Son rise: Zafar with Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie

In the name of the father

When Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989, the Iranian leader not only blighted the life of the author, who had to live surrounded by armed British police for a decade, but also caused deep distress to Zafar, Salman’s son by his first wife, Clarissa Luard.

“I don’t feel bitter about what happened, but it has affected the way I behave,” says Zafar, now 26, in quite a moving piece he has penned for Tatler magazine. “I can be a cynical bastard. The greatest side effect is my strong dislike of organised religion.”

Since Zafar is now into something called “party planning”, Salman, who is based in New York, apparently asked his friends in London to call on his son if they needed assistance with organising corporate entertainment.

Geordie Greig, Tatler’s editor, reveals: “Zafar came to see me and we had a bit of chat.”

One thing led to another and Geordie persuaded Zafar to write his “fatwa diaries”, which appear in this month’s Tatler.

“It hardly needed any changes,” adds Geordie.

Zafar has told of the early death of his mother from cancer, missing a father who couldn’t be there for obvious reasons and going to a prep school where some parents wanted the headmaster to expel him because they feared his presence endangered their children. “The headmaster bravely refused,” he points out.

When he was 21, Zafar was taken to India by his father. “People assume I can’t know my father well, that we couldn’t possibly be close, yet the opposite is true,” he writes.

Master Zafar exhibits an engaging line in self-deprecating humour: “I wasn’t a great student and have always remembered a comment from one of my English teachers who joked about how he would never forget having to sit Salman Rushdie down at parents’ evening and explain his son was crap at English literature.”

However, from what I’ve seen, Zafar should consider expanding his Tatler article into a book.

Lawfully yours

It is easy to see why Robert Alexander, Queen’s Counsel, who died last week, aged 69, was called the “best barrister of his generation”.

Lord Alexander of Weedon, as he became, was cricket mad and happy to serve as chairman of the MCC from 2000-2001. This was richly ironic because he had once represented the very person loathed virtually as anti-Christ by Lord’s ? the Australian magnate Kerry Packer.

The latter’s crime was to use a former England captain, Tony Grieg, to recruit some of the best players of the day for what was then ridiculed as a “cricket circus”, played by people in “coloured pyjamas”, but is now called one-dayers.

The ICC and the England’s Test and County Cricket Board ruled that anyone who went with Packer would be banned from the first-class game. But the outcasts alleged this constituted “restraint of trade” and hired Alexander to represent them.

Wide eyed I was in the High Court every day to see some of my heroes give evidence. At the end of one day which finished with a particularly clever piece of cross-examination by Alexander, I chanced my journalistic arm and wrote a note somewhere to the effect that “Mr Alexander, QC, wore the smug smile of a bowler who has taken a wicket with the last ball of the day”.

The next morning, Alexander, who was 6ft 6in tall, summoned me and shocked me by thanking me profusely for that last line. He won the case, enabling Packer to change cricket for ever.

The only Tory MP of Asian origin in the House of Commons, Shailesh Vara, 45, remembers Alexander for another reason. At the Tory party conference of 2000, Alexander called Vara, now MP for the rural seat of North-West Cambridgeshire, a “rising star” and marked him out as a “future Conservative Party leader”.

Shailesh, who tells me he is travelling to India on January 1 as part of a “Conservative friends of India” parliamentary delegation (“Indian boy goes back to mother country as British MP”), pays tribute to his “good friend”: “It’s a tragedy he’s died at such a young age. For the pre-eminent barrister of his generation, he had no airs and graces.”

SING ALONG: The two CDs released by Reynold d’Silva

Tune in

The music known as Gregorian chants ? a form of monophonic, unaccompanied singing developed in the Catholic church over a thousand years ago ? first came to my attention because of Nirad C. Chaudhuri.

In his last few days of his life before he died on August 1, 1999, he scrawled a note which could only be deciphered by his youngest son, Prithvi.

Niradbabu had wanted “Gregorian chants”, Prithvi said later.

Later, I learnt that this music was traditionally sung by monks during religious services and is credited to Pope Gregory I (590-604), though it is now claimed that Gregorian chants were developed 200 years later during the time of Emperor Charlemagne.

Let’s fast forward to last week when a CD of Gregorian chants was issued by good Goan boy, Reynold d’Silva, managing director of Silva Screen Records whose stock in trade is releasing western film scores.

The recording for the CD was made in September last year at a performance by “Hortus Musicus” at the Toom Church, Tallinn, Estonia.

Reynolds’s music goes from the sublime to the, well, sublime ? he has also simultaneously issued his first compilation of Bollywood songs. The latter include Aayega aanewala (Lata Manageshkar) from the film Mahal, Chura liya hai tum ne (Asha Bhonsle and Mohammed Rafi) from Yaadon Ki Baaraat, and Ek ladki ko dekha (Kumar Sanu) from 1942: A Love Story.

“We should have done it years ago,” he adds.

Natwarspeak

Natwar Singh is a man I have known for a long time, partly because he was the deputy Indian high commissioner who lived in “Sun House” in Hampstead, north London. In London, he laughed a lot.

What he enjoyed doing best was reviewing books for the Financial Times, talking about E.M. Forster and how India and England were ruled by Cambridge men (true at the time). He once proudly showed me his extensive library in Delhi.

Those diplomats who have become authors in his watch (eg. Vikas Swarup, the director of his office) speak very highly of him. He would launch their books and give them time off to do promotional tours. I wouldn’t be surprised if Natwar is keeping a no-holds-barred diary.

STAMP IT OUT: The stamp issued by the Royal Mail

Tittle tattle

The Royal Mail has brought out a beautiful new 68p stamp based on a painting which hangs in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) in Mumbai. It’s a lovely stamp to use on Christmas cards to India.

However, a group calling itself the Hindu Forum says Hindus are offended by the stamp because of the tilak and kumkum markings on the man and the woman respectively. Apparently there are also “conversion issues” in India.

It’s all very bizarre. Everyone I know loves the image.

My view is a) the stamp is great and b) Hindus shouldn’t stir up hatred against Christians ? not in India, not in England. Why not live and let live?