Flashback: Journo tales from Poona

“Moonlight stretches out against the skies
How much you get depends upon the size
Of windows in your room. Your glass of wine
Can only hold so much of the divine
Essence of love, which shouldn’t be taking but giving
No sorrow for the limitations of living…”
From Songs of the Barcodedar by Bachchoo

One of the best poems in the English language, a vast book of a poem, is In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was written on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam and dedicated to him. It is more heartfelt than any obituary can be. Dear reader, why has this Tennysonian crie de couer come to mind? Answer: through the challenge of inadequacy.

Allow me to explain. Last week, my friend from our teenage days, Dileep Padgaonkar died in Pune, where he and I were born and brought up. We were the same age.

Dileep went to St. Vincent’s School and I was sent to Bishops. St. Vincent’s was a Catholic Jesuit school and Bishops was founded by Anglican clergy in 1864. St. Vincent’s was dedicated to educating the general male population of the town. Our school was dedicated to an arcane idea of “character-building”. Academic achievers were seen as “swats”, the real pupil heroes being athletes, boxers and the captains of sports teams.

Even so, the athletes and teams of St. Vincent’s were by far the best in all the schools of Pune. And together with that, St. Vincent’s had the most proficient academic achievers. When Dileep and I attended school in Pune this comparison was obscured by the fact that most of the pupils of Bishops were from prosperous families whereas very many of the pupils of St. Vincent’s were poor. The record of achievement speaks. St. Vincent’s produced high-level professionals, politicians and national figures, much more so than our school.

Dileep went on to the academic and “serious” Fergusson College. I went on to Nowrosjee Wadia College, which had a reputation for being the “chaloo” college of the town. We knew of each other in our schooldays but interacted and became friends in these college years.

Our main joint activity was being part-time student reporters for the Poona Herald, a new daily newspaper launched by builder-entrepreneur Atur Sangtani. Our reporting assignments were mostly trivial — covering the changes initiated by the Poona Club, the Poona police’s annual boxing match, the anniversary of an institution or a pilgrimage night at a shrine. We were paid by the column-inch and we compared notes about the copy we had filed on most days. Our assignments were carried out on bicycles, with writing pads and pens in our pockets.

Then the Profumo scandal broke in England. John Profumo, a Conservative minister for defence, was using the services of a prostitute called Christine Keeler, who was also the professional lover of the naval attache of the Russian embassy in London.

Christine’s pimp was one Stephen Ward, a self-styled osteopath, who was the centre of these controversial arrangements. Ward was reported to have served in India during the Second World War.

That triggered an idea. Dileep and I speculated on the possibility that he could have been injured in his service in Burma and sent, as many soldiers were, to the military hospital in Pune. We cycled to the hospital, identified ourselves as from the press and searched the records of wartime patients. We found several soldiers by the name of Ward, but none of them, disappointingly, called Stephen or even “S” Ward.

It was, I protest, entirely my idea to proceed with a report of Captain Stephen Ward’s confinement in the Poona Military Hospital. Dileep and I shared the responsibility for the picturesque detail of the report: A nurse who recalled how flirtatious he was and attempted (Trump-like) manoeuvres on the female staff. The report was given pride of place in Herald’s pages.

The next day, when the report was printed, Dileep and I cycled to the Herald offices in East Street. There were several cars parked outside — an unusual scenario. One of the cars was an Oldsmobile convertible and a tall, bulky gentleman with a handlebar moustache stepped out of it on seeing us and accosted us, asking if we were Dileep and Farrukh. We said we were. In a very commanding voice he introduced himself as Captain Colabawalla from the Blitz newspaper, Mumbai’s bestselling scandal sheet.

He invited us to ignore the others, presumably representatives of national newspapers, and to get into his car. His inducement was to wave two hundred-rupee notes about. I had never seen one before. We got into the car. He said he wanted us to sign over our article to his newspaper and he would give us the appropriate contract when we drove away.

We saw our advantage and asked him to drive through Mahatma Gandhi Road, known locally as “Main Street”, where we would be seen by friends and the public riding in style in a convertible Oldsmobile.

He drove us up and down and we waved to our astounded friends, loafing of an evening. He then produced the simple contracts and we said we were hungry and a Chinese meal would be appropriate. Colabawalla was more than willing and we stopped outside Kamling, Pune’s only Chinese restaurant.

The article appeared in Blitz, and I vaguely recall that it was signed by Colabawalla who had elaborated our story even further.

Such was Dileep’s and my first big step in journalism. I went on to study in the UK and Dileep, who spoke and wrote French from his schooldays, went on to study at the Sorbonne. We met in our holidays in London and Paris and Dileep, on returning to India, joined the Times of India and eventually became its chief editor.

In our European days he was my guide to French films and French wine. He never lost the ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and the Indian secular ideal. I shall miss him.