In Conversation with Vinod Bhardwaj

It is interesting that both of us started out together as trainee journalists with the Times of India in 1973. I was on the English side while you entered the Hindi stream. Nevertheless, for the first few months, we underwent the training together and, for a few initial weeks, even shared a tiny room with three beds in a building called National Hostel. 

Yes, when I faced this hostel life in Bombay after a carefree one in a five-room house in Lucknow, it was quite a jolt. Initially, I was always on the lookout for excuses to quit my job. A couple of times, I even tried to return to Lucknow by feigning I was suffering from jaundice until the blood tests showed no traces of it. 

Why did you choose journalism as a career instead of a teaching job?

In those days, if you chose to become a Hindi writer, then you generally ended up as a lecturer. But the thing is many a good Hindi writer and poet in those days had a master’s degree in English and some even taught English. I wrote in Hindi and, by the age of fourteen, was even getting published. I remember I wrote a short play called Do Mitra (Two Friends) for Akashvani Lucknow and, because I was too young, the cheque came in the name of my elder brother. While I was doing my BA, I had the option of doing an MA or PhD in Hindi. But in the course of my BA studies, thanks to my editing the small magazine Aarambh (Beginning), I came in direct contact with quite a few Hindi literary personalities. I think, at the time, it was a good decision on my part to go for MA in Psychology. I was drawn to Sigmund Freud’s ideas and his theories on dreams. While I was doing MA in Psychology, Noam Chomsky’s theories of psycholinguistics were quite a rage. Today, as a radical political thinker, Chomsky tends to tear apart the American official policies but in those days, he brought about a revolution not so much through his words but through his phrase-centric grammar. 

Another characteristic of the psychology class was that out of the thirty of us, only three were boys, the rest were all girls. Which means the exercises of nine-day experiments, involving starved guinea pigs being made to run around, offered illimitable possibilities to fraternize and gossip with the girls. In a group of four, there would be three girls and one boy, i.e., me. I have many interesting memories of those days. A pretty girl’s marriage had been fixed and she was to tie the knot five months later. Perhaps, she had this urge to treat herself to at least one small-time affair in the interregnum. To realize her fantasy, she obviously needed a guinea pig. The poor soul decided to make me the sacrificial goat. Dev Anand’s Prem Pujari was due to release soon and its song, Shokhiyon mein ghola jaaye phoolon ka shabab, usme phir milaayee jaaye thodisi sharab, hoga yoon nasha jo tayyar voh pyaar hai (the lyrics were by Neeraj, better known for penning, Karwan guzar gaya ghubaar dekhte rahe), was a rage among the young. It was a favourite of that pretty girl as well. The denouement of the five-month-long shy and immature affair was that one day, in quite a theatrical fashion, the girl handed me the invitation card to her marriage and made me swear I’d come to attend. Somehow, I scraped together thirty-five rupees (quite a sum in those days) and bought a Bombay Dyeing sari of the latest style as a gift for her marriage. But the tragic consequence of this gift and the mere act of attending a class fellow’s marriage, and that too in Sitapur, far from Lucknow, was that the husband heartlessly forbade the wife to continue with her studies. The point is that the three boys among the twenty-seven girls had quite a few entertaining experiences beyond the routine of studies. I have no regrets about not doing an MA in Hindi. While doing my BA, I had already noticed how boring Hindi professors could be when one lecturer described a new poem akin to the experience of enjoying a picnic. 

So, could you have ended up as a professor of psychology? Interestingly, even today, psychology remains a favourite subject among girls. 

My father worked for a bank. He was always worried about how his boy would find employment. He composed poetry and counted strange characters in the guise of poets and artists among his friends – who the hell would offer him a job? One day, he told me, maybe you’d get a clerk’s position in the Information Department of the UP government. He had this notion that on the strength of his contacts, he’d manage to get a banker’s job for at least one of his three sons. But none of the three joined any bank. My father was a bank cashier. My grandfather once came down from Ghodewaha, a village near Jullundur, to see his son for a few days and landed up at his bank one morning. When he saw his bright kid counting wads of currency notes, his joy had no bounds. He developed this illusion his son was a moneyed man. These are the memorable episodes of those days. Around 1970, the Times of India appointed a number of eminent writers as editors in its Hindi publications or otherwise, assigned them high positions there. When writers like Agyeya, Dharmavir Bharti, Raghuvir Sahai, Kamleshwar, Manoharshyam Joshi, Sarveshwardayal Saxena and Shrikant Verma became journalists and began to move around in cars, it was an inspiration for many young Hindi writers to head for Delhi or Bombay to become journalists. 

Raghuvir Sahai wanted me in Dinaman but the entry was possible only through the Times of India training scheme. I formally applied against an advertisement, sent an essay and had to go through two interviews – in Delhi and Bombay. And eventually became a journalist. 

Nowadays, writers are counted as outsiders or odd-men-out in the world of Hindi journalism. But in those days, it was the literary fraternity that carried the burden of a large section of journalism – especially when it came to the top positions in the Times of India and Hindustan Times.

Which journalist has impressed you the most?

Shamlal would top the list. When I was under training in Bombay for a year, I couldn’t even imagine I’d become close friends with such an eminent editor of the Times of India. Shrikant Verma was a well-known poet and intellectual and Shamlal would often visit his house. In the weekly Dinaman, Shrikant Verma was a colleague and quite liked me. At his house parties, I’d often encounter Shamlal, Dilip Padgaonkar and others. One day, at his Gulmohar Park house, Shamlal told me that he felt Hindi journalists were better educated than those working for the English press. The reason being that quite a few eminent Hindi poets and writers had taken to journalism, which was not the case in English. I continued to visit Shamlal at his house until his final years when he was well into his nineties. Towards the end, he slowly began to lose sight and shifted to a small room of his otherwise large house. This room had two paintings – one by Ram Kumar and the other by Akbar Padamsee. I have never seen a greater book-lover than Shamlal. I count myself lucky that I was able to spend many intellectually stimulating evenings in his company. Among the Hindi fraternity I was quite impressed by journalists of the stature of Dharmavir Bharti, Raghuvir Sahai, Shrikant Verma, Manoharshyam Joshi, Rajendra Mathur and Prabhas Joshi but nobody could be compared with Shamlal. Today, a person like him would never be able to rise to the level of an editor. Of course, M.J. Akbar, S.P. Singh and Udayan Sharma were my colleagues. We were all, more or less, the same age. But alas, S.P. Singh and Udayan left this world quite early.

How much of A True Lie is based on facts and how much of it is imagination?

Ultimately it is a novel – so it ought to be considered imaginary. But behind every imaginary episode is the uneven surface of truth. I was certainly not writing an autobiography nor does the novel draw everything from journalism. For example, the most interesting episode of the novel does not concern journalism at all. Around the time when there were strong rumours that Dinaman was about to close down, I thought of writing a book which would give me a decent royalty every year. One of my friends was a big-time English publisher. He proposed a sex manual in Hindi. Hindi publishers did not issue such books on a royalty basis, and the big publishers didn’t publish such titles at all. But in this instance, I hoped to regularly get my legitimate royalty from this publishing house. Swimming in the sea of enthusiasm, I quickly wrote down five chapters. At this point, the publisher’s grandfather wanted to see one chapter. Having read it, he gave this sage advice – the writing is fine and everything is as it should be but if all this gets published in Hindi, our daughters and daughters-in-law might go astray. My friend promptly handed me a cheque to compensate for my labour but I could never complete the manual and, of course, there was no question of it ever seeing the light of day. In the novel though, this episode emerges in a different shape. All the same, it tells us something about the awkward realities of our Indian society. A famous artist (who was also a writer) once wrote a detective novel to raise some cash whereas I almost wrote a sex manual. For a long time the five chapters lay buried under my sundry manuscripts. Then some years ago, I tore them up. 

While the central theme of A True Lie might involve an unconventional narration of Hindi journalism where some misfit writers tended to sit in the lap of brand managers, child sex abuse too is close to its heart.

The central character of this novel is faced with a huge dilemma. I have seen many such loudmouths during my student days in Lucknow and have even occasionally moved around with them. They would look for their victims among the rich and handsome boys. All over the world – in Britain, there have even been a succession of surveys – the psychological wounds of sex abuse in childhood have transformed people’s lives. German philosopher Schopenhauer has said somewhere that ‘Sometimes revenge is sweet’. But the protagonist of A True Lie is never able to free himself of that mental wound despite finally realizing the futility of revenge. I feel that the Babadin Syndrome is the central idea of this novel, which has actually nothing to do with journalism.

While translating the novel, in one chapter, I felt as if one was realizing the experience of a psychological masterpiece. After the protagonist’s wife delivers a mentally challenged girl, she gives up sexual relations with her husband. And when the husband starts an affair with his wife’s best friend, that relationship is left in ruins once he learns that all along, his wife was having a lesbian relationship with the same friend.

You are right, Brij. That chapter offers an important turning point in the narrative. It also has remarkable psychological complications. 

After Seppuku and A True Lie, in the final part of your so-called trilogy, what do you want to say by once more bringing in an artist as the protagonist? And that protagonist is also a sex addict.

While on the surface all three novels have a similarity of format, their characters and episodes also have a rather strange and disturbing but deep relationship. Thus, the three are independent works but somehow, they are also linked. Maybe, I couldn’t muster the courage to pen an autobiography. Therefore, I have taken a string of incidents from my life and planted them in the world of imagination in my own fashion.