JOIN USTaking out my stuff from grandpa’s antique tin-box on board the destroyer heading for the Philippines, I discovered a crumpled old letter socked away in a crevice. The script was gobbledygook to me and I sought the help of Khalifa, the ship’s barber. “Huzoor, it’s in Punjabi,” he declared, “in the olden days even the non-Muslims used to write in Farsi-Urdu script...” and as Khalifa read the letter with his finger moving from right to left, my pen sizzled along from left to right, transcribing grandpa’s words.
“To the Editor, Risala Punjabi, Lahore,” he wrote in 1906, “Sir, subsequent to Nafisa Begum’s book review of Dr Watson’s Journals the entire stock of three copies has been sold out here in Ferozpore. Begum sahiba has been liberal in her praise of the writer and Mr Sherlock Holmes, the hero of the book. I have met both these gentlemen and would like to share a few home truths to counterbalance her misplaced flattery.
“Right at the start we read about Dr Watson’s injured hand pierced by a Jezail bullet in the 1880 Battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan. Dr Watson wants us to believe that he fired back at the shooter with a double-barrel weapon. Sir, I was a medic with the Punjab Frontier Force attached to the Berkshire regiment to which Dr Watson belonged. Together we were manning the Field Hospital at Maiwand when suddenly the Afghan ‘warrior queen’ Malalai Anaa barged into our tent and demanded that we attend to her comrades first. Dr Watson said no. She pointed her Jezail musket at him and shot him through the arm. But he managed to escape to Kandahar on a mule, leaving me alone to deal with Malalai. That, sir, is a double-barrel truth.
“In a later chapter, the author shifts the Jezail injury to his leg to explain his limp. Watson was in India for long, and yet, in the ‘Sign of Four’ he describes M/S Dost Akbar, Mahomet Singh and Abdulla Khan as Sikhs. His racism surfaces when he calls Indians ‘black devils’ and Punjabi a ‘queer Sikh lingo’…”
(Grandpa then goes hammer and tong at Watson for killing Holmes in the ‘Final Problem’, but when the Londoners protest, he does a U-turn and revives the detective, claiming he was all along in Tibet. The truth is Holmes was in Punjab. As war veterans grandpa and Watson were in touch with each other.)
“Sir, as requested by doctor sahib in a telegram, I was at the railway station to receive Sherlock Holmes, but no one matching his description jumped out of the train. I was hailing a tonga when someone tapped me on the shoulder; I spun around, saw a person in burqa, and was about to hop into the carriage when Holmes lifted his veil, laughed and said ‘Hello Gurbax Singh’. ‘How did you know I am Gurbax?’ I asked. ‘Elementary, my dear Sardarji,’ he said, ‘the tattoo on your forearm says so’.”
“Holmes was a hit with my seven kids; he handed each one a box of Tiddlywinks — an indoor game in which one flicks counters into a pot to score. Poor women got the empty Tiddlywink tins.
“Soon we were out shopping in the seedier parts of Ferozpore looking for the hookah, chillum, and Holmes’s favourite, the one-string Ek-Tara. ‘I am giving up the pipe, cocaine and violin,’ he declared. Women and kids liked watching him drag at the chillum and create smoke rings and then pierce them with smaller rings. He played the Ek-Tara well while others sang. He also got a shabash for solving the mystery of the neighbour’s missing pigeons, a lost tricycle, and for locating a poor snake charmer’s missing reptile.
“On a Sunday morning, Holmes was the breakfast guest of Sethji, a bigwig in our locality. Sethji asked him if he was married. ‘No sir,’ he replied, ‘neither do I ever intend to.’ Why, why? the kitchen echoed. ‘Because, dear ladies,’ Holmes, the misogynist, replied, ‘I find women most unworthy creatures… The most charming lady I ever met was hanged for poisoning her three little daughters to claim insurance.’ Holmes hadn’t noticed that the family had three young daughters. Plates and parathas flew at him. He vamoosed, crashed into my house, grabbed his stuff including Ek-Tara, and was never seen again. Yours truly…”