By Khushwant Singh

The Dawn: June 29, 2008

IT was a grievous blow to those who strove to build bridges between Pakistan and India to hear that Minoo Bhandara, ex-member of the Pakistan National Assembly, had died.

Apparently, while on a visit to China, he met with a car accident and was seriously injured. He was flown back to Islamabad. Amongst those to call on him in hospital were President Musharraf and his wife, Sehba. He seemed to be recovering but on June 15, he gave up the battle. He was barely 70.

I don’t recall when and where I first met Minoo. We had a common friend and role-model in Manzur Qadir. He shared my opinion that Manzur was the paradigm of goodness and rectitude. It was this admiration for Manzur that created a bond between us. I do remember at our first meeting I asked him, “Are you a Bawaji?” He was nonplussed as he did not know what the word meant. I had to tell him that in India, behind their back, we refer to Parsis as Bawajis.

“And what are you doing in Pakistan?” was my next question. He explained he ran the Murree Brewery and was also a member of the National Assembly. We became friends and whenever he was in Delhi, which was often, he spent a couple of evenings with me. He was proud of his products, notably the Single Malt Whisky which he brought for me. He was invariably accompanied by a pretty Pakistani girl, usually a painter, poet or a novelist.

I also discovered that Pakistan’s leading novelist in English, Bapsi Sidhwa, was his sister. Bapsi stayed with me when she was in Delhi. When I visited Pakistan, I stayed with Minoo in his beautifully laid out bungalow in Rawalpindi. It was next door to his distillery. He had built a mosque alongside for his Muslim employees. I asked him how Pakistanis took to his brewing liquor — forbidden as haraam. He smiled and replied, “You know how things are in our countries: say one thing, do another. My products are only meant for export. But behind closed doors, the elite of Pakistan, when they can’t get imported stuff, they make do with the indigenous.”

Needless to say that in Pakistan among the richest who made his fortune legally was Minoo Bhandara who had the monopoly of brewing beer and distilling whisky. Minoo’s main interest was not politics but literature. He would patiently answer all the questions about political affairs in Pakistan that I fired at him and then to turn to books, novels, anthologies of poetry – and whatever. In Delhi, he usually stayed at the India International Centre and spent his afternoons doing the rounds of bookstores in Khan Market. Invariably, our evening sessions would end by his asking what I was working on. I was then busy translating selections of Urdu poetry into English. I was facing a lot of difficulties with Ghalib.

“I don’t agree with any of the interpretations of the opening lines of his Diwan:

Naqsh faryadi hai kis ki shokhi-i-tehreer ka

Kaaghzi hai pairahan har paikar-i-tasveer ka

(A painting speaks for itself

It needs no learned explanations in detail

On paper it is painted, itself it tells its tale)

I told him that there was nothing to suggest that Ghalib had alluded to a practice of petitioners having to wear paper robes when they appeared before the Shah. He simply meant to say that a picture tells its own tale. It does not need learned interpretation to explain its purport. Minoo disagreed and said, “At the time we (i.e. Zoroastrians) ruled Iran, that was accepted practice.” We had an animated (never heated) argument over it.

Another time it was Faiz’s oft-quoted lines:

Raat yoon dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aayi

Jaise veerane mein chupke say bahar aajaae

Jaise sehraon mein haule say chale baad-i-naseem

Jaise beemar ko bevajhe qaraar aajae

(At night your lost memory stole into my heart

As in barren wastes silently spring

As in glades zephyr begins to blow

As in one sick without hope, hope begins to grow)

We argued over my translation. I conceded to the suggestions he made.

Every time Minoo came to India, it was to attend a conference or seminar on Indo-Pakistan relations. He put the Pakistani point of view to Indian audiences. Back in Pakistan, he put the Indian reactions in articles he wrote for Pakistani journals. He was a true bridge-builder between the two nations. With his going that bridge has fallen.

For me, Minoo’s death has been a personal loss. With all my Pakistani friends from my Lahore days now resting in their graves, he was my last remaining link with a country I call my watan — my homeland. That link has been snapped. n

The writer who is 93 years old was born and brought up in what is now Pakistan. One of India’s leading journalists, he is the former editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and author of the award-winning Train to Pakistan and the three-volume History of the Sikhs, among other books.