he was jailed by the Nawab for treason. He described this as “enjoying the hospitality of the Nawab”.
The scholars asked him questions about his Surajgarh years, but in fact the lure for their trips was not Diwan Sahib’s reminiscences. Early in 1948, the Mountbattens, Edwina and her husband, went to Surajgarh for a state visit on which Nehru accompanied them. It was rumoured that Edwina and Nehru had written each other notes during the week they spent there in rooms at opposite ends of the palace, or stranded at separate dining tables. The notes were thought to have been stolen by a member of the palace staff, and ended up in the Diwan’s possession. Historians hungered for them. Dealers came for them too: their passion was not in the cause of biography; it was because of what the letters would fetch if sold. I was not sure the letters existed, but if they did, Diwan Sahib appeared to have no plans for them. He was contented enough in his dressing gown all day, drinking his rum and gin.
Because of Diwan Sahib and the rumour of those letters, I met many scholars and writers. I never knew who they were, but he gave me a summary after they left. “That man’s a fraud, he does nothing but plagiarise.” Or: “That woman sits in Chicago all year and then produces authoritative work on Indian villages after two weeks of fieldwork.” If he approved, he called them “good boy” or “good girl”. “That was Ramachandra Guha,” he said once, of a tall, distracted-looking man in glasses who had addressed him as Sir throughout. “He’s a good boy, but he didn’t have a single drink.”
“Those letters should be in the Nehru Memorial Library, Sir,” Ramachandra Guha had told him. “They should not be at the bottom of a trunk.”
“They are safer at the bottom of a trunk than in any Indian library I know of,” Diwan Sahib had said.
Diwan Sahib was brusque enough with visitors to acquire a reputation for being outright rude, and none of his acquaintances were allowed to grow into friends. Although he could not do without seeing me every day, he could become cantankerous or quarrelsome in minutes. But with his new-found relative, he was transformed. He hovered, he stood waiting as Veer looked around the house, he said in tones of apology that it needed repairing and cleaning up. Veer wandered from room to room as we followed, occasionally stopping and saying, “Where’s the walnut wood chest that used to be here?” or “There was surely a desk in that corner.”
“If you come and live here,” Diwan Sahib said vaguely in Veer’s direction, in a voice so hesitant that it did not sound like him at all, “I would prod myself and get some repairs done.”
I lingered with them that evening and watched Veer stow his things in one of the unused bedrooms. He cast an appraising look around it as he unhitched his backpack and changed his walking shoes for slippers. It was clear he intended staying for a while and I could tell that the predictable temper of our days was to change. Himmat Singh staggered in with a bundle of wood and coaxed a fire out of it. “Very damp room, Chote Sa’ab,” he said to Veer. “But it will be better with this fire.” He had known him “this high”, he told me in the kitchen. In those days, Veer would often come during his school holidays and even then the semi-circular room with bay windows and prints of rearing tigers on the walls was his room. Himmat Singh began to work through a pink hillock of onions and set eggs to boil. Because Diwan Sahib himself ate very little in the evenings, there was hardly any food to be had. Now dinner had to be conjured up out of nothing and Himmat Singh bustled about with a self-important air. “Ah, the old times were so different,” he said. “Visitors every evening and the kitchen busy from morning till night. I had an assistant just to chop and cut and clean. You should have seen how much Chote Sa’ab ate. My own stomach would feel good and full to see him licking bowls clean, and at the end he sighed like this – fuuuuf – and he said, ‘Himmat Singh, there is nobody who can cook like you in all of the Kumaon.’”
That evening, Diwan Sahib grew merrier and merrier, drinking twice the amount he