It's being sold as Khushwant Singh's swansong. The Sunset Club may fetch him the bad sex award as well. But that's about it
It's being sold as Khushwant Singh's swansong. The Sunset Club may fetch him the bad sex award as well. But that's about it
In Marquez's Memories of my Melancholy Whores, a lonely journalist buys a girl's virginity on his ninetieth birthday as he waits for his death. Though Iran banned it saying the novella was promoting prostitution, it's a poignant story of a man finding love in the last chapter of his life. Marquez's prose infuses poetry in the primal and helps the reader gloss over the grotesque. The same, alas, can not be said about Khushwant Singh's last book The Sunset Club (there have been novels and essay collections before by the same author that publishers have put out as his last work for non-literary purposes, but that's for another article).
The story is simple. Three old men meet daily at Delhi's Lodhi Gardens and relive fantasies. They bitch about the world and bemoan the loss of sexual prowess. One of them, Boota Singh, is much like Khushwant himself.
The love for single malt, the obsession with laxatives and enemas and the problem with weight, coupled with a taste for the distasteful (Boota likes farting and then smelling it) are the give-aways.u00a0
There are some passages on the change of seasons, which come as a relief, reminding the reader that beyond the dirty old man there's another Khushwant. "In March, death and rebirth go hand in hand. It is the time for patjhar (falling leaves) and new ones taking their place. Peepals, neems, kosams and many others denude themselves to don new garments. Shahtoot (mulberry) trees, which looked like cloth less umbrellas of dry sticks, get a green fuzz by mid-February...."u00a0u00a0
But such poetic prose gets lost in the bad sex. Sample this: "What a volcano of passion she had in her little frame! They were at it every time they were on their own -- at times, six times in one day. She found him too heavy and suggested she come on top. He found that even pleasanter and lay on his back with his massive circumcised penis up like the Qutub Minar. She mounted him, directed his erect member inside her till it disappeared between her thighs. She did most of the work, kissing his eyes, his lips, heaving up and down. It was her groaning with ecstasy that brought him to a climax. What a bliss it was!"
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Had the same feeling come after reading the novel, Khushwant could have walked away in style.
The Sunset Club by Khushwant Singh published by Penguin Viking. Rs 399
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