Tavleen's trysts

INDIA'S BROKEN TRYST
Author: Tavleen Singh
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 424
Price: Rs 699

Before we go any further, a few declarations of interest may be in order. I know and admire Tavleen Singh. In fact, I admired her long before I knew her. At university I was fascinated by the column she wrote for the short-lived New Delhi magazine and later, I was a fan of the stories she did for Sunday and The Telegraph.

At a time when journalists quaked with fear at the very mention of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale's name, Tavleen had the guts to confront the "Sant" without a trace of fear and her reporting from Punjab was easily the best.

I admired her for her honesty about her private life too. In the mid-1980s, when India was a much more conservative place than it is today, Tavleen told the story of her relationship with Salman Taseer and the birth of their son Atish on the pages of Savvy magazine with courage and candour.

The honesty seemed to me to characterise Tavleen's attitude to life. She has always lived on her terms, apologising for nothing and being openly contemptuous of political correctness. She was, as she says in the book, born into privilege and has never made any attempt to conceal it.

For a few years in the nineties, we both had flats in the same building in Delhi and this finally gave me an opportunity to see her up close. She would throw elegant dinner parties where guests may include Patrick French, VS Naipaul, a couple of maharajas and maharanis or a model straight from the Paris catwalk. But early the next morning, she would drive off to some grimy little village hours from Delhi to file gritty, on-the-spot reports.

And yet, as much as we admired her, I think everyone in the building was secretly (and sometimes, not so secretly) terrified of her. She was quick to anger, viewed fools with a contempt she did not bother to disguise and if you got on her wrong side, she would lacerate you with her put-downs.

Many of these qualities continue to characterise her journalism, though in recent years she had proved to be a much better story-teller than any of us suspected. Durbar, her book on the Delhi of the seventies and eighties, was easily the most evocative account of that period that I have ever read.

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Tavleen's trysts