The Dancer and the Raja (21 page)

“Princess, tomorrow I'm going to make an Indian paella in your honor …” he tells Anita.

Meeting Paco makes Anita realize that she is forgetting her mother tongue. She cannot speak Spanish fluently anymore without mixing in French or English words and expressions. To such an extent that the very same night she writes to her parents. She asks them to take a copy of the
History of Spain
and another of
Don Quixote
in Spanish to Paris for her, where they are going to meet up quite soon, “since I think that otherwise I'm going to lose the habit of speaking Spanish, as I am not able to practice with anyone here,” she wrote with many spelling mistakes.

The raja, who has requested an interview with Lord Minto, is told to attend “unaccompanied.” It is a short, formal interview, in which he listens to the new ideas of the viceroy regarding the measures he wishes to adopt to get Indians to participate more actively in government matters. In the end, the raja brings up the matter of his wife's status. Lord Minto promises him he will do what he can, although he assures him that the law passed by his predecessor, Lord Curzon, which cancels any right of succession of children born to marriages between an Indian prince and a European woman, will remain in force, by order of the King.

“That law does not concern me, Excellency; in my case, there is no problem with succession, since I already have an older son by my first wife. All I want is to have my marriage to my Spanish wife recognized and the restrictions imposed lifted.”

The viceroy avoids giving him a straight answer until the raja, irritated, reminds him of the words of the Prince of Wales during his visit in 1906, when he publicly showed his disapproval of the condescending, arrogant attitude of English civil servants toward the Indian princes.

“Excellency, may I remind you what your future emperor said, that we princes of India should be treated as equals, and not like schoolboys.”

Having said that, he says good-bye to the new viceroy, who remains there twirling the ends of his gray mustache, surprised at his vehemence. As usual, the raja leaves the interview disappointed and furious. Those English, as cold as steel, are imbued with an increasingly irritating sense of their own superiority. Their arrogance seems to have no limits. How far do they think they can go down this path?

But his wife, against all the odds, wins unexpected battles. The last of the social events they attend before their journey to Europe is in response to an invitation from the governor of the Punjab in Lahore, who has decided to organize a Durbar for the princes of the region. Conrad Corfield, a young civil servant in the Indian Civil Service, the institution that trains the cream of administrators and top civil servants, receives the job of organizing the meeting in such a way “that the Spanish Rani is kept out of the sight of those members of the government who are present,” as the orders state. “There were some pavilions in the Durbar hall where the ladies were supposed to sit,” Corfield would say later, “so I ordered some enormous pots with palm trees to be placed in the pavilion for Anita, to hide her from the others. But when she arrived and saw the palm trees, she went into another pavilion. When the governor's wife made her entrance, she was so interested in meeting her, because of how much she had heard about her, that she greeted her in public with a curtsy. Anita was delighted. I got a reprimand for not having been able to keep the situation under control.”

¹¹
The law of purdah alludes to the custom of wearing a veil, of Moslem origin.

27

The raja knows that it has not always been like that. There was a time when the English did not live as a minority shut up in their barracks, their forts, their palaces, and their compounds, horrified at the idea of mixing with others, or others mixing with each other. There was a time when the British viceroys did not put measures into practice that separated Asians from Europeans, like now. There was a time, at the beginning of the period of English colonization, that it was quite the opposite: ideas and people mixed freely. The line between the cultures was not clear-cut.

The English who first settled in India were not arrogant individuals, imbued with a sense of racial superiority, like these viceroys and governors with a Victorian mentality capable of investing a considerable amount of energy in limiting the movements of a Spanish girl of eighteen married to a raja. They were men who came from a more Puritan society, harsher and tougher than India. They did not arrive in a virgin world peopled by illiterate tribes who had only just come out of the Stone Age; India was not America. They came to a country that had a civilization thousands of years old, the result of an intense mixture of cultures, religions, and ethnic groups. A civilization with a high degree of refinement and tolerant in its customs.

Those English people adopted habits from the local nobility, such as taking a partner, a
bibi
, as they were called.
Bibis
came from the whole social spectrum, from courtesans and women of high society to former slaves and even prostitutes. In such a huge territory full of kingdoms and principalities, there was no shortage of courtesans. Some of them were very sophisticated, like Ab Begum, who in the seventeenth century appeared naked at parties in Delhi, but no one noticed because she was painted from head to toe as though she were wearing pantaloons, and even her bracelets were drawings.

The raja maintains a love-hate relationship with the English. He admires them and hates them at the same time. He thinks they have lost their memory, that they refuse to remember how coarse and rough they were because they do not want to recognize everything that India has taught them. Starting with hygiene. They learned to wash themselves from the
bibis
they so despise now, something that no one did in the Europe of the time. They began with ablutions like the Indians, that is to say pouring jugs of water over their bodies, and later they took to taking a daily bath or shower. They have forgotten that the word
shampoo
comes from Hindi, and means “massage.” They have forgotten how much in love they were with their
bibis
, who kept their homes for them, kept the servants in order, and looked after them when they were ill. From them they even learned how to make love, thanks to the inexhaustible source of sexual practices in the
Kamasutra
. Many positions considered normal by the
bibis
were either unknown by most British people or were considered as depraved or unhealthy in Europe. In India they thought the English did not know how to make love, that they did it in a rough, hurried way, not like young Indians who knew a thousand ways to prolong foreplay and the pleasures of copulation. Did they not compare the British soldiers with “village roosters,” incapable of winning the heart of an Indian woman because of their lack of sexual sophistication? Thanks to Indian women, the English were able to give free rein to their most sophisticated erotic fantasies.

The English in India have forgotten that in those times their fellow countrymen exchanged their leather boots and steel helmets for fancy silks, learning an Indian language, enjoying zither recitals in the desert, and eating with their fingers. Rice only with the right hand, keeping the left hand for personal hygiene, in Hindu and Moslem style. They stopped chewing cut tobacco and started having a red mouth from the habit of chewing betel nut. From that time comes the expression “to go native.”

The most extreme case was no doubt that of Thomas Legge, an Irishman who retired from the world and became a fakir when his wife died. He ended up living on alms, like the Hindu holy men, and sleeping in a tomb in the Rajasthan desert. He used spiritual practices, holding his breath, totally naked and with the trident of Shiva in his hand.

Another very well-known case was that of George Thomas, the archetypal European adventurer. After serving the rajas in the north of India, he managed to carve out his own kingdom in the western Punjab, becoming the raja of Haryana.
¹²
In England he was called the “raja of Tipperary.” He built himself a palace, coined his own currency, and set up quite a respectable harem. He became so Indianized that he forgot his mother tongue and at the end of his life he spoke only Urdu. His Anglo-Indian son became a famous poet who declaimed verses by Omar Khayyam in the
mushairas
¹³
in old Delhi. The funny thing is he was called Jan Thomas.

The highest representatives of the empire also changed. How the raja would love to remind the viceroy that Sir David Ochterlony, the highest British authority in Delhi in the final years of the Moghul Empire, received guests lying on a sofa, sucking on a hookah, dressed in a silk gown, with a Moghul cap on his head, and being fanned by servants with peacock feathers! Every night, his thirteen women followed him in procession through the city, each mounted on her own elephant, luxuriously decked out. Although he lived like an Oriental prince, he defended the company's interests to the hilt. In those times, what was good for England was also good for India, and vice versa.

But there was a time when the English realized that acculturation and the mixing of races would be prejudicial to the security of the empire. Mixing with the locals threatened to create a colonial class of Anglo-Indians able to defy British power, just as happened to them in North America, to their great humiliation. The survival of the Raj meant not accepting that there might be “Indian-style half-breeds.” So people's mentality gradually changed, and a feeling of moral and individual superiority took hold of British society. Racial awareness, national pride, arrogance, and Puritanism replaced curiosity and tolerance. The atmosphere became more and more stifling for men who showed too much enthusiasm for their Indian wives, their mixed-blood children, and local customs. A range of laws prohibited the children of marriages between Europeans and Indian women from being employed by the East India Company. Later, another law was passed to prohibit any Anglo-Indian from joining the army, except as “musicians, pipers or blacksmiths.” They were also banned from going to study in England. A little later, another law prevented civil servants from going to work dressed in any clothes that were not strictly European: good-bye to the comfortable slippers, pajamas, which finally turned into a garment exclusively for sleeping in, and the wide
kurtas
that were perfectly suited to the rigors of the Indian climate. The British army published a series of decrees to forbid European officers to join in the Holi festival, the festival of colors, the biggest celebration in the Hindu calendar. A Scottish watchmaker, the founder of the Hindu School of Calcutta, who died of cholera, was refused a Christian burial, since it was alleged he was more Hindu than Christian.

The number of Indian
bibis
included in wills began to decline until it disappeared altogether. And the English who had adopted Indian customs began to be ridiculed by the new representatives of the company. Even the habit the white men had of smoking the hookah vanished. Europeans stopped being interested in Indian culture, as though they were convinced that it no longer had anything to offer them. India had become a kind of El Dorado, a land to conquer and not allow oneself to be conquered by it. William Palmer, an English banker married to a
begum
and who lived like a Moghul prince, had a premonition when he wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: “Our arrogance and our injustice are going to bring down the vengeance of a united India. There have already been some rebellions …” Fifty years after writing those words, the 1857 mutiny gave the coup de grâce to the mutual trust that had existed between the two peoples, between the two worlds.

Since then, East and West have continued to move away from each other, and now the raja and Anita are the victims of the rift that has been created. For an Indian to want to live in Europe and wear a suit and tie does not surprise anyone, but for a European woman to marry an Indian, go and live in India, dress like an Oriental princess, and live as she pleases is considered a scandal. For the French to take the Angkor temples to Paris is perfectly acceptable, but for the raja to wish to import French statues for his park is considered an eccentricity. Could Kipling be right when he says “East is East, West is West, and never the two shall meet”? The raja would like to think the opposite. The echo of a more liberal past holds the hope that both worlds may become reconciled. That is the deep vocation he has always felt, since he came back fascinated by his first big trip to Europe and America. And, on a small and modest scale, he intends to dedicate his life to it.

¹²
His story served as an inspiration for Kipling's character in The Man Who Would Be King.

¹³
An open-air poetry recital.

28

Finally departure day arrives, for the first journey back home, to Europe. Lola, the maid, has been in a state of nerves for days, going back and forth without rhyme or reason; she suddenly gets so excited that it looks as if she's going to take off, a rather difficult thing owing to her volume and weight. She is going back to Málaga, and she thinks she will never leave it again for the rest of her life, or at least that is what she says. She has forgotten what it is to be a servant in Spain: poorly paid, not much respect, and no future at all. But from a distance she sees it all through rose-tinted spectacles. She hates India, the spiciness of the food, the terrible heat, the isolation, and the animals and insects. Apart from that she lives like a queen. In Spain, maids don't have servants to prepare their food and wash their clothes for them …! It has been a while now since Anita gave up with Lola; she just wants to be rid of her. Mme Dijon will also travel, as part of the retinue, since she is going back to France until the raja calls for her services again. It will be hard for Anita to let the Frenchwoman go, as she has taught her so much, and her presence, always comforting, has given her self-assurance and confidence. Without her, life in Kapurthala will be much lonelier and infinitely harder.

The husband of Dalima, the wet nurse, is opposed to his wife accompanying Anita to Europe. The other servants say the wet nurse has problems at home, but that she is so discreet that she does not want to talk about it. Or perhaps she cannot. It seems that her husband has even gone as far as to threaten her with divorce if she goes. But Anita needs her, and so does little Ajit especially, for whom Dalima is a second mother. So the Spanish girl has solved the problem by offering them an amount of money that a poor Hindu family cannot refuse. Since Dalima does not want to be separated from her daughter, the little girl will also be part of the entourage, which will be made up of a total of thirty-five people.

Two days before they set out on the great journey, Bibi comes to see her to say good-bye. Her disheveled appearance and gloomy mood make Anita suspect that something has happened to her. Her eyes seem to be far away, like someone in a shipwreck.

“What's the matter, Bibi?” the Spanish girl asks her, as she organizes the clothes scattered in piles on the furniture in her bedroom. She not only has to organize the trunks for the journey; everything has to be left ready for the move to the new palace. On her return from Europe, they will not go back to Villa Buona Vista to live. They will finally move into L'Élysée.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Bibi is about to reply when, suddenly, a lump forms in her throat and she bursts into tears.

“Bibi … has something happened to you?” Anita thinks the worst, an illness or a death.

“I have no right to be sad about something like that …” Bibi answers. “I was sure my parents would send me back to England to go to university, but they've just told me they won't … They don't want to and that's that.”

Bibi weeps bitterly. Anita feels sorry for her, but does not really know how to react. It does not seem right for a girl as strong and full of life as Bibi to burst into tears for something that seems so trivial to Anita.

“And can't you study in Lahore?”

“They don't accept girls in the colleges, and besides, there aren't any universities there. My father says a girl has no reason to study at university. They want me to get married and stop being a nuisance …”

There is a silence that Anita does not dare to interrupt.

“… But I don't want that kind of life, Anita. I want to do something for myself. What's wrong with that?”

“Well, your father doesn't want that.”

“I know.”

Bibi remains pensive and makes an effort to calm down. Anita gives her a handkerchief.

“I spent ten years at boarding school in England, Anita. Although I feel Indian, I also belong there. What am I going to do with my life in this hole? I love the Punjab, I have a privileged life, but I'm stifled here.”

“Do you want me to tell the raja to intervene with your family?”

“Oh, no! That would be worse and it wouldn't do any good. There's nothing to be done. I know my parents and they won't give way. For them, my education is over. I can play the piano, play tennis, and I speak English with the right accent. With all that, they feel satisfied. But I don't. They don't think that what I've learned is any good for anything. What is useful for others seems vulgar to them!”

“In my country they say it's an ill wind …” adds Anita, not knowing that that saying, in the case of Bibi Amrit Kaur, will acquire a meaning whose effects neither of them can suspect now. “Don't get so upset, girl, you'll get by …”

“Have a good trip, Anita. I'll miss you,” Bibi tells her when she hugs her.

Bibi is perplexing, a mixture of Indian and European, of aristocrat and simple woman, of lady of leisure and Good Samaritan at the same time.
Poor thing! How lonely she must feel!
Anita says to herself when she sees her riding away on her horse through the gate of the villa. The Spanish girl understands perfectly well because she also lives in two worlds, without really belonging to either. Nothing links two people as much as the fact that they both feel pushed aside, different from everyone else, uprooted; nothing cements a friendship as much as the fact that they each understand the other's loneliness.

How different Bombay looks to her on this trip! On her last stay, when she arrived in India, Anita felt intimidated by the hustle and bustle of the city. Today she finds it imposing, with its solid buildings facing the sea, its colonial mansions, its lively port and busy markets whose smells are now well known to her. She recognizes the fragrance of spikenard lilies as she goes past a little altar, the spicy smell of fried chilli peppers in curry sauce, the oversweet perfume of
ghee
, the fat used by sweet makers, or the unmistakable aroma of
bidis
, poor man's cigarettes made of a leaf of tobacco filled with chopped tobacco. Today she can distinguish an Indian from the south from one from the north, a Brahmin from a
marwari
,
¹⁴
a Jain from a Parsi, or a Moslem
bohra
from a Shi'ite. She knows what a mosque, a Gurdwara, or a Hindu temple is. She knows who is a real beggar and who is pretending to be deformed to soften people's hearts. She knows how to bargain at the stalls near the Taj Hotel, where she buys the last trinkets as gifts to take to Europe. When she happens to say a phrase in Urdu or Hindi, the shopkeeper throws open his arms as though he were standing before a goddess from the Hindu pantheon, as it is very unusual to find a white woman who knows even a few words in any of the country's languages.

Bombay is the real port of India, a voyage of only twenty days from Europe. In order to avoid the sun as much as possible, the raja has reserved the best berths on the SS
America
—belonging to the English P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) shipping line—that is to say, those that are starboard. The crossing is calm, without the heavy seas of that first voyage. Concerts at dusk, games of bingo, and chatting to the other passengers—delighted at returning home—make the journey seem short.

When they reach Marseilles they are surprised to find they have become a famous couple in Europe, as there are many photographers and journalists waiting for them at the end of the ship's gangway. Although the raja is cross at the impertinence of the questions they ask them, Anita makes an effort to answer them, although sometimes it is hard for her. “Princess, is it true you eat snake meat every day?” “Will your son be a king in India one day?” “Is it true you live locked up in a harem?” “How do you get on with your husband's other wives?” The thoughtful answers that Anita gives them, which reveal how normal her life is, seem to disappoint them. They would love to hear that she eats stuffed snake for lunch every day, that her son will be an emperor, and that she is the queen of the harem. Even so, the story of the Andalusian girl who became a princess from the
Arabian Nights
arouses keen interest.

When they arrive in Paris, the platform at Austerlitz Station is also full of journalists who fire a hail of indiscreet questions at them, but among the crowd, among the porters loaded down with parcels and the trolleys full of the trunks of their impressive retinue, Anita spots the slightly stooped outline of her father, the kind Don Angel Delgado, accompanied by Doña Candelaria and her sister, Victoria, who lives in Paris with her American husband. The Delgados have traveled from Madrid for the family reunion, because Anita and the raja could not travel to Spain for lack of time. “They look like they've shrunk,” says Anita in surprise. To her they looked thinner and more fragile, although they are well dressed, her father wearing a gray felt top hat and Doña Candelaria in an astrakhan coat with an ostrich-feather hat. Behind them is her sister, Victoria, with a swollen belly. Anita wrote in her diary, “My parents couldn't stop hugging and kissing little Ajit, whom they called ‘my little Indian.' Victoria kept on looking at him and squeezing him as if he were a toy, perhaps thinking that soon she would have one like that in her arms, but her own flesh and blood …”

Having the family in Paris, her social life becomes a chore. Dinners at the homes of aristocratic friends of her husband tire her out. She would much more prefer to have dinner with her parents, after having bathed her son and put him to bed with the help of Dalima. The little pleasures of motherhood serve to compensate for the excitement and frivolity of her social life. But this is the price she has to pay for being part of the most sought-after couple in
tout Paris
. The raja is happy because he feels he is the center of attention and because at the dinners with marchionesses and dukes he rubs shoulders with the great personalities of the moment: the writers Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, and Paul Bourget; the great Russian choreographer Sergei Diaghilev; and so on. Feeling part of that world gives him a profound feeling of intense satisfaction. Few Indian princes can boast of that, and even less of making India fashionable in Europe. Has Diaghilev not just told him that the subject of his new ballet,
The Blue God
, came to him after they had met?

The raja makes his social life the center of his existence, because, apart from liking it, he has big plans for the immediate future: the marriage of his son Paramjit, the heir to Kapurthala, to Princess Gita, who is now completing her studies in Paris. This princess is the daughter of an old friend of his who has come down in the world, the maharaja of Jubbal. At Cartier's he buys his son the watch now in fashion, the Santos-Dumont, thus called in honor of the famous Brazilian aviator who managed to fly in a machine heavier than air and who, furthermore, he had the pleasure of meeting on an earlier trip. For his daughter-in-law he buys another wristwatch, a hexagonal one with diamonds incrusted in it. And six more for his own collection.

The raja wants the wedding to be a social event of the first order. It will also be the opportunity to inaugurate the new palace where he will reside with Anita. His first moves are aimed at hiring a passenger ship to carry the five hundred English and three hundred French guests from Marseilles to Bombay for the magnificent celebrations. He wants it to be a sparkling celebration, original and sumptuous, as is customary for heirs in Indian principalities.

“I'm going to introduce you to Gita, my son's fiancée,” he tells his wife one day. “She will be the first maharani of Kapurthala. I want you to become friends.”

The future daughter-in-law is Anita's age. Although she seems French from her gestures and way of speaking, she is a Rajput Indian of high caste. With her light brown curly hair, big, dark eyes, a fine, well-shaped mouth and a wheaten complexion, Gita is a young woman with easy manners who is studying at the exclusive convent school of L'Ascention, where generations of girls from good Parisian society have been educated. The raja has insisted his daughter-in-law should have a French education—and it is he who pays all the expenses, also hiring the services of a lady companion called Mlle Meillon. The three of them dine at Maxim's and when the raja starts talking about his larger-than-life plans for the wedding, Gita's eyes open wide. Surprise, thrill, or fright? Anita is not sure how to interpret that look. Gita says she is very happy in Paris and that she would like that stage of her life to go on forever. She does not seem at all keen to go back to India, not even in order to be a princess. Something in her reminds Anita of Bibi, perhaps the ease with which she can move in both worlds. But Gita is more Indian and mundane and lacks the rebellious streak that makes Bibi so unusual. For that reason it is difficult to know what she is thinking or to know her true feelings. Indian women are accustomed from an early age to following the path marked out for them by their parents, without opposing them or questioning it. When they are left alone, Gita tells Anita that she has seen her future husband only once, when she was ten and he was twelve, at the formal presentation, because they were engaged to be married from early childhood. She thought he was a serious boy, tense and a little gloomy. They did not say anything to each other and they have not seen each other again since.

What neither the raja or Anita can suspect is that Gita is really suffering the agonies of love and may not even turn up in Kapurthala on her wedding day. The idea of going back to India to marry a man she neither knows nor understands has become unbearable to her. Gita “has allowed herself to be contaminated by the West,” as the gossiping tongues would say. She is madly in love with an officer in the French army, a tall, blond man called Guy de P., with whom she is having a secret and passionate romance. The meeting with her father-in-law and Anita makes Gita realize that the moment she will have to embark on the longest journey of her life is coming inexorably closer. And it is a journey that repels her. She is suffering because she does not feel so European that she can sacrifice everything for love, or so Indian that she can accept the destiny that has been marked out for her. She is thinking seriously of running away and disappearing in her lover's arms. Will she have the courage to do it?