Reminiscences of the Nehru Age – M O Mathai

Foreword:

This article has a short but important history. It was written on June 23, 1977 by no less a person than M.O. Mathai. He was then Indian Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru’s private secretary. Mathai was an intelligent and competent man from south India, a Catholic by religion like many south Indians, and quite courageous to have written the two well-known books: (1) Reminiscences of the Nehru Age, and, (2) My Days with Nehru, where he has, for the first time, divulged many secrets of the high and the mighty of the Nehru years.

However, the article that our readers are going to read, was not an ordinary article of a descriptive nature. It has many references to Mathai’s personal interaction with Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru). The article was originally supposed to be a part of Mathai’s book, ‘Reminiscences of the Nehru Age’ but for obvious reasons, at the last moment, it was left out of the book. I received a copy of the article, (which I am sharing with our readers), soon after its appearance in the form of an article by an unknown author but it does not take too much grey matter to guess who is writing and about whom. Our readers will judge. A great deal of what Mathai is telling us in these pages, are already known to intelligent, informed readers; however, these few pages are surely quite readable although the actors and actresses of the old drama are now gone, many with their past glory tarnished! It was to hide the tarnish that so much trouble had been taken to keep these few pages hidden from the general public, at the time. In India, the general public has always been and still is the outsider, never mind what the politicos say!

Here follows the verbatim reproduction of Mathai’s SHE She has Cleopatra’s nose, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes and the breasts of Venus. She has hair on her limbs which have to be shaven frequently. Physically and mentally she is more of a male than a female. I would call her a manly woman.

I met her first in her ancestral home in the winter of 1945. She then had a baby son of crawling age and who was a cry baby. My first reaction was that she was a conceited girl with unhappiness written all over her face. Her second son, born in December, 1946, was an unwanted child. As a baby he had to be circumcised to remove a defect. By 1947 her cup of unhappiness was full and fortune took possession of her face.

In the autumn of 1946 her father gave her a small Austin car. She wanted me to teach her driving. In the initial stages I used to take her to the Viceroy’s bodyguard’s Polo Ground for lessons. She was quick in learning. Then I stopped the driving lessons because she was getting into the advanced stage of pregnancy. I told her I didn’t want her to take any risk going into the open roads learning driving. Her second son was born in the middle of December 1946. By the middle of February 1947 she was ready to resume driving lessons. We went into the roads and to Connaught Circus. Then I told her “you just imagine that you know everything, concentrate, consider the person driving a car from the opposite direction is a fool, and go along with confidence driving the car, take a round of Connaught Circus and come back”. She did that and returned in triumph. The driving lessons ended there.

Before the middle of 1947 she asked me to take her out to a cinema. From then on we used to go out for pictures as often as I was free – which was not frequent.

She looked forward to taking me out driving over the Ridge with the jungle on either side. She hated small cars. So we used to go in my car which was a Plymouth. She liked to go into the wilds where there were ruins. Drives to regions beyond Qutab Minar were favored. One day, during an aimless drive, she told me complainingly “You do not love me”. I said “I do not know; I had not thought about it”. By the autumn of 1947 I knew she had fallen headlong in love with me without my taking any initiative in the matter. Her face would light up on seeing me. She started talking to me about herself. She said that some time after her marriage, she discovered that her husband was not faithful to her. This came to her as a great shock because she married him in the teeth of opposition from every member of the family. She said she began to lose her saris, coats, blouses, shoes and handbags. She suspected the servants until she discovered some of her lost things on the persons of two women at a party. These women were known to be friendly with her husband. She also found out to which women her husband had given the books stolen from her book-shelves.

She made it known rather discreetly what her intentions were about me. I told her I had two inhibitions: (1) I did not like to fool around with married women; (2) my loyalty to her father prohibited anything such as she had in mind. She was immediately forthcoming about No.1. She assured me that some time ago she had stopped having anything to do with her husband. She added: “I can no longer bear the thought of his touching me”. She further confided in me “fortunately he has also gone impotent though he retained his attraction to women”. About No. 2 she was angry with me and asked “What has my father got to do with it? Am I a minor?”

Since then she spent as much time with me as possible and ridiculed me for my attitude to her father in so far as she was concerned. But I continued to resist gently. I was not mentally prepared or reconciled as yet.

On the 18th November 1947 she took me to her room and kissed me full on the lips and told me “I want to sleep with you; take me to the wilds tomorrow evening”. I told her that I had very little experience with women. She said “all the better”. So on the 19th, which was her birthday, we went driving out and chose a place in the wilderness. On our way back I told her that I had some revulsion about milk in her breasts (though she had stopped breast-feeding the child a while ago). Afterward, she did something about it and soon went completely dry. She discovered that I knew little about sex, and gave me two books, one of them by Dr. Abraham Stone about sex and female anatomy. I read them with profit.

She was not promiscuous; neither did she need sex too frequently. But in the sex act she had all the artfulness of French women and Kerala Nair women combined. She loved prolonged kissing and being kissed in the same fashion. She had established a reputation of being cold and forbidding. She was nothing of the kind. It was only a pose as a feminine measure of self-protection. She was a passionate woman who was exceptionally good as a wriggler in bed. During the twelve years we were lovers, I was never satisfied with her.

Progressively she became hostile to the fat female family friend who used to come to stay. Ever since she saw the family friend welcoming me on arrival with a hug and an innocent kiss on my cheek, she became jealous and livid with rage against the family friend. Occasionally the family friend used to ask me to take her and my “she” to a good cinema whenever there was one in town. My “she” could cleverly see to it that I did not sit near the family friend but only next to her as third in the row.

The day before the next time the family friend was expected to arrive “she” asked me to take her out into the wilds after sundown. In the car I asked her ‘what is the big idea? I have some urgent work to do’. She replied ‘as long as the fat one is here, I will keep away from you because I do not want you to touch me after she has touched you.’ I assured her that I had absolutely no interest in the fat one. Eventually, ‘she’ got used to the fat one’s friendly welcome and departure gestures to me.

She tried hard to persuade me to occasionally go up to her room while her husband was there, sit down and talk to them both. I told her that I had no intention of practicing deception. So she used to bring him to my study occasionally.

She used all kinds of devices to ensure that her children spent as little time with their father as possible. She told me that she did not want any influence of their father on them because she was convinced that his influence would be bad for them. She concluded by saying: “I do not want my children to grow up as champion liars.” This was one of the reasons why her husband was shifted to a separate room.

Once I mentioned to her something which her husband had told me. She said: “Don’t believe a word of what he says. I have learnt it to my bitter cost”.

She wrote to A.C.N. Nambiar, whom she had known personally for a long time and who was also a friend of her father and mother, asking for his opinion about divorcing her husband. She knew that Nambiar was a dear friend of mine. Nambiar replied to her to say that under certain circumstances it was preferable to have a clear break to living in make-believe. I did not encourage her in this matter, mostly for the sake of her father.

One day, she told me that she could not bear the thought of being married to a Hindu. I told her “It is a compliment to the galaxy of great men Hinduism has produced through the ages”.

I never encouraged her to come to my bedroom. On one occasion she came. It was past midnight. I was fast asleep, having worked till midnight; she lay down beside me and gently woke me up by a kiss. I asked her “What is the matter?” She said: “I had to come”. I did not know if she had been troubled in mind. I told her: “Let us lie here quietly and do nothing unless you want to”. She said: “On this occasion, I only want to be with you”. She lay there relaxed till about 4 in the morning, and gently tip-toed to her room upstairs. Before going away she told me: “I never told you that once I thought of committing suicide. Such thoughts do not come to me any more. You have given me back my happiness.”

Once, early in our life of love, she told me, “I never knew what real sex was until I had you”. At the height of her passion in bed, she would hold me tight and say “Oh, Bhupat, I love you”. She loved to give and receive nick-names. She gave me the name of Bhupat the dacoit, and I promptly gave her the name of Putli, the dacoitess. In private we used to call each other by these names. About her protestations of love in her romantic excitement, I quoted to her once two passages from Byron’s Don Juan:

“Man’s love is a man’s life, a thing apart, It is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion woman loves her lover; In all others all she loves is love”.

She replied, “all right, I want you to tell me as often as possible, not in bed, that you love me”. I tried my best to oblige her. In fact, there was no difficulty, for I had fallen deeply in love with her.

One evening, I found her disturbed. When she saw me, she burst into tears. I asked her what had happened. She said that when she came from her dressing room to drink her usual glass of milk, she discovered that there was finely powdered glass in it. The powder was floating on the thick cream. At the first sip she immediately sensed it in her mouth and spat it out. She said that from her dressing room she heard her husband sneaking into her bedroom and making an exit. She controlled herself, put her arms round me and holding me tight, said: “Oh, Mackie, I love you; I am so glad you came up.”

In the Constellation plans on our first visit abroad together, she was all excitement when we were in sight of Mont Blanc. She said softly to me, “I like the Queen Bee, I would like to make love high up in the air”. I asked her:”Didn’t you ever dream of soaring higher up like an eagle and surveying the world? I woke up from such a dream once and found myself on the floor, for I had fallen from the bed without breaking any bones”. She knew I was pulling her leg. On reaching London, she found out the first free meal-time for her, and arranged for me to take her to a quiet restaurant. On reaching the restaurant, I asked her to order the food; I said I would have the same as hers with the addition of six large raw oysters on ice with appropriate sauce to begin with. She said she too would have it. The main dish she ordered was veal. She said “Ever since I arrived here, I have been dying to eat veal”. I asked her if ever she had read Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra. She said, “No, why?” I told her Vatsayana had prescribed veal for young couple for six months before marriage. She had not even read the Ramayana or the Mahabaharata. Her knowledge of the Ramayana was only what her grandmother had told her. In many ways, she was a denationalized person.

She did not like artificial birth-control aids. Once in the early fifties she got pregnant by me. She decided to have an abortion done. She went to the British High Commission doctor whom she knew personally; but he refused to help. So she went to her ancestral home and got in touch with a lady doctor whom she knew personally and in whom she had perfect confidence. On this trip she took her second son with her. After a fortnight the mother and the little son returned with the good news that the boy was cured of his defect in speech in the natural process. Earlier he could not pronounce “R”, and the mother was worried about it; she was in frantic search for a speech-correction expert. On the day of her return, she told me that the whole thing came out without any medication or aid.

Was the father aware of her attachment to me? The answer is in the affirmative. Every time he had to go out for dinner, he knew where to find her. Fifteen minutes before the time of departure, she would come fully decked up and sit in front of me in my study. At the stroke of the appointed time the father would pass my study and call her out.

In the winter of 1958 I happened to see something by sheer chance. Immediately after lunch, I went to convey some urgent information to her. She had already closed the door. I knocked; after about five minutes she half-opened the door and peeped out. I discovered that the curtains were drawn and a tall, youngish handsome, bearded man – a Brahmacahri – was in the room. I came away saying “I had something to tell you; but I shall say it later”. That was the end of our relationship. She tried to make me believe several times that the scene I witnessed meant nothing more than some “yoga” and “spiritual” lessons. I gave her the definite impression that I was not interested in her explanations. Gradually she grew bitter against me. In fact, ultimately she became my deadly enemy – which constantly reminded me of the famous couplet of William Congrave:

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned; nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

Within a fortnight of the incident I collected all her passionate letters and returned them to her. A year later I came across some more in my old papers. They were also returned to her.

There is an erroneous belief among some that she and her husband came together during the last two years of the husband’s life. Enough had happened in their lives that a reunion of hearts was not humanly possible. It is true that she was kind and considerate to him during his illness. Certain things were done during this period and more specially at the cremation and collection of the ashes of the husband and well advertised to give certain desired impressions. They were all for public consumption, for, by that time, she had emerged as a full-fledged political animal.

23rd June, 1977.

Afterword:

A few clarifications, now that the readers had a look at the material presented by no less a person than M.O. Mathai himself on Indira (aka Maimuna Begum).

Indira used to ‘shave her limbs’; read that as ‘her pubic hairs’. This is an Islamic practice forced today on the Afghan population by the Talibans in Afghanistan. There is nothing extraordinary in her statement that she would not like to get married to a Hindu man, although she used to have unauthorized sex with the Hindu ‘brahmachari’ in her own bed room.

That her second son (the bastard son by Mohammad Yunus) Sanjay (aka Sanjiv) had circumcision is no secret now. Why blame an unknown and imagined ‘defect’? It was done only to leave the seal of Islam, exactly as it had been done on Jawahar in the palace of the nawab of Oudh. Her inordinate love to eat veal can be tolerated but not the false explanation of circumcision. The entire Nehru family was of Islamic roots of unknown pedigree and they now plan to hand over the country today, to an ill-bred Catholic woman of unknown pedigree.

That she had the abortion of her third baby, the one sired by Mathai, is not known by many. But the matter was hushed up by the excuse of ‘speech-defect’ of the baby son, Sanjiv (he was not name-changed to Sanjay as yet, after the car theft in London and to procure a separate Indian passport to evade the London police). Now we know that it is hard to pronounce the letter ‘R’!

That Firoz was a liar does not come to us a surprise! Didn’t the school boys use to chant:

“Gali gali men shor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai?”

And to think that no one had told them that the bastard son of Indira was the Bofors thief, which fact even any of the Indian leaders have not yet been able to decipher! And how could a fornication-prone thief like Firoz, hide the fact from a smart broad like Indira (aka Maimuna Begum), his own wife, for, it is widely accepted that Indira was indeed much smarter than Firoz.

That Indira had no or little knowledge of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, was suspected by many. Did she know anything at all of the Koran? She was after all invited by the Saudi king to attend the Hajj ceremony at Mecca which information was also suppressed by our foolish media persons. If Indira learnt the rudiments of the Ramayana from her grandmother, the question still remains, which one? Jawahar’s mother or Kamla Nehru’s (nee Kaul) mother! We happen to know the name of Jawahar’s mother; it was Thussu which was changed later to Swarup Rani. None of us seem to know the name of Kamla Kaul’s mother.

The fact of Firoz’s cremation is very interesting. It was done only to fool the Hindus of India. This Sunni musalman son of Nawab Khan, the liquor vendor of Allahabad, converted to Catholicism by Sonia’s petulance at Orbassano, Italy, had died and been cremated like the kafir Hindus but was not buried in accordance with the tenets of Islam. Then what happened to him? Did he go to the Jannat at all? Did he have the 72 houries and the 28 gilmans (pearl-like boys)? No one tells us that! It is amazing that the Indian media is headed by a bunch of idiots and that situation needs to be corrected as early as possible.

I am sure that the short write up by Mathai has done a world of good for our readers and eventually the larger public in India. Rest assured, all India is now reading our web-site and discovering the truth for the first time. The truth will surely eventually come out in full, for all to know and eventually they will all act as true sons of the soil. At the moment, our India is chock a block with traitors, starting from the President, Michael Kocheril Raman Narayanan to Gujral, Kuldip Nayyar, Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Dilip Kumar, Mani Shankar Aiyar, K. Natwar Singh, retired ambassador Abid Husain, Mukarram Husain et al and a host of others!

And a thought about Firoz’s attempt to poison his own wife! Was it the same incident that had prompted Indira to poison Lal Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent? Who knows?

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