Not enough malice, too much sex, and alas, no Nehru!

will know that he made a success of the three-point formula that was the manifesto of family reads in those days before the big, bad world of cable TV, namely money, sex and religion. Khushwant Singh ceased to be editor of the Weekly, went on to bigger and better things, but stayed true to his rule-book, even when his attentions had shifted from writing editorials to writing novels.

The novella under review is being touted loosely as based on an account of an affair Nehru had with a god-woman; nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, he does have a god-woman as a principal character, and for good measure, a yogic/tantric guru as bonus: but that's where any similarity with Shraddha Devi or Dhirendra Brahmachari ends.

The hype is expected to have readers queuing up for their quota of salacious gossip (Singh, after all, is almost obsessive about the lives and loves of the Nehru-Gandhis); disappointingly, they won't find any. Instead, they will be treated to Singh's disabused formula that, given his age, appears to be more wishful sinning than sinning.

Even Singh will admit that his mantra is somewhat simplistically applied to the book with none of the twists and turns in the plot other novelists so love. Money? Jai Bhagwan (the protagonist, and not a cry for mercy) decides that independent India will need to power itself with industries, and somewhat effortlessly goes about becoming the richest man in India.

Religion? A god-woman who has a tiger for a pet, bathes nude in the river, and practices tantra. And sex? Ah yes, the sex. One can't help wondering about the distance the writer has travelled from any real experience given that he devotes the most effort (and pages) in an attempt to be dirty. But Brand Khushwant is altogether dated and unlikely to excite the clumsy thumbing of a young readership who can find prurient stuff far more easily on the net.

Even so, it is entirely possible that Burial at Sea could become the pillow book for the young in mofussil towns with somewhat less reach to the Internet; and parents are hardly likely to think of the octogenarian writer as having a harmful influence on the young "" he is, after all, the scholar of the classic study, A History of the Sikhs.

Singh's undoubted charm, like Ruskin Bond's, lies in the apparent simplicity with which he writes which, as any author will tell you, is a more difficult task to achieve than more learned arguments on paper.

His Train to Pakistan touches the heart and the mind because it combines an emotional moment in history with real-life characters and passions and pain. Delhi, though written much later, is dark and brooding, both an ode and a lament to a city that Singh introduces as the living and final abode of emperors and whores, of rulers and eunuchs, a city torn by violence that capriciously surrenders to pleasure.

Burial has no hint of that scholarship, and five years after his last work, less to offer than readers expect. In the autumn of his life, Singh has a right to slow down, but little reason to advance the easy route to sell using sex not so much as invigorating tonic as pathetic aphrodisiac.

If Burial follows the path first trod by The Company of Women, Singh has taken the trouble not to deviate on a journey that is somewhat unnecessarily and unfortunately devoted to the carnal. Perhaps it is the rambling of an ageing mind, or the restlessness of a young heart.

Either way, had the writer chosen to build a story around his somewhat endearing attempt to build a book around the sex and get on with it, he might have succeeded better. Not that the book will not sell; in all probability, it will; but it does Singh, whose contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica is well recognised, no credit, for it is of the genre more readily sold on railway platforms than in urban salons.

Singh began his writing career when there was considerably less to distract the reader, and when his visceral humour tended to qualify him to the post of vanguard of robust writing that appealed to readers across several strata of society.

India is not that innocent any more, and there's more skin on television than malice in Singh's pen. When age has mellowed even Shobha De whose books are now devoted to letters to her children and an airbrushed autobiography, isn't it time Khushwant Singh stopped trying to be a dirty old man?

Burial at Sea
Khushwant Singh
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 198
Price: Rs 275