Remember that chestnut? What happens when three Bengalis come together? You get two Communist parties, and possibly one Durga Puja. So what happens when three Punjabis merge? You get a controversy.

Three elderly Sikhs — one just back home from hospital, the second in the pages of a book and the third sitting right in front of me — are in the news. But the real culprit is on a table in front of me, a nicely packaged book with an attractive green cover. Bhaau, it says in Gurmukhi.

The creator of Bhaau — elder brother in Punjabi — is looking a little distraught. For Darshan Singh, who has written seven or eight books in as many years, has never had to ward off the media before. “I am sorry but I have written better books than this,” he says.

Well, none of his earlier books, straddling a spectrum of urban issues, was seen as a thinly-veiled take on the life of Marxist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet. Parallels have been drawn between Bhaau’s protagonist Karam Singh Kirti and the now ailing former general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). But Singh seeks to stress, almost like a refrain, that the events in the book in Punjabi reflect his own understanding of politics.

“I have been inspired by Surjeet but my book is a work of fiction,” says the 80-year-old author, who started writing his books in the new millennium. “In that sense, I am a man of this century — but only in the literal sense,” he adds dryly.

It all started some three years ago when Singh, who retired from the information department of the Soviet Embassy in Delhi, decided to write a book on the Communist movement. “I wanted to portray interesting facets of the movement, and its highs and lows. But I wasn’t going to write its history — I wanted to do so in fiction. So how do I do it? I need characters, a story line. I need a structure that will tell a story, but at the same time be readable. If you start you shouldn’t be able to put it down. Otherwise who’d be ready to read anything about the Communist party?”

So Kirti was born. Like Surjeet, he grew up in Punjab, was a part of India’s freedom movement, joined the Communists, moved to Delhi, was the general secretary of the largest Marxist party and eventually gave way to failing health and a perceived hardliner. “People say that my hardliner is like Prakash Karat. But I just wanted to portray a hard-core fellow,” he says.

So what is Kirti’s successor called? “P.R. Nambiar,” Singh replies, and laughs somewhat sheepishly. Nambiar, incidentally, has a wife in the party, who is going to join the politburo. “But the character is from Bangalore,” Singh hastens to add. Unlike Karat’s wife, Brinda, he implies, who studied in Dehra Dun and Delhi. “And P.R. hardly appears in two or three pages. But everybody only wants to highlight that.”

The book, published by Chandigarh-based Unistar books (whose representative says it may soon be translated into Hindi and English), essentially deals with a period of two months. “That’s my window,” says Singh. The focus is on government formation — it starts with elections being announced and ends with the results. Kirti, who like Surjeet has friends in every party, brings warring factions together. Kirti urges the unnamed European woman who heads the largest elected party to hold talks with Maharashtra leader Salve, who once had problems with her European origins. For Salve, read Sharad Pawar.

A great many others flit in and out. There is Pehelwan, who has been likened to Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Bal Gopal, who withdraws in favour of his wife after he has been forced to step down as chief minister, seemingly based on Lalu Prasad Yadav. Mayawati makes a brief entry when she announces, after the results, that her doors are barred to everybody but her beautician. Even Amar Singh has a walk-in role, as the uninvited guest Kirti takes to a dinner hosted by the European lady. And Jyoti Basu? “Well, there is Sarad Babu,” sighs Singh.

“But, you see, my book is essentially based on all that I have gathered over the years. I followed the events of government formation from all the newspapers,” he says. “I read newspapers very closely and between the lines — so I can smell and sense a lot of things.”

Singh, who describes himself as a “reluctant writer,” read the dailies, met people and then wrote a series of drafts. Then, before sitting down to pen his final manuscript, he went to see Surjeet at his residence about a year ago.

“I have known him since 1950 when the Communist Party of India was underground. But that doesn’t mean I was chummy with him. We were not friends, but he knew me as a sympathiser,” says Singh, who has been close to the Left from the mid-1940s when he was a young boy in Pakistan. “He was a good mass leader and a good party leader, so he knew everybody.”

Singh told Surjeet about his book and that his protagonist was based on him. He asked him for his help to reconstruct the summer of 2004, when the National Democratic Alliance government fell and the United Progressive Alliance cobbled together a majority. Surjeet, whose memory had started failing him by then, couldn’t recognise Singh, but asked him for a set of questions.

“But unfortunately dementia had set in by then,” says Singh. “His friends told me that Surjeet wouldn’t be able to help me, because he had forgotten everything.”

Singh, however, is certain that if Surjeet’s mind was as agile as it was once, he, for one, would never have had a problem with his book. “Surjeet was not the kind of a man who would say, don’t say this about me; don’t write that.”

Midway through the conversation in his well-appointed home in a leafy enclave in south Delhi, Kirti merges with Surjeet. Singh speaks of one, and seamlessly moves on to the other. It becomes clear that when he is talking about Kirti, he is also referring to Surjeet.

Often described as a power broker by his political opponents, Surjeet, Singh points out, belonged to the old school of politicians — like his own Kirti. “Surjeet started his life with eight acres of land; even now he has eight acres. One of his sons runs a small restaurant in England, the other looks after the land in Punjab. They could have, as is the practice now, also joined politics and taken up positions but they didn’t.”

But Kirti — and here Singh sticks to his protagonist’s name — also led factions, and ousted other powerful leaders from the Punjab party. “He is a human being; he has his weaknesses,” says Singh.

Singh, clearly, has his friends in the Left parties. The writer, who translated Turgenev, Dostoveysky and Chekov into Punjabi from Russian (he lived in Moscow for four years in the Sixties when he picked up the language), knows the inside stories. He talks about a Surjeet aide who walked to office every day, about love affairs among the Marxists, and how accessible Surjeet was.

“Surjeet was like a railway man or a policeman, on duty for 24 hours. Nambiar is not like that, he is a 10-5 man,” says Singh.

The Surjeet era, Singh says, is dead and gone. He has a scene in the book where the Bengali Marxist, Sarad Babu, drops in on Kirti. “I just showed two old men sitting there. There are tired, old comrades; fatigued, but still yoked. Kirti tells Sarad Babu, ‘You have changed the image of the Communist — you drink, your son is an industrialist, but still you are clean. But I have not done anything and still…’”

The meeting, Singh adds, didn’t happen — but could easily have occurred. “Jyoti Babu must have his daily drink — his image is that of a European Communist. My protagonist doesn’t drink; he only has tea with a lot of sugar.”

Darshan Singh rues the passing of an era in Left politics. “The Marxists don’t have a vision of a big party; they are comfortable where they are. Soon they will be a tiny party, sitting quietly in AKG Bhawan like the CPI sits in Ajoy Bhawan,” he says. “I feel, for I’m an older Communist than Prakash Karat.”

Singh’s next book is on a globalised family. You can almost hear the sighs of relief from Ajoy Bhawan and AKG Bhawan.