Singh’s ‘sweetheart’

Veteran journalist Khushwant Singh, in his syndicated column "This Above All,” has written about Mehera Jussawalla (mother of poet Adil and thespian Firdausi) whom he had known when they were at Shanti­niketan. Adil too, in his tribute to his mother in her birth centenary year ("A life presumed lost,” Parsiana, April 21, 2012) has referred to the then 18-year-old Singh as being one of her male admirers.

Mehera Jussawalla (l) and Khushwant Singh

Recalling the time he was in Tagore’s university, the nonagenarian Singh writes: "In the few months I spent in Shantiniketan, I learnt to play the sitar. I also learnt I would never make a professional painter. About the only plus point of my stay there was to befriend an attractive Parsi girl from Bombay.

"To start with it was largely due to the fact that neither of us could speak Bengali. I was besotted by her. When I returned to my college in Lahore, I started writing to her. I addressed her as comrade which in the lingo used at the time was synonym of sweetheart. Our correspondence lasted a couple of years till she got married. Then she stopped answering my letters. Her name was Mehera Jussawalla. I kept track of her movements for many years.

"Her son Adil, now over 70 years old is an Oxonian and lived in London till he returned to Bombay in 1970. He has been teaching English at St Xavier’s College. He has already published two anthologies of his poems. His latest offering is Trying to Say Goodbye... His poems make good, thought-provoking matter.”