Chapter Four My First Proposal Our house crouched on a spur of the hills overlooking the cantonment. It was separated from the civil station by a belt of trees hiding the lake that gives Sagar which means 'the sea' its name. On winter mornings we saw the lake in a blanket of silver mist rising above the trees. An orchard of mangoes, guavas and custard apple trees surrounded the house, but its real pride was a solitary and profuse mulberry tree. Our compound must have been vast. As children we had no idea how far it extended into the hills at the back; we just took it for granted that everything within range of our walks was ours or at least our grandmother's. There was no human habitation behind the house, and the jungle beyond the orchard was friendly, sparse and open. it harboured no dangerous animals, only hares, partridges and an occasional jackal. <><><><><><><><><><><><> My grandmother was a restless person, an indefatigable traveller and a compulsive visitor of exhibitions. These were the great events of the era between the two World Wars. If there was one within range (which meant within about 500 miles) she would find some excuse to make the trip the need for a new car, curtains or furnishing material or for a visit to the doctor. I invariably accompanied her on these jaunts. In December 1929 my youngest uncle, Kunjar Samsher, who was training to be an air pilot in Delhi, came home for a holiday. He mentioned that Delhi was to have an exhibition of aeroplanes and a flying display early in the new year. That was Page 30 enough for Muan. 'Oh, I should love to see it,' she announced. 'In fact, we'll all go.' My grandmother had developed her own style of travelling. The journey was made in a large seven-seater car, usually a Buick, with a lorry for the servants and luggage following behind. The luggage included a fair-sized tent because she wanted to be able to set up camp whenever she pleased and not be bound to hotels or dak- bungalows. Apart from the two drivers, she took a mechanic, her own two maids, a male cook, a female cook and a couple of extra servants. Each member of the family was also accompanied by a maid or manservant. Wherever she went, she had to have her own establishment, preferably a bungalow or in Bombay or Calcutta a spacious flat in a quiet district. Since such accommodation had to be hired for at least a couple of months, our city visits were always fairly protracted. So now she despatched my uncle and his wife in advance to hire a bungalow in Delhi. One of her sons, Hem Samsher, and his wife accompanied us in the Buick, and I had prevailed on my grandmother to let my favourite cousin, Prem, come with us. We set out from Sagar at the crack of dawn and towards the afternoon we stopped for refreshments and for stretching our legs in King George's Park (now Mahatma Gandhi Park) in Gwalior. The scale of the surroundings must have been too vast to have made any particular impression on me I was ten years old at the time even though I have since thought how our dust-grimed car and its travel-weary passengers must have resembled a detail on a giant Bruegel canvas. This part of Gwalior has the sort of grandeur that the Mughals sought to create in Delhi and Agra, but with less success since neither city has the natural advantage of a rearing hill fort. Here is a setting that calls out for a panoramic display of pomp, rank upon rank of marching soldiers, a charge by plumed lancers or a parade of caparisoned elephants. Blocking off one side and providing a backdrop of stupefying dimensions is the fort itself; opposite lies the white colonnaded expanse of Jaivilas Palace. In between is the stage, a mile or more of immaculate lawns, formal gardens, noble stands of trees and marble pavilions. Page 31 Anyhow, on this winter afternoon, when the edges of our ears tingled with pain and felt like wood, there were no elephants, no cavalry; indeed, not even many people out in the park. We had stopped beside a tiger-house, and it drew me like a magnet. As I stood staring in awe at a big tiger sprawled in front of his cave, I became aware of a stir among the park attendants and the few strollers. Next I heard the clatter of horses' hooves, and all turned to gaze at a boy on a white horse and a girl on a black horse, both of which seemed far too big for them. Close behind rode a man in a turban. They passed by, chatting amongst themselves, and were presently swallowed up by the shrubbery near the enormous gates of the palace. 'Jivajirao Maharaj!' an attendant explained in hushed excitement: 'And his sister, Kamalaraje.' So this boy was the Scindia master of the Gwalior palace, the fort, the park and the tiger. Surely, there should have been some sign from the sky, a flash of lightning to mark the tableau on my memory. But if a star skipped in its course, it did so unseen in the thin January sunlight. In fact, there was nothing to tell me that I had been offered a glimpse of my future. It was getting late, and we had to hurry if we did not want to find ourselves after nightfall in the area of the dreaded Chambal dacoits. Uncle Hem hustled us back into the Buick, and soon we were skirting the rock-fort on our way to Delhi. My thoughts were of the tiger sprawled lazily on the bare rock and of the wonders that the imperial city held in store, not of the boy and the girl on their magnificent horses. <><><><><><><><><><><><> New Delhi was not yet fully built. It was just parts of a town flung about on an arid landscape, bare and unlived-in. We travelled vast distances over dusty roads to see great monuments of pink sandstone, but many were still cluttered by piles of building material. We goggled from the permitted distance at the chopped- off dome of the Viceroy's palace. We decided that the city's vaunted shopping centre, Connaught Place, was not to be compared with our favourite Chowringhee of Calcutta, and we daily consumed enormous teas at Davico's or Wenger's, the haunts, we were assured, of Delhi's society. Page 32 At the exhibition we had come to see, the men trying to sell the various types of aeroplanes treated my grandmother as though she were a potential customer. In retrospect this does not seem so fatuous, since the aeroplanes cost little more than the more expensive cars. We watched the frail gaudilycoloured flying machines being put through their paces, like horses at a rodeo, soaring into the air, flying upside down, circling with their engines shut off and writing messages in the sky with coloured smoke. After six hectic weeks we motored back to Sagar and to routine. This visit to Delhi, which the Raj had built to proclaim its invincible presence, coincided with what was to prove a watershed in the lives of most Indians of my generation. It was while we were still there that the nationalist leaders declared 26 January 1930 as our 'Independence Day', and launched a campaign of 'Civil Disobedience'. The first shot in this campaign was fired a few weeks later when Mahatma Gandhi set out on his march to the seaside village of Dandi on the west coast. There, in open defiance of the law, he made a spoonful of salt by boiling sea water in a pan. To the guardians of the Empire this was nothing short of an act of war against the King Emperor, as the British monarch was invariably referred to in India. For this crime Gandhi was clapped into jail for a four-year term. In the wake of his arrest more than a hundred thousand people rushed to break the law in one way or another. That spoonful of salt had set up a tidal wave that would eventually sweep away the Raj. To grow up in that era was to be caught up in the tide, to learn to use such words as 'nationalism' and 'patriotism', to be roused to a pitch of frenzy by slogans, to look for heroes to praise and for villains to curse or, for someone brought up as I was, to seek redress in prayer. <><><><><><><><><><><><> My uncles, who were born in Nepal but had lived in India all their lives, never suffered from what I later learned to call a crisis of identity. They, and even their children, regarded themselves as citizens of Nepal. They professed disinterest in Page 33 the freedom struggle; the problems of their adopted land were not their problems. Nepal was independent; the British had twice attempted to conquer it, but the Gurkhas had thrown them back. Their country had its own king, its own Maharaja; it was not ruled by an alien power beyond the seas. What pride they took in that fact. Since children customarily took on the citizenship of their fathers, I was unarguably Indian: a cuckoo in the Nepalese nest, a gulam or slave in this conquered land. The distinction must have always been there, unspoken, but it had emerged in the course of some family argument. Thus, to the normal confusion of growing up, was added the difficulty of reconciling the pride of my Nepalese connections with the shame of being born an Indian. My grandmother's unabashed preference for me over her sons' children produced an additional complex. Sensitive to jibes that I was spoilt by my grandmother because I had no home of my own, I was also at an age when one tended to overreact. I suffered agonies and slid into paroxysms of selfpity. In these dark moods I would convince myself that I was destined to suffer such humiliations because my mother had died and left me among strangers. There were times when I worked myself into states of acute depression, imagining that I saw visions of my mother calling out to me from some remote place in the firmament. Once I made myself ill enough to take to my bed; I was so convinced that I was going to die that I solemnly began to say my goodbyes to my uncles and cousins. Luckily, my grandmother had an exorcist in the form of the resident witch-doctor. Biray was a wizened little man with a face like the inside of a walnut, and he wore a single earring. He brought with him a sigri or small charcoal stove with a ready-made fire and squatted down on a board placed near my bed. He mumbled prayers as he blew on the fire to set up a blaze, and then he began heating an evil-looking branding knife. I could have sworn that its edge became red hot. I stared at him as he picked up the knife. I was unable to utter a whimper, caught between paralysis and hypnosis. Braced for the ordeal, I waited to be branded, for the jolt of pain, the sizzling sound of the knife, the smell of burning flesh. Biray took my left hand in his and applied the knife below the crook of the elbow. It was barely warm. Page 34 'The spirit has left the girl,' he told my grandmother. And so it had, or at least my illness had. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Like the other children of the household, I could speak Hindi as fluently as Gurkhali, but I had very little contact with Hindi literature. The history we learned was that contained in the little green and red oilcloth-covered Macmillan or Longman textbooks, showing how heroically the men of the East India Company had conquered India and what prosperity their rule had brought. I don't remember at what age I began to be aware of an urge to learn Hindi, but by the time I was fifteen I had persuaded my grandmother to appoint a Hindi teacher for me. Rameshwar Prasad Srivastava, Master-saab as I called him, turned out to have that rare mixture of erudition, common sense and humour. He was trim, dark and neatly dressed, carried himself with quiet dignity and spoke with a voice that was perfect for reciting poetry aloud. He handled books with reverence and read them with me (with a slight inclination of the head) as though he too was reading them for the first time. Together we plunged into the core of Hindi literature and, almost without it being explained, I learnt to distinguish between flamboyance and elegance, verbiage and scholarship. Master-saab hunted out history books, in Hindi as well as in English, and through them I began to learn about the pre-British past of my country. I discovered that we had had a vigorous civilization which, under the shadow of the empire, had curled up and withered; great literature, painting, music, sculpture, scholarship and, above all, a religion based on the bedrock of a philosophy which had withstood the convulsions of history for thousands of years. To be introduced to this heritage was like breaking the seals to Aladdin's cave. What Master-saab taught me led me to realize the privilege of having been born an Indian, the inheritor of a great tradition. A sure sign of a resurgent India was the emergence of its own heroes. For a century or more, we had been disciplined into adopting Britain's heroes as our own: Horatio Nelson, Gordon of Khartoum and even the conquerors of our own Page 35 land, such as Robert Clive, Arthur Wellesley or Henry Lawrence. Now at last we had a crop of Indian men and women with the hallmarks of authentic heroes. Believing in the power of prayer, a plea for India's liberation from bondage became incorporated in my daily puja. A picture of Mother India, festooned in chains, found a place of honour in my prayer alcove, right next to the idol of my private god, Gopal Krishna. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Towards the end of 1935, Lucknow was to hold an exhibition, and it would have been unlike Grandmother if she had kept away. A wedding of a distant relative in nearby Kanpur gave her the necessary excuse and we set off in her caravan. From a bungalow in Kanpur, hired for the winter, we commuted to Lucknow for the exhibition, sometimes staying with relatives for a day or two. Then I discovered that my father too had come to Lucknow, ostensibly to show the exhibition to his new wife, whom I now met for the first time. My stepmother was only six years older than me, and I took to her instantly. We have remained close friends ever since. All these years I had seen little of my father. I had never even gone to stay with him. Whenever his work brought him to Sagar, he always paid me a visit, bringing a small present, such as a box of sweets, or a piece of silk for a blouse. These visits were both infrequent certainly not more than two or three in a year and brief. Nonetheless, they had the effect of drawing me closer to him. I loved him and venerated him more than any other man, and nothing heard in my grandmother's house would ever alter my affection and regard for him. My father, then in his mid-forties, was an impressive figure. Tall, handsome and superbly built, he carried himself with a self- assurance that must have come from his position as Deputy Collector in the Provincial Civil Service. Although his friends found him polite and easygoing, he had a reputation for being a brusque and outspoken official, never open to bribery. His superiors, however, seem to have found his integrity and adherence to principles a shade too rigid: he was subjected to frequent transfers and must have been the only Page 36 officer of his cadre to retire after more than thirty years of service in the same rank and position as he had started. At the Lucknow exhibition I appointed myself as a sort of guide to my stepmother, who was unaccustomed to big cities and bewildered by the scale and grandeur of everything about her. As we were going through a Government Information Centre, which contained large maps and charts showing how the country was governed, and I was showing off my knowledge with my usual exuberance, I noticed that a young man, with a pear-shaped face and in immaculate Western attire, had attached himself to our party and was listening with undisguised interest to everything I had to say. I took him to be an official connected with the exhibition, since he seemed to know my father well. He trailed along with us for the best part of an afternoon, but I was not introduced to him and I don't recall that he addressed a single word to either my stepmother or myself. A day or two later, in Kanpur, I received a seven-page letter from this young man pouring his heart out to me and proposing marriage. It seemed that he had already spoken to my father, but that my father had declined to press his proposal. Although I was not aware of it then, the proposal must have put my father in an acutely embarrassing position for Mr Singh as I shall call him was a member of the Indian Civil Service. The Raj had its own caste system, more inflexible than that of the Hindus. The members of the ICS, mostly recruited from the British upper middle class but with a few handpicked Indians grudgingly let in, were the country's elite and were generally known as, and by the peasants literally believed to be, 'heaven-born'. To my father, merely a provincial civil servant, Mr Singh must have represented a rare prize as a son-in-law. But the proposal was flawed, because Mr Singh's horoscope was dominated by Mangal or Mars. In spite of its name, which means 'auspicious' or 'festive', Mangal is an unlucky star. For a man to have it in his horoscope means that his wife will die young and vice versa for a woman. The only solution, of course, is for a Mangal to marry a Mangal; but I have no Mangal in my horoscope. I did not reply to the letter; to have done so would have been Page 37 a transgression of the rules of behaviour. I don't think I was put off so much by the Mangal as by the age difference: he was thirty and I was barely sixteen. Besides, what little I had seen of Mr Singh had not bowled me over. I tore up the letter, and Mr Singh's proposal was never mentioned again. Years later, Mr Singh became the centre of one of the most sensational and sordid trials of the time. A maidservant in the Singh household died in mysterious circumstances and Mr Singh was accused of having murdered her. After a protracted trial he was declared to be 'not guilty', and indeed there was a suspicion that he might have been the victim of a frame-up. But the publicity surrounding the trial of such a senior civil servant so upset Mr Singh's wife that she committed suicide. A little later Mr Singh too took his own life. I have often wondered whether it was not the Mangal at work. Chapter Five Going to College In 1937 I made my first-ever visit to my father's house. He was stationed in Jhansi then, only 140 miles from Sagar seven hours by train. I took my own maid with me, and my grandmother provided an escort of two of her most trusted retainers, who were charged to look after me and bring me back. My father looked as pleased as Punch to have me visit him, and I began to look upon him as a guide and mentor to whom I could turn whenever I needed advice or help. I was welcomed as though I were a long-lost daughter by his new wife, whom, almost in the same spirit, I took to calling Mummiji or 'Respected Mother'. My father was still keen on getting me married off without delay. A week or so later he took me to Banda, 120 miles away, where we met an old friend of his, an affluent zamindar or hereditary landowner, called Chowdhari K. Singh. He told me that it had been arranged between them that I should marry Mr Singh's son, and now it was only up to us to give our consent to the match. After we had been in Banda for a few days, the reason for our visit must have become common knowledge in the neighbourhood. One afternoon the daughter of one of the neighbours, whom I had often seen in the house, wanted to see me alone. Almost in a teasing vein, she made tender enquiries as to whether I had any objection to marrying Mr Chowdhari's son. I told her, in all honesty, that I would be happy to marry him if my parents desired it, upon which she suddenly fainted. This caused quite a bit of panic in the Chowdhari house and they had to send for a doctor to revive her. When I realised Page 39 that she was violently in love with the young man, I then and there made up my mind that it would be heartless to break up her romance. So when, a day or two later, my consent was formally sought, I pretended that I was not interested in the proposal. I am happy to say that Chowdhari Singh's son did, sometime later, marry the infatuated girl and that their marriage turned out to be an unqualified success. This stay in Banda was, however, to give my life a totally new direction. It was my first experience of living among people with a broader culture than my own, for the family was known for its progressive views. If I was mildly shocked by their heresies, I was also impressed by their unwillingness to conform. By their lights, even my father stood revealed as an obscurantist, someone who had too readily absorbed the official attitudes and outlook of the Raj. Here neither Rana taboos nor the Raj's rules were held to be sacred; all dogma, all institutions, new-fangled or traditional, were treated with irreverence. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Chowdhari, a well-known proponent of women's emancipation, was all for my continuing my education. Being an ardent follower and devotee of that high-priestess of theosophy, Mrs Annie Besant, he persuaded my father that the women's college founded by her in Benaras was the right place for me. So, by the time we returned to Jhansi, it was settled. Since it was all but certain that my grandmother would object to such a plan on principle, we decided that I should stay on with my father until the colleges opened, and go straight to Benaras from there. Now everything depended on my passing the matriculation examination. I did pass. My father busied himself with getting the necessary forms and I was admitted to the Besant Women's College. It was important that neither my maid nor my two menservants should get wind of what was afoot. On my last day in Jhansi I sent my maid off on an errand which would keep her away for several hours and busied myself stuffing my most fashionable clothes into an enormous black trunk. On the day-long train journey to Benaras, I was accompanied by one of my father's step-brothers. Page 40 It was only after he had seen us off at the railway station and returned home that my father judged it safe to explain to my servants that I had gone to Benaras to join a college and that they were free to return to Sagar. They had formed their own impressions of what had really happened. Aware that there had been talk of my marrying a rich zamindar's son, they were convinced that this was precisely what had been accomplished, and that my father had secretly sent me off to my husband's house. They went wailing to my grandmother with such garbled accounts that she made up her mind that I had been sold by my father for a high price. She had already called in her lawyers to file a suit against him for abduction when she received my letter from college, full of apologies and explanations. I had written as soon as I possibly could, exonerating both the servants and my father. I said soothing things about how comfortable I was in my hostel room and how good the food was, but that I missed her more than I could say. It was a long letter, and my eyes brimmed with tears as I wrote it. The bravado and excitement that had gripped me at the thought of going off on my own into the world had been replaced by an awareness of guilt, of having betrayed someone who had brought me up and had been so unfailingly kind and understanding. <><><><><><><><><><><><> It was perhaps just as well that, in those early college days, I did not have much leisure to feel sorry for myself. There were adjustments to make which I had not foreseen. For the first time in my life I was entirely on my own, without some member of the family to run to and, worse still, without a servant to do my bidding. The hostel attached to the college was much smaller than our Sagar house, and in it I had to share a room. My black trunk suddenly began to look monstrously large, and when I began to unpack some of my belongings I noticed that my room-mate could hardly keep her eyes away from them. At first I thought that it was my modest array of idols that had aroused her interest, but soon discovered that it was my clothes that held her rivetted. I felt a Page 41 little embarrassed by her stares, but thought no more of it at the time and went to bed. The next morning I went to class dressed in one of my silk saris and wearing my everyday jewellery, which included a rather showy nose-ring made of a diamond solitaire. More and more of my fellow students turned their heads to glance at me, whispering among themselves. Surely, something was wrong. Slowly it dawned on me that nearly all of them were wearing plain cotton saris and no jewellery. It took me a couple of days to realize that even the Besant College, for all its preoccupation with liberalism, was stiff with its own orthodoxies. Here most of the students were followers of the theosophical movement, committed to vegetarianism, and practitioners of the cult of Plain Living and High Thinking. Whether or not there was high thinking among my collegemates, I was made overwhelmingly conscious of their zest for plain living. But then plain living had a much more powerful and persuasive prophet than Annie Besant: none other than the Mahatma himself. It had become a weapon in his non-violent war against the British. At his bidding, millions of people had made bonfires of their fanciest garments and begun to dress themselves like peasants. Millions, but not me. I had always been too fond of fine clothes and jewellery to give up wearing them. Here in the Besant Women's College I was converted by the urge to conform. I did not want to be marked as an outcast in a colony of plain livers. Feeling a little like a thief hiding stolen goods, I took off my nose-ring and put it away. From then on I resolved to boycott all foreign-made goods, even though it would mean never wearing the lovely French and Italian saris and accessories that I had so assiduously collected over the years. At the very first opportunity I went into the bazaar and bought myself half a dozen cotton saris and material to make blouses. That night, I sat up in my room till the early hours of the morning laboriously hand-stitching a blouse. That first trip to the bazaar brought home to me how scrupulously the staff of the college themselves practised the cult of plain living, and also how the cult had brought in its wake its own snobberies. Whenever one of the girls wanted to Page 42 go into town, she had to get a member of staff to go with her. They came readily enough, but what was awkward for us was that they insisted on paying their share of the fare. There were neither buses nor taxis, so we had to take a tonga or, an even more plebeian vehicle, the jhatka. Since it was unseemly for a Besant College girl to sit in the front seat with the driver, the tonga could, with the chaperone, take only two or, if they were very thin, three girls. In the jhatka, which had no seats but only a platform on which you had to squat, anything up to half-a-dozen could be squeezed in. It became a point of honour with us to prefer the jhatka to the tonga. That way, the share of the staff member who went with us came to much less. <><><><><><><><><><><><> In conformity with its dedication to plain living, our hostel catered only for vegetarians. Since I was used to giving up eating meat, fish and eggs for four months every year during the period of chaturmas, this was no great deprivation to me. And if I sorely missed the number and variety of dishes that regularly appeared at my grandmother's table, even during the months of self-imposed vegetarianism, I don't think I complained about the plainness and monotony of hostel food half as much as some of the flag-bearers of plain living. The first friend in college I made was a girl from the far south, who was a stranger to this part of India. Although she spoke English well, she knew not a word of Hindi. Being much more at home in English than the other hostel girls, it was perhaps natural that she should be drawn to me. I began to teach her Hindi, and by the end of term she was quite fluent in it. I made friends with half-a-dozen other girls as well; we formed a group of our own, doing things together, sharing common interests, gossip and a few secrets. One of the girls was married and I remember how we would listen avidly to her stories of the wonder and romance of wedded life, how we all waited with vicarious anticipation for the fat weekly letter that her husband never failed to write, how she would carry it away to read in private, her face flushed and her eyes shining, and how, for days afterwards, we would pester her to tell us what it contained. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Page 43 Benaras is a holy place, the Mecca and the Rome and the Jerusalem of Hinduism. The mother of rivers, the Ganges, sweeps past its phalanx of temples in a majestic arc. Pilgrims flock to it in their millions, and thousands come here merely to die, as my grandfather had done. But to the inmates of our hostel, the Ganges was no more than an awesome presence to be glimpsed only when we went to the bazaar in chaperoned groups for our shopping, or were allowed out to see an approved film at one or other of the city's cinemas. We led a sheltered life, superintended by a portly and stern-faced spinster from Maharashtra, whom we called Mohan Tai. A self-righteous prickly woman, she took pride in running a tight ship. Her eyes, magnified and distorted by thick lenses, would flash fire at the slightest infringement of her barrage of rules. We all stood in awe of her and concocted impracticable plans for defying her authority, but we must have secretly admired her too. I remember one incident when Mohan Tai refused to let us go and see a film which was being shown in one of the local cinemas. It was called Mukti and it was made by a company called New Theatres. Their earlier pictures had been immensely popular and their songs had caught the fancy of young and old alike. But in this latest offering Tai had detected a nude statuette which was shown in one of the scenes. I remember getting into a heated argument with Tai about the merits of these earlier films and how a film company with such a reputation could not possibly produce a film that would corrupt the morals of young girls. It was to no avail. Tai did not even tell us about the nude statuette, but lost her temper and ordered us back to our rooms. We were furious and talked at length of retaliation. I spent half the night tossing in bed, trying to devise a plan to redress what I was convinced was a great injustice. The next morning I tried to talk the other girls into going on a hunger strike. Alas, my suggestion was not received with much enthusiasm. We were at an age when meals were all but indispensable. The 'injustice' simmered for a week or so and then died. The term progressed. The skies darkened with clouds and the monsoon broke loose on cue. The half-moon of the river filled out to become a vast brown lake, its waters swirling Page 44 through the lower-level temples. Then as abruptly as they had come, the rains went, the skies cleared and the Ganges lost its bloated look and became sedate and serene once again. The temple spires glistened in the sun. I was no longer an outsider, but part of the life of the hostel and the college. I look back on my two years in Benaras with fondness. I revelled in the extra-curricular aspects of hostel and college life and took part in musical programmes and in plays. In my second year I graduated to being an organizer of these activities. I took extra lessons in music and art. It was only towards the end of the last term that I got down to serious study, keeping awake at nights to make up for earlier neglect. Then came the examinations and the sudden wrench of parting from friends. My father had meanwhile been transferred to Mirzapur, almost next door to Benaras. It was to his house that I went for my summer holidays. The house was in turmoil because one of my father's brothers was getting married in the village of their birth, Gangni. I went along with them, on a trip that turned out to be an exercise in search of my roots. Gangni is not far from Agra. Remote and forlorn, the village was only approachable by a dusty cart-track. The house in which my father was born was no different from the dwellings of the other villagers, stunted and built of mud-bricks with uneven wall surfaces which were painted with crude goodluck signs on both sides of the front door and, at the back, were encrusted with drying cowpats for the winter fuel. I was not conscious of any sense of let-down; two years among the plain-livers had changed more than my way of dressing. Rather, I was filled with a sense of awe and pride that someone who had been born in such a house, in such a village, should have struggled against caste and clan prejudices, have risen in the world entirely through his own efforts and ability, and been sought as a son-in-law by a man who had so nearly become the Maharaja of Nepal. In June came the results. All the girls in our group had passed. I was determined to continue my studies, and this time my grandmother made no objection. I managed to get admission to the same Isabella Thoburn Women's College in Lucknow that my mother had so briefly attended. Here I found Page 45 to my great pleasure that I was sharing a room in the hostel with one of our group from Benaras. The College was a venerable institution, the most prestigious in the entire province. Life seemed to be far less restricted and preoccupied with plain living than in the Benaras college. I at once felt at home, made new friends and plunged into a variety of social activities. I was looking forward to the next two years and to getting my Bachelor of Arts degree with pleasurable anticipation. But it was not to be. I did not know it then, but both my father and my grandmother were busy as beavers, each trying to outdo the other in finding a suitable husband for me. Chapter Six Marriage Talks The Ranas, in spite of having been removed from their Indian roots for well over four centuries, still considered themselves to be more Rajput than the Rajputs themselves. Like so many transplanted communities, they had become insular and inbred. Fencing themselves off from their environment for fear of contamination, their lives were governed by the racial taboos of the time of their emigration. In the sphere of their marital alliances, these taboos were all but inflexible. Rana sons and daughters could not marry outside the kshatriya or warrior caste. Wealth, looks, education and the compatibility of the planetary influences were among a host of secondary considerations in which compromises were permissible. But it was caste that reigned supreme. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Girls from families such as mine married the man of their parents' choice. They were not supposed to have any personal views on the subject or, if they did, to express them. My own thoughts about the sort of person I would eventually like to marry would have shocked both my grandmother and my father, as they vied with each other to find a husband for me before the other succeeded. My ideas, romantically vague as they were, centred round some as yet unidentified figure in the forefront of the freedom struggle. The freedom fighter of my youth was nothing like today's violent revolutionary. He was a starry-eyed idealist who offered himself rather than others as a sacrifice. His uniform Page 47 was the peasants' garb, a knee-length shirt worn over either dhoti or pyjamas made of hand-spun cotton, and a white cotton cap. It was his proud boast that he was equipped with neither arms nor armour; his greatest strength was his vulnerability to physical assault. The picture he evoked was of a moth drawn into a raging fire. His principal 'weapon' was a maddeningly obtuse philosophical concept called ahimsa, meaning 'non-violence'. His campaign was satyagraha, meaning literally 'protest for truth', and somewhat clumsily translated into English as 'civil disobedience'. It took the form of breaking the laws of the Raj systematically, openly (with a good deal of fanfare) and, above all, peacefully, so that those who administered the laws would have no alternative but to clap him into jail. At first the imperialists had laughed; to them the Indian freedom fighter was a figure of fun. But as civil disobedience began to show results, the British rulers betrayed their misgivings in nervous ticks, in groans and curses. The empire, which Rudyard Kipling had depicted as a hallowed institution, was being shown up for what it was, a system of keeping a nation enslaved. The curry-Colonels of the Raj reacted with mounting severity. They caned mobs, fired blanks, made horseback charges, took hostages, imposed crippling collective fines and filled the country's jails to overflowing. Gandhi had astutely banked on the temperament of the typical British administrator. 'I never allowed anyone to shout ''Mahatma Gandhi" without giving him six on the bottom with a stick,' boasted one senior police officer. Such men, who could be depended on to foam at the mouth on cue, hastened the retreat of the imperialists. The participants in the civil disobedience movement absorbed the punishment and went to jail, still shouting Gandhi's name, in their millions. I myself was guiltily aware of not being wholly reconciled to the Mahatma's preachings. Non-violence went against the grain of my kshatriya background and instincts; it had a negative masochistic connotation. How could any redblooded man see women and children being caned and clubbed by the police without being aroused to hit back? Subhas Chandra Bose, who had already shown himself to be the stormy petrel of the freedom movement, was more like my ideal of a freedom fighter. Page 48 Like the vast majority of the men and women of my generation, I was inexorably drawn into the wave. I had already stopped wearing imported saris, even though the saris I preferred were made not in England but in France or Italy. Those who made the rules did not know the difference, but in any case it was the done thing to wear only Indian-made things. This had been a major sacrifice. But sacrifice was in the air; it was, in some undefined way, inseparable from the national struggle. It showed that you belonged. The more you gave up, the more patriotic you were. So I conformed. Unlike others from my background, I turned away from Western society and embraced Hindu mores of behaviour. I avoided clubs, tea- dances and cocktail parties. I disapproved of the drinking of alcohol, a practice I associated with the white rulers, and took to a wholly vegetarian diet. <><><><><><><><><><><><> It was in my first term at the Lucknow College that my father came up with another proposal for my hand. Lieutenant Chauhan, one of the last of the King's Commissioned Officers of the Indian Army, came from a jahgirdar family and thus belonged to the landed aristocracy. The jahgirdars were hereditary noblemen whose titles to their estates had been recognized by the British. To his surprise, my father found that he had a staunch ally in my grandmother's household. My uncle, Hem Samsher, had run away as a young man and enlisted as a private in a Gurkha regiment. It had taken all my grandfather's influence among the British officials to secure his release. But the hardships of life in the ranks had not cured my uncle's infatuation with the profession, and he was convinced that the ideal husband had been found for his niece. Lieutenant Chauhan had been posted to Sagar. Uncle Hem went to see him and was instantly won over. After my grandmother's consent had been secured, there was an exchange of horoscopes, which were found to be complementary. The next step was an exchange of photographs, so that the two people most concerned could give their approval. Along with the picture of the officer in his dashing uniform came a Page 49 glowing letter from my cousin Khem, no doubt written at her father's bidding. She told me that even though, as a military officer, Lieutenant Chauhan lived among hard-drinkers, he neither touched alcohol nor smoked an appeal, no doubt, to my new-found enthusiasm for plain living. It made it much easier for me, however, to make up my mind. I said yes, and apparently so did Lieutenant Chauhan. A date for the wedding was decided for the coming year: 8 May 1940. And so it was settled. The stars beamed brightly and there was little to do except shop around at leisure for the hundreds of things that a girl thinks she needs in preparation for her marriage; a pleasurable exercise that provided the spur for yet another of my grandmother's expeditions. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Meanwhile, almost unnoticed by us, something had happened in the outside world. A new war had started. In India we were not aware of any sense of urgency or alarm; the war was kept at the proper distance and the Raj went on at its own unhurried pace. My grandmother, Uncle Hem, his wife, their daughter and I set off in the usual caravan to Calcutta. The city had never looked more festive, more gay. Society had gathered for the annual 'season', which lasted for three weeks when the Viceroy happened to be in residence: the polo, the races, the flower show and the dog show filled the papers, consigning the war to the back pages. For the Viceroy's Cup, the scarlet-robed bodyguards led the procession down the green turf. Firpo's, the stamping ground of the city's high society, glittered with parties. Although I was not a participant in these gaieties of the Raj and its social élite, it was impossible to be in Calcutta without being aware of them. You only had to go for a drive along Chowringhee and pass a dozen Rolls Royces flying the flags of our Maharajas to feel that you were somehow a part of the pageant. We stayed for three months in Calcutta. In early March we set off on the five-day journey back to Sagar. The first overnight halt was made in the travellers' bungalow in Patna. That night my cousin Khem complained of a severe pain in her stomach and was rushed to the Government Hospital, where it was discovered that she had a ruptured appendix. An emer- Page 50 gency operation was performed, and for nearly a month her life hung in the balance. Two months later, on 8 May the day of my proposed wedding poor Khem, still in hospital, was pronounced to be out of danger. We were unable to leave Patna until the middle of June, when she was at last considered fit to resume the journey. In the meantime, Lieutenant Chauhan's battalion had received orders for overseas service. He wrote to my father suggesting that our engagement should be treated as cancelled. He had no intention of leaving his newly-married wife for the war with the possibility of her widowhood. Nor did he wish the marriage to be held over until the end of the war, which would, he thought, probably continue for several years. I have always been thankful to this man whom I never saw except in a photograph for his selfless and sensible gesture. Rather than keep things suspended, as most people in his position might have done, he had made a decision which was in the best traditions of his calling. <><><><><><><><><><><><> I had left college to get married and was now back in Sagar. I was in my twenty-first year, five feet five inches tall, painfully thin and weighing no more than ninety pounds. My grandmother tried her best to feed me up, but when after three months she found that I had not even put on an extra ounce, she gave up. 'It's all due to your vegetarianism,' she would tell me with a despairing shake of her head. Later that same year my favourite and youngest uncle, Kunjar Samsher, and his wife, whom I called Mamiji, were going to Calcutta for a holiday and suggested that I should go with them. It was only when, on the eve of our departure, I heard my grandmother giving Mamiji elaborate instructions to make sure, whenever they took me out, that I wore longsleeved blouses to hide my skinny arms, that I realized that Uncle Kunjar had now taken it upon himself to find a husband for me, with my grandmother's approval. On the train to Calcutta my uncle told me that the man he had in mind was Rajkumar Durjay Kishor Dev Varma, younger brother of the Maharaja of Tripura. No wonder my grandmother had been won over. Tripura, up until the Japanese entry into the war, Page 51 was a fantasy domain, part Shangri-la and part Never-Never Land. It was separated from the rest of India by two of Asia's mightiest rivers and therefore almost inaccessible. It was a land of bewildering paradoxes, savage and civilized, ancient and modern, of tribal animism and of an enlightened secularism, of witchcraft and of science, of tantric voodoo and of scholarship. It was also a paradise doomed, but, of course, no one could have foreseen it at the time. Tripura was ruled by a dynasty of great antiquity known as the Manikyas; the ruling Manikya, eldest brother of Durjay, was the 180th of his line. His principality covered a sparsely populated area of more than 4,000 square miles wedged intricately between India and Burma, a rich tract washed by fast-flowing rivers, with fertile plains rising through densely forested slopes to rugged mountains. In the forest lived wild elephants, tigers, leopards, sambhars, cheetahs and other game; in the hills were the tribes which had lived their own kind of lives since medieval times. Tripura's capital, Agartala, with a population of under 40,000, was like some sleepy, sun-warmed holiday resort. In the middle, surrounded by wooded parkland, was the Vijayanta Palace, a rambling complex of domed pavilions joined together by colonnaded passages running through lawns and enclosing ornamental pools. It was a structure designed more as a showcase for the priceless objects that the Manikyas had collected over the centuries than as a residence indeed, the palace had no living accommodation at all. The Maharaja and his family lived in several annexes, using the palace principally for state occasions and for entertaining their guests. Among the exhibits in the palace was the ivory and gold throne which the Tripura rulers were said to have used for their coronations for more than four thousand years. Whether or not the Manikyas were, as they claimed, the oldest princely dynasty of India, they were certainly among the most enlightened; well known as patrons of the arts, and of music and learning. It was the father of the then Maharaja, Bir Chandra, who, himself a painter of note, had 'discovered' Rabindranath Tagore, India's most revered literary prophet of modern times, and who had given help and encouragement to the country's equally illustrious scientist, Jagdish Chandra Page 52 Bose. The Manikyas were educated at public schools of the British pattern and were well-travelled. They excelled in outdoor games, were connoisseurs of European art and music and they prided themselves on being highly Westernized. They were bright and fun and fully at home in the social whirl of Calcutta, where they maintained a splendid town house. They entertained lavishly and took their guests to hunt wild buffalo and tiger in their preserves. While the guests danced the rhumba or the tango on the polished teakwood floor of the dance pavilion of the Vijayanta Palace, the tribal drums picked up the beat in the surrounding forest. You will not recognize in the Tripura of today the land I have described. Now the capital has become a camp for refugees from Bangladesh, a huddle of unsightly shanties pulsating with humanity at its most degraded. The woods have been cut down for fuel, the fountains are dry and the ornamental pools serve as refuse bins. Only the great white palace remains, exposed and neglected, its plaster cracking, its paintwork peeling and its marble halls dimmed with dust. Sparrows nest among its chandeliers and flocks of pigeons inhabit the domes. If Tripura was remote from the rest of India, I knew that its ruling dynasty had always had close links with the Ranas of Nepal. At least one of Tripura's Maharanis had come from the Rana family, and it was an established custom over much of the century that the Dewan, or Principal Minister, of Tripura had to be a Rana. There are influences in life that no one can explain. Did I in some earlier life-cycle owe some kind of obligation to Tripura some promise made in a moment of pride or abberation and lightly forgotten? For Tripura, in spite of its transformation from a holiday resort into a hive of refugees, has continued to hover hauntingly close to my own life, reminding me, or so it seems in retrospect, of obligations owed. I did not marry Durjay Kishor Dev Varma. In families such as ours, marriages were not made by the intending couples, but by their relatives and astrologers. Equally, engagements were broken by others. Durjay and I went about our separate ways without so much as a backward glance. But I have a feeling that the house of the Manikyas had never quite forgotten whatever it was that I Page 53 owed. It bided its time; a dynasty that is five thousand years old does not count time in ordinary ways. And when that time came, it exercised its spell once again. It was like going back in time, reliving a past experience. For I gave my eldest daughter in marriage to the Maharaja of Tripura. She died young, unhappy and, I suspect, estranged from me. Was that in fulfilment of something that I had escaped from paying, by passing on my debt to my daughter? I have always wondered. <><><><><><><><><><><><> A short time before, Tripura had flashed into newspaper headlines and had caused all of us at the Lucknow hostel to sit up and take notice. The activities of the Indian princes had always provided our newspapers with a steady flow of gossip. They were our playboys and eccentrics; they were wealthy, romantic, wicked and unpredictable; they drove fast cars, fell off horses and crashed their private aeroplanes; they played flashy cricket and superb polo and gambled away improbable sums. Tripura broke into the news sedately enough. It was announced that the Maharaja's sister, Kamal Prabha, was to be married to the Maharaja of Gwalior. A few days later, we were told that the whole city of Gwalior was being given a face-lift for the coming festivities. Simultaneously, there began to appear reports of a powerful lobby opposed to the marriage. The Maharaja of Gwalior was a Maratha, and his mother and his courtiers did not want him to marry someone outside the Maratha community. That was when we began to follow the developments with growing interest. Soon we learnt that some of the well-known diehard Maratha princes had come in on the side of the Gwalior courtiers, and that they had even made representations to the Viceroy to dissuade the Maharaja from proceeding with the marriage. Following a period of tantalizing silence, there came the abrupt announcement from the Gwalior camp that the marriage had been cancelled. So the reactionaries had won. As girls, we were solidly ranged on the side of the bride, and properly indignant on her behalf. The Maharaja of Gwalior, had he appeared on our campus at that time, would have been coldly received. Page 54 <><><><><><><><><><><><> The meeting between Durjay Kishor Dev and myself had been arranged to take place on neutral ground, so that it should have the appearance of a chance encounter. So we met at Firpo's, which was then as much of a Calcutta landmark as the Ochterlony monument. My uncle and aunt, an elderly friend and I were already seated at our reserved table, waiting for Durjay and his party. It was nearly six in the evening, and most of the tables in the large room were already taken. Men, Indian and English, in well-cut business suits and accompanied by women in flowered dresses or saris, sipped tea and nibbled at Firpo's famous cakes; others ordered their ritual sundowners. Their talk and laughter made a gentle buzz. As I was taking in the scene, I noticed that people were waving at a newcomer. It was Durjay, dark, slim and looking oddly military, who sailed past his friends with signals of recognition before making his way to our table. Instantly I was struck by the fact that this was his element. I may have gone to college and spoken in public debates on the issues of the day, but now I was required to be the demure bride-to- be. I played the part diligently, keeping my eyes lowered most of the time, answering questions primly and not volunteering a remark. Uncle Kunjar ordered tea. Durjay at once earned a point from me when, on being asked whether he would not prefer a drink, he politely declined. He was almost as quiet and self- effacing as myself, and I think we both came away from the encounter believing that we had approved of one another. The critical first interview was successfully completed; now the less pertinent questions of dowry, place and date of the wedding, lists of gifts to relatives and sizes of wedding parties could be negotiated at length. Our horoscopes must have already passed an initial scanning, otherwise it is unlikely that we would have met at all. Page 55 Chapter Seven The Dictates of Destiny By no stretch of imagination could I have fitted Durjay Kishor Dev into the home-spun garb of the freedom fighter of my dreams. But my instincts and upbringing would not have permitted me to resist the processes that my grandmother or father had set in motion. It was as though they represented destiny itself, and I have always been a strong believer in the dictates of destiny. All I was expected to do was to wait and prepare myself to make a home in remote Tripura unless, God forbid, this time too something went wrong. The thought kept nagging me that I must be setting a family record for unsuccessful engagements. The weeks passed. I began to notice that the further negotiations that should have followed the Firpo's interview had mysteriously fallen behind schedule; there was no sign of the mounting activity that overtakes a Hindu household preparing for a wedding. Uncle Kunjar, who had been at the forefront of the negotiations, went about as though he had nothing more serious on his mind than the amateur point-to-point races that the Cavalry School officers held every winter. Our house in Sagar housed a very large number of people. Apart from uncles, aunts and cousins, there were at least fifty second- or third-generation servants attached to the family who were forever in and out of our rooms. In such a ménage, secrets were almost impossible to keep. You only had to keep your ears open to learn the latest gossip about pregnancies, illnesses, quarrels, about which aunt had purchased new saris or jewellery and which uncle had lost money gambling, and how well or badly their sons were doing at school. Page 56 So I listened. I discovered that my grandmother as well as my uncles were having second thoughts. Perhaps they had been a little too precipitate in arranging the match between a young man who was altogether too Westernized, and someone like myself, brought up in strict Hindu orthodoxy? 'But he didn't seem all that Westernized to me,' I was bold enough to point out to Uncle Kunjar. 'I remember he didn't even have a drink when you offered it.' 'That was merely his politeness. He found out that you did not approve of people drinking.' That revelation made me think even more highly of Durjay. Someone who had gone to the trouble of finding out my likes and dislikes in advance, so that he should do nothing that might earn my disapproval, had shown the sort of consideration that did not come naturally to most Indians. If that was a sign of being 'Westernized', I found nothing wrong with it. After all, I reminded myself, it was not as though there was anything deep-rooted or inflexible about my objection to alcohol, it was merely a new- found prejudice generated by my involvement with the struggle for independence. All my life I had lived among people who drank fairly regularly. Alcohol to the Gurkhas was a necessity of life indeed, during certain festivals, it was actually a sacramental requirement. Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was even marked by destiny to transform this deep-dyed product of British imperial culture into a properly committed freedom fighter? Within a few days of this conversation, Uncle Kunjar went off to Tripura, ostensibly to discuss the arrangements for the wedding, but, in fact, to take a closer look at the man he had so fervently hoped I would marry. Now Uncle Kunjar was a real country gentleman, as conservative as they come. He asked nothing more of life than to be able to hunt and shoot regularly, ride with the officers of the Cavalry School and go on living in the more than moderate comforts of the parental home. His horizons were conveniently walled in by the tiger jungles of the Central Provinces; his social circles did not extend much beyond the Sagar Club and the Officers' Mess of the Equitation School. His values were those of suburban officialdom, buttressed upon Rana traditions and taboos. Page 57 On the home ground of the Manikyas he must have felt like a fish out of water. In Calcutta they had seemed to form the hard core of its highly Westernized social circle, and this was something he could have reconciled himself to. But here he saw a different facet. Around them congregated artists, writers, dancers and actors. What he must have found even less palatable was their closeness with the Brahmosamajists, a group of articulate intellectuals bent upon purifying the Hindu religion of its accretion of orthodoxies. To Uncle Kunjar the chasm between his favourite niece and the Manikyas must have looked wider than ever. But there was no question of his breaking off the engagement which he himself had so assiduously brought about not unless, that is, he found another prospective husband about whom he felt less apprehensive. If, as they say, marriages are made in heaven, how devious must be the ways of heaven! And how unlikely its instruments! Imagine, for instance, my uncle, a polite and even deferential guest in the house of the groom, determined to call the whole thing off, but giving away nothing as he joined in the interminable talk about that other broken engagement between Princess Kamal Prabha and the Maharaja of Gwalior. As he listened to the talk about the Maharaja of Gwalior, his way of life, his views, his likes and dislikes, the thought suddenly crossed his mind that here was someone much closer to his own ideas of the sort of man his niece should marry. Practical to the last, he even managed to get hold of a copy of the Maharaja's horoscope, just in case. The Maharaja of Gwalior, His Highness Jivajirao Scindia: right age, right caste, right everything. You could not aim any higher. He was one of the five premier Maharajas who were what were termed 'twenty-one-gunners', which meant that they were entitled to a salute of twenty-one guns on their 'official' visits. In the private ranking order of the princes themselves, the gun- salutes conceded by the British stood for less than the fact that he was one of a handful of princes who were also known by their family names. He was 'The Scindia', as the ruler of Hyderabad was 'The Nizam' and that of Baroda, 'The Page 58 Gaekwad'. The Scindias were a part of the folklore of the land, a family that had changed the course of history itself. It is possible that, if my uncle had given himself time to think, he would have been too daunted by the audacity of the idea to have gone on with it. Princes rarely married girls from outside their own order, and the Gwalior rulers, in particular, had traditionally found their brides from among a handful of old Maratha families from their homeland in western India. Around the Maharaja of Gwalior were his conservative and intriguing sardars, vigilant as hawks to guard clan interests and traditions, as they had so recently demonstrated by baring their teeth at the Tripura alliance. But Uncle Kunjar took the bit between his teeth. As soon as he came home, he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law Chandan Singh, in Gwalior, enclosing the photograph of me which had been taken for the proposed Tripura alliance. How Uncle Chandan Singh was to approach the Maharaja [whose service he was in] and to speak to him on so delicate a subject as his marriage a subject made all the more sensitive by the adverse publicity surrounding the breaking off of the Tripura engagement was not my uncle's problem. He had the fullest confidence in the tact, energy and ingenuity of his brother-in-law. For a week or so after his return, he went about looking stern and preoccupied. This was so unnatural that I began to wonder if something had gone wrong in Tripura. Apart from my grandmother, who could be trusted to keep the information to herself, the only person to whom Uncle Kunjar had given a hint of what was afoot was his wife, Mamiji. So when, a few days later, he received an answer from Uncle Chandan Singh assuring him that the initial reaction from the Gwalior camp had been favourable, he had gleefully read out the letter to his wife. Their son, Devendra, a bright boy in his teens, happened to be within earshot. He came running to my room to tell me what he had heard. This news gave me the right opportunity for letting off steam. I sought out my uncle and told him that neither he nor anyone else had the right to arrange my marriage without so much as asking me what I thought of my proposed mate. As it was, I had plenty to say about the Maharaja of Gwalior. 'Don't you know how callously he broke off the Tripura Page 59 engagement?' I charged him. 'It was the talk of our college. How can you even think of marrying me off to someone so fickle- minded agreeing to marry a girl and, when the preparations are nearly complete, breaking it off after the invitations had been issued?' My uncle kept reassuring me with sweet reasonableness. No one had given me away; everything was still at the proposal stage. 'And what happened in Tripura?' 'Oh, we discussed things.' 'You haven't gone and broken it off or . . .' 'Whatever could have given you that idea?' 'Then what about this new thing . . . Gwalior.' 'Don't you worry your head about these things,' he told me in his uncle-to-niece tone. 'You just relax, and let us do the worrying. How do you think you girls are to be found good husbands if their relatives don't do everything possible huh?' 'But a girl has to be able to say yes or no,' I protested. 'Without doubt. She must.' He was still in the grip of his gut-feeling that he was on to a winner. He made me feel that I was being unreasonable and that I had no cause to grumble. But I could see what my uncle was up to. He was keeping Tripura 'on hold', just for a couple of weeks, while he tried his hand at being an instrument of heaven. My grandmother was no more forthcoming. 'We'll wait and see,' she told me. 'Let your uncle see what he can do. Meanwhile, try and put on some weight. Just look at how your collar-bones stick out.' Looking back on these events, it seems to me to have been a kind of Lewis Carroll creation, with logic taking a back seat to Alice. My uncle Chandan Singh, had somehow managed to force his entry into the looking-glass world of the Gwalior court. In an arena where angels would have feared to tread he had marched in stamping. He kept Uncle Kunjar posted of his day-to-day progress. At Sagar Uncle Kunjar went about looking even more distracted, as though bowed down with the weight of secrets, while the rest of the household became visibly twitchy with Page 60 suppressed curiosity. Then one day he announced that he was taking his wife and me to Hardoi, where my father had been transferred. 'We have to get his agreement to everything we have settled in Tripura,' he told me somewhat pointedly. 'He has to give you away, after all.' I noticed that my uncle and aunt were taking with them rather more luggage and servants than was normal for such a trip. Mr. Dubay, a family friend who was an important local official, had been invited to go with us along with his wife. Mamiji was also taking along her eleven-year-old niece Riddhi, ostensibly for a treat. All this should have made me suspect that our real destination was not Hardoi, but then, as I discovered, not even Uncle Kunjar had a precise idea of where we might end up. Towards noon we reached Jhansi junction, where it was necessary to change trains. Here Uncle Kunjar had our luggage unloaded and bustled us into the waiting-room. Then he dashed off to catch the waiting train from which we had just alighted. After it pulled out, Mamiji revealed to me that he might have gone to Gwalior, a two- hour journey from Jhansi. Hanging about at Jhansi railway station was a familiar feature of our railway travels. The waiting-room was large and high-ceilinged and it was furnished with comfortable cane sofas and lounging chairs; it had a bathroom at the back. The catering was adequate, the waiters and attendants knew us and there was an excellent bookstall on the platform. It was late in the evening when my uncle returned along with uncle Chandon Singh from Gwalior. We could see from the way he walked that he was bubbling over with excitement. 'We're going to Bombay,' he announced. 'We'll have to hurry up, for the train is due any minute.' Hardoi, which was to have been our destination, lies 200 miles to the north of Jhansi; Bombay is certainly five hundred miles or so to the south. Instructions were shouted at the bewildered servants to get our things together and porters were ordered to take them to the right platform. Between trying to get reservations, changing tickets and tipping the attendants, my uncle told us that he had gone to Gwalior. The Maharaja of Gwalior had seen my photograph and had suggested that we should all meet in Bombay. Page 61 'So that the two of you have a chance to see each other and decide for yourselves,' my uncle told me. I had been fuming for hours, conscious ever since being bundled out of the train at Jhansi that the whole idea of the visit to Hardoi was an elaborate trick. But the first-class waiting-room at Jhansi was hardly the place to throw a tantrum. What little I managed to say was brushed aside. My aunt, on whom I had hitherto depended to take my side, kept darting warning glances at me to remind me that there were other passengers present. After we had found our berths on the Bombay train my uncle tried to smooth things out. 'We have met all your conditions, haven't we? You wanted others to be present when you first met His Highness. Well, there is your aunt, and there is Mr Dubay, a family friend. And then, after you two have met and you still find that you don't want to marry him, no one is going to force you.' 'So long as that is clearly understood.' 'But it would be a crazy thing to do,' my aunt put in, now batting openly on her husband's side. 'And I know you're not crazy.' So everyone else had made up their minds; if the Maharaja of Gwalior said yes, there was no question of a refusal unless I was crazy, of course. Chapter Eight I Meet the Maharaja The room in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay faced the sea. The afternoon sun came straight through the bay window and cast a watery sheen on everything in it. I sat in a chair, feeling dowdy in a long-sleeved close-necked 'Cossack' blouse of my grandmother's design. Flanking me were my uncles, my aunt and my cousin. Mr Dubay hovered discreetly in the background, making it abundantly clear that he was not participating but was, nevertheless, on call. Opposite us sat the Maharaja of Gwalior, Jivajirao Scindia, and one of his sardars, Krishnarao Mahadik, a family elder who was married to his aunt. The Scindia was typical of his Maratha race: compact, stocky and sunburnt. He had muscular shoulders, bright eyes, a soft almost gentle voice, and an easy impish grin. With my uncles and aunt he exchanged only formal pleasantries, but little Riddhi seemed to have made an instant hit. He discovered that she spoke Marathi fluently, which, Mamiji later told me, was why she had been brought along, to 'break the ice'. Beyond greeting me on arrival with folded hands, he addressed not a single remark to me. It was Sardar Mahadik who engaged me in conversation. The war was in its second year: it was after Dunkirk and the fall of France. British cities were being given a daily pounding by Hitler's bombs. At home, the provincial government run by the National Congress had resigned en bloc, and our political leaders had been clapped into jails. As far as I remember nobody talked of the war or of the freedom struggle; it was not the occasion. Mamiji dispensed sandwiches and poured tea. Page 63 Riddhi and the Maharaja chattered away in Marathi and seemed to find a lot to laugh at. I watched the warships at anchor, with their guns pointed directly at us, turning now and then to answer a question from Sardar Mahadik. 'And what about music, Princess; are you fond of music?' 'I like music. But you must not call me ''Princess". I am not a princess.' 'How am I to address you, then?' 'Lekha devi, I think. That's how visitors to our house address me.' He went back to his tea, and I to my ships, and then: 'Classical music or film songs?' 'Both, I suppose, each in its place.' 'And do you play any musical instrument?' 'No, but I did study vocal music. I didn't pursue it.' 'Yes, of course. Did you study history at college, Princess?' 'No, not history and please don't call me "Princess".' There was a subdued twitter of laughter. 'You said films. Do you like the cinema?' That was how it went on, stiff, polite and formal. Presently the Maharaja and his sardar made their farewells and were gone. It could not have been much more than an hour later when the telephone rang. Mr Dubay, who had taken upon himself the duty of answering all telephone calls, told my uncle that it was Sardar Mahadik on the line, who wanted to speak to him. My uncle went to the telephone, and I saw Mamiji folding her hands in an involuntary gesture to will the telephone into being the bringer of good news. It was neither yes nor no, however; the Maharaja wanted us to have lunch with him the next day, at Samudra Mahal, his seaside palace in Bombay. After only a little hesitation, accompanied by wondering aloud whether it would look all right 'at this stage of the negotiations' for us to visit the Scindia's house, Uncle Kunjar had said yes. But, as he told us later, Sardar Mahadik had also made a request: 'His Highness wants to invite someone else to lunch. I take it that will be all right.' 'Well, so long as it is someone from His Highness's family,' my uncle had answered. Page 64 'Not family, but as good as. A close friend. His Highness the Nawab of Kurwai.' On this point my uncle had taken a firm stand. 'Well, I don't know. I'd just as soon it was a private luncheon party, with no outsiders.' 'Of course, of course, Rana-Saheb. No, no, there'll be just ourselves. No outsiders.' So the next day we all sat down to luncheon at Samudra Mahal. This time the talk was a little less strained, but we still didn't know what the Scindia had decided. He and Riddhi seemed to have taken up their cross-talk exactly where they had left it the previous afternoon. Towards the end of the meal I overheard the Maharaja telling Uncle Kunjar that he would like us to go with him to see a film at the Excelsior Cinema. I saw my uncle turn to his wife before saying yes. Later that same evening, as we walked into the gilded lobby of the Excelsior, the Scindia was waiting at the foot of the stairs, with a more impish smile than ever. This time he was not accompanied by a member of his staff but by a friend whom he introduced to us. 'The Nawab-saheb of Kurwai. He was supposed to join us at lunch, but couldn't manage it.' That was when Mamiji became absolutely sure that our marriage knots were already tied. 'Look how anxious he was for his best friend to see you,' she whispered to me. She was convinced that the Maharaja had invited us to go to the cinema to show his bride to the Nawab. The next morning the telephone rang even before we had breakfast. It was Sardar Mahadik again. The Maharaja would be delighted if we would be his guests at the races that afternoon. Uncle Kunjar, suppressing his initial inclination to refuse, had asked to be rung back in ten minutes to see what the ladies had to say about it. 'I'll tell him "no", shall I?' he said to Mamiji. 'What nonsense? We must go.' 'But at the races! The whole of Bombay will see us in the Gwalior box.' 'But that's just what he wants. To show off your niece can't you see that?' 'But . . . but it is all so unconventional . . .' Page 65 'This is not Sagar,' Mamiji retorted. 'Ask Lekha what she thinks.' 'If Mamiji says it is all right to go, we should go,' I said. Was that how marriages arranged themselves, I wondered. At some stage they slipped out of the clutches of the arrangers and took off on their own. For even though no one had said anything definite yet, I had already become convinced that the Maharaja of Gwalior had made up his mind. And so had I. I decided not to put on my Cossack blouse for the races. Mamiji gave me a hard look, but did not say anything. My uncle, I'm sure, did not notice what I was wearing. He was already looking a little lost, having had to relax the ground rules he had believed were inflexible. So we drove to the races, through the special owners' entrance and were received by the Maharaja, this time with an ADC in attendance, Captain Vithalrao Lagad. We were handed badges, escorted to the Members' stand and settled into a box. Even I, who knew very little about horse racing, had heard that the Scindia was by far the largest and most successful breeder and owner of racehorses in India. From the race cards that Captain Lagad had pressed into our hands I saw that four of his horses were running that day. Surely it was not too much to ask of the fates that at least one should win, to provide the day with its own good-luck omen? Mamiji had come more formidably equipped to lobby the fates. When we went to see the horses parading, being saddled or just led around in the enclosure between races, she would fall behind, dropping little silver coins. We memorized the Scindia's colours and the number that his horse had drawn. And then we sat in the box, with every nerve knotted and fingers gripping our seats, as though we were ourselves on horseback. Only by an effort of will did we manage to prevent ourselves from yelling out as the terracotta and blue colours streaked ahead of the others. After a chilling few seconds, the number went up on the indicator and the inner knots unravelled. The fates was benign. Two of the Scindia's horses won. Even after more than forty years, I still remember their names: Pushpamala, meaning 'Garland' and Fire Alarm. So the wonderful afternoon ended. In the evening shadows Page 66 we walked back to the car park. While my uncle lingered to say thank you and goodbye, Mamiji and I got into the car. Captain Lagad, who had held the door open for us, then did a strange thing. He bent low and made as if to touch my feet with his right hand before lifting it to his chest three times. Mujra is the mode of salutation with which the courtiers in Maratha princely states greeted their Maharaja and Maharani and their children, but no one else. It is performed with a good deal of flourish and style, and does not come easily to outsiders. Indeed, it is still the proper mode of salutation among the families of the Maratha ex-princes; my own son and other relatives invariably greet me with a mujra. In that instant I knew. Nonetheless, I managed to protest: 'You mustn't do mujra to me, Captain!' 'I must, to our Maharani.' So the members of the Maharaja of Gwalior's staff had been already told what none of us from Sagar knew, that I was to be their Maharani. Soon after we had reached our hotel room Sardar Mahadik rang again. The Maharaja had charged him to tell us that he had made up his mind to marry me and that he would greatly appreciate it if the date for the wedding was fixed before we left Bombay. 'His Highness would like it to be before the end of February,' he told my uncle. He and Mamiji looked very solemn and humbled by success. I fled into the bedroom and bent my head in prayer before my bedside gods. <><><><><><><><><><><><> I shall never forget my grandmother's spontaneous gesture when I returned. She took off the diamond ear-rings she had always worn and put them on me. They were big diamond solitaires, the most precious items of her jewellery. After a brief shopping trip to Delhi, I found the Sagar house gratifyingly astir with activity, with jewellers and dressmakers squatting in the corridors. The priests of both sides had agreed that 21 February was the right day for the wedding. We set off by special train on the nineteenth. I had left Sagar many times before, but this time it was different. I was leaving it to make a Page 67 new home for myself in Gwalior. As the train chugged through the hills that surrounded Sagar, I burst into tears. Page 69