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THE LAST LAUGH
BY JUG SURAIYA, 24 DECEMBER 2006, TIMES OF
INDIA NEW DELHI.
I was in two minds about writing this
column. I still am. The thought of writing
it first came to me when I read of the
brutal murder of Papiya Ghosh, the noted
academic and historian, in Patna. No, this
is not a memorial to Papiya. I never met
her, nor can I claim to be acquainted with
her work. A tribute from me would be a
presumption. However, I did have a connexion
over many years with Papiya and her sister,
Tuktuk, who is now a senior civil service
officer.
Papiya and Tuktuk were by far the most
regular contributors to Kookie Kol — a sort
of zany Letters to the Editor column — in
the Junior Statesman (later renamed JS)
magazine. It was said of JS that it helped
to invent the Indian teenager. I don't know
about that but it did provide a platform for
young people from all over the country to
interact both with each other and with the
JS staffers, who in most cases were not much
older than their reader-correspondents. If
30 years after its closure JS is still so
vividly recalled by the generation which
grew up with — and partly through — it, it
is because the magazine was not so much a
publication as a participatory rite of
passage.
People still talk about the 'Love is'
posters that featured in JS, and the large
serialised pin-ups, particularly those of
the comic strip heroine Modesty Blaise and
Zeenat Aman. And all JS readers-writers
remember Papiya and Tuktuk who almost every
week traded deft and daft witticisms with
Kookie in his column. Much of the humour of
Kookie Kol centred round the near-mythical
PM (no, not Prime Minister but Prize Money)
that the deliberately niggardly Kookie doled
out only on the rarest occasion. The PM was
only 25 rupees, not a large sum even in
those far-off, pre-inflation days.
Nonetheless, the PM became an avidly sought
after Golden Fleece which, week after week,
inspired intrepid expeditions into the realm
of spoof and satire. And many of the more
successful sallies were by Papiya and Tuktuk.
Of all the greater family JS, I was perhaps
the most grateful for the persistence of the
duo. For, while the bespectacled sketch that
adorned the top of Kookie Kol was of my
colleague Dubby Bhagat, the operative Kookie
who handled the column was me (a piece of JS
trivia revealed here for the first time) and
without Papiya and Tuktuk's energetic
correspondence, I doubt if I'd have been
able to sustain the slot. Before her life
was so viciously cut short, Papiya went on
to earn honours far more esteemable than
Kookie's paltry PM. But I, and perhaps a lot
of others, will remember her at least partly
for her long-ago weekly forays into a
long-lost world of innocence and humour. And
this is why I was in two minds about this
column, still am. For it's a column, as I've
said, not so much about Papiya and the
terrible end she met, as about the business
of laughter and remembering. Is it an
insensitive frivolity, a tasteless
desecration, to counter the dread solemnity
of death — particularly when untimely and
violent — with the memory of mirth?
Mercifully, the mind can't long harbour
pain. Memory is a creative act of
anaesthetic amnesia. Most of us tend to
remember selectively, overlaying the traumas
of the past with recollections of the good
and the pleasant. There is an inevitable
measure of guilt in this partial and
necessary interment of memory. It helps to
ask ourselves if, far from being a callous
escape, laughter finally is the best
remembrance. Our only chance of literally
having the last laugh — or indeed perhaps
the first as well — on our common mortality.
Perhaps remembered laughter is the real
Prize Money beyond any other. And come to
think of it, maybe I'm not in two minds
about this column any more.
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