ABSTRACT
Krishna Paul was Joginder Paul’s wife, friend, partner, first auditor, muse, and keeper of all of his memories. Joginder and Krishna married under extremely dramatic circumstances, and the Pauls had to move to Nairobi in Kenya very soon after as a precondition to it. Krishna Paul is also known for her work on the Joginder Paul corpus, having translated/transliterated the bulk of his Urdu fiction into Hindi and some into English. In this essay, first published in Hindi as “Main Hee Janoo” and later translated into English as “Only I Would Know” for a book of Krishna Paul’s conversations with Chandana Dutta on her life and times with her writer husband, she discloses how Paul lived as he wrote and wrote as he lived. The essay reveals how his behaviour and philosophy in private life was a mirror to what he created in his fiction, his unpretentious simplicity, his capacity for inclusiveness, and his oneness with all his fictional characters.
