animal. As he confesses, he doesn’t watch television. The few appearances he has made on the small screen have left him looking distinctly uncomfortable.
What Suraiya does understand is the English language, abstract thinking and narrative journalism. In the best traditions of journalism, Suraiya is a gifted and witty storyteller, one who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He began his career at a time when the newsrooms and editorial pages of India’s national newspapers still represented a clubby English-Speaking Union, when editors had a sense of fun or at least an affectation of idiosyncrasy and had not evolved into fungible “manditors” — to use a ghastly portmanteau expression (manager + editor) that Suraiya helpfully informs us is the brainchild of his longstanding employers.
Yet all of that is getting ahead of the story. Suraiya has served up a memoir that is funny, nostalgic, bittersweet and thoughtful, with all four sentiments sometimes appearing on the same page. Many (if not all) of the pieces have been published before, in one or the other of Suraiya’s voluminous newspaper writings. Even so, they have been welded together appropriately, with a racy chronology and delightful anecdotes.
Suraiya is today something of an elder statesman in Times House, home of the Times of India. It is both fitting and ironic that he started out at the Junior Statesman, drifting into journalism simply because he didn’t know what to do. Edited by Desmond Doig, whose sketches were as famous as his words, JS, as the weekly quickly began to be known, more or less invented modern features journalism in India. It was the first publication to actively reach out to young, Westernised Indians.
The biggest surprise about JS was its parentage. Brought out by the owners of the venerable Statesman — which at the height of the Kargil War of 1999 carried a learned edit page article on the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta — JS, writes Suraiya, represented a “by-blow… (the Statesman) did not like”. It was fated to have a short life and was eventually killed off by C.R. Irani, Statesman’s managing director and later editor-in-chief.
Not surprisingly, JS reflects the happiest and most fulfilling period of Suraiya’s career, or so it would appear. Not surprisingly as well, Irani is the first journalistic target of Suraiya’s caustic wit.
Irani’s finest hour was the Emergency. From his worm’s-eye vantage point, Suraiya saw it differently: “Each morning the MD would come to JS, tucked away on a mezzanine floor of the Statesman building. Striding into Desmond’s cabin, he would ask for the JS team to be summoned. All of us would troop into Desmond’s cabin…”
“The MD would address the congregation: ‘Desmond, boys, they’re coming to take me away. I expect them at any moment. But even after I’ve gone, remember: Keep fighting the good fight, keep the flag of freedom unfurled. That’s all. Thank you and God bless till we meet again’.”
“Then, heels clicking counterpoint to the silent strains of We shall overcome, the MD would march out, presumably into the arms of the waiting constabulary.”
“They never came. In the afternoon Desmond would phone the MD’s secretary, Gaver, to ascertain his fate.”
“The MD’s gone,” she’d confirm.
“To Lalbazar lock-up?” Desmond would ask.
“To the Bengal Club for lunch,” she’d reply. And the next day the entire sequence would be repeated.
The most moving chapter in the book is the one describing the end of JS: “Death of a magazine that still thinks young”. Suraiya writes the obituary with, to borrow an expression he uses in another context, “a deferred broken heart”: “If I had to use one word to describe JS it would be Camelot. The promise of a once and future kingdom, the kingdom of youth. We shall always remember when we were young. And when young no longer, we shall know that youth itself lives on. Forever ending, forever enduring, with its astonishment, and its anger, and its pangs of joy sharp as pain. That is what JS was, and is, and always shall be. Camelot.”
From the Statesman, Suraiya moved to the Times of India in New Delhi. Here he encountered not Camelot but a series of Merlins and Launcelots, and the occasional Launcelot Gobbo. His interlocutors ranged from Girilal Jain to Dilip Padgaonkar to H.K. Dua. Suraiya got to know them well, as this short profile of Dua’s stint at Times House testifies:
“Mr Dua looked like a terminally sun-tanned Santa Claus minus the red suit and white whiskers. He exuded genial reassurance the way a toaster exudes heat. ‘Have no fear, H.K. Dua is here,’ his body language seemed to say…”
“Unable to gain entry onto the edit page, Mr Dua went one better. He began to write front-page edits. The first of these was about crooked politicians in Bihar. It contained an immortal line about netas who wooed farmers by pretending to ‘fondle their cows while stealing their fodder’.”
“That unforgettable line — with several modifications, some of which featured the inclusion of the word ‘udders’ — became the talk of the town… Mr Dua beamed broader than ever before.”
To know what Suraiya did next, read the book.

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com