HE should not surprise anyone that a book by Khushwant Singh is called The Company of Women. The title is apt, as this is a rollicking sexual romp through a whole company of women by the chief character, Mohan Kumar.
You could ask why, at 84, an author who can write a scholarly history of the Sikhs, and knows so much about natural history, and writes so elegantly and with such ease, should limit himself to this kind of novel. The answer appears to be that this is what he enjoys.
In the author's note, Singh admits what Mohan Kumar does is something he'd have liked to have done, and says the title could just as well have been "Fantasies of an Octogenarian".
Of course, there's much more to Mohan Kumar than just sex. The words "Havana cigar" and "Mercedes" on the first page itself indicate how well this son of a railway official has done in life.
He won a scholarship to Princeton. Never truly at home in the US, his love and loyalty to his widowed father makes him reject the Green Card option and return home.
He gets into import-export and, before you know it, owns a whole house in Delhi's Maharani Bagh. He is, though, old-fashioned. He is unfailingly polite, treats women as ladies, and thinks a good night out is going to the Delhi Gymkhana or the India International Centre.
We don't get to know much about Mohan Kumar's business techniques. This is, after all, a sexual biography. The sexploits don't start until he's a student in the US where he scores with scores of women, partly due to his reputation for having the largest penis ever seen.
There is a cartoon quality about the scenes when women see it for the first time, and express their admiration. Veni, vidi, vicichange order in his case - he sees, he comes and he conquers.
Mohan Kumar is scrupulously secular in his approach: all that is required is for his conquests to be female - mercifully there are no hijras. He cements the SAARC spirit even-handedly by intimacy with the wife of a minister from "Azad Kashmir" and with a Sri Lankan diplomat.
The one disaster in his life is his marriage to a spoilt, nagging, rich Punjabi brat. The marriage breaks down and he places an advertisement for a concubine. What he needs is a short-stay, live-in relationship with no strings attached. The results are interesting.
He distances himself from his sweeper-woman, and enjoys different characters such as a bespectacled PhD lecturer in English and a masseuse from Goa. Choosing women of different shapes, colours and sizes for his protagonist also makes it easier for the author to avoid monotony in the many descriptions of the sexual act.
Mohan Kumar manages to be fond of all his women. But then that's not difficult - they are all fantasy ones. With the exception of his wife, they adore having sex with him, want as much as possible, are never unpleasant, questioning or over-emotional and choose their own moment to say goodbye. He never even has the inconvenience of having to dump them.
But not all is perfect. The novel ends on a surprising note and leads you to the conclusion that has been dawning all along. For their own good, the best thing to do with men like Mohan Kumar is to dose them with a medicine that has an effect opposite of Viagra.
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