The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  A feeling of friendship is formed immediately between Bibi and Anita. The Indian woman is one year older than she is and is Protestant—Presbyterian. She speaks French and English perfectly, plays bridge, and sings and plays the piano like a professional. Anita admires her because she represents everything she would have liked to be: aristocratic, rich, and free. Her father has the reputation of being “a pious Christian,” a man committed to the idea of an independent India, an attitude diametrically opposed to the raja’s thoughts on the matter, so they have no relationship whatsoever. But Bibi does participate in palace life, especially when there is some reception or other that interests her, or to join in sporting activities. Tall, with big brown eyes, and somewhat ungainly, she is very fond of sport, which she has played assiduously during the years when she was a boarder at the Sherbourne School for Girls in Dorset. Apart from being the local tennis champion, she is an educated young woman, fun to be with, and very active. She has one foot on each continent, and her open mentality and lack of prejudice make her especially attractive to Anita.

  The raja looks kindly on the fact that his wife has made friends with Bibi, because it is one way of counteracting the blockade set up by the women in his family and of breaking her isolation.

  “But bear in mind that that branch of the family is contaminated by absurd, revolutionary ideas that I do not share at all,” he warns her.

  She does not reply and pretends she has not heard him, but she knows all too well what the raja is talking about. Bibi uses expressions such as “India under the yoke of England” and is indignant at the ancient customs that belittle and affect women, such as arranged marriages between children, or the seclusion they are forced into. As a Christian, she has been lucky enough for her parents not to have forced her into a marriage, but even so, she says they keep trying to find her a suitable candidate. She does not want to hear of it. She has come back from England with her mind full of discontent and a desire to change the age-old mentality of her country. She dreams of going back to London to study at university. In Anita she has found a good listener so she can give free rein to her opinions. The long rides they take together in the afternoons are an opportunity for Bibi to show her friend the other face of India, the face she will never see if she remains locked up within the four walls of Villa Buona Vista. And so Anita discovers the India of the countryside and realizes in what poverty the peasants live, and she comes to feel for a country whose heart beats at a rhythm so very different from the one that beats in the upper spheres of society.

  One afternoon, dressed for riding like an Englishwoman, with high leather boots and a black velvet riding hat, Bibi arrives sitting astride her horse. She is wearing a trouser skirt, an article of clothing that is still seen as shocking in Kapurthala, although in other parts of India it may have been accepted after the viceroy’s daughters made it fashionable when they rode up and down the Mall in Simla wearing this innovative and scandalous garment.

  “Today I want to introduce you to Princess Gobind Kaur,” she tells Anita. “You’ll like meeting her. Why don’t you take Negus and come with me? I’ll take you to her palace.”

  Negus is Anita’s favorite horse, an Anglo-Arab as black as coal and with a coat that shines with silvery reflections; Negus represents freedom to Anita. Together, the two friends ride some twenty kilometers across the countryside, until they reach a village called Kalyan, on the other side of the Kapurthala border. They approach a mud hut on whose walls a middle-aged woman is laying out cow-dung pancakes. The woman waves effusively when she recognizes Bibi and they hug each other. This can’t be the princess, Anita tells herself. But she is wrong. That woman, with her blackened hands, dressed in a sari that is dirty with mud and smoke, and without a single jewel, is Princess Gobind Kaur, a third cousin of Bibi’s father. The man who comes down the track with a plow over his shoulder is her husband, Waryam Singh, an ex-colonel of the army of Kapurthala, ennobled because of his ancestors’ glorious services.

  “What about the palace?” asks Anita.

  “We’re in it,” answers Bibi, laughing and pointing to the mud hut.

  India is surprising, thinks Anita. Not too many years ago, Gobind Kaur lived in a palace six stories high in Kapurthala City, surrounded by all the luxury and sophistication that were due to her by virtue of her high birth. Married by force to a nobleman of great wealth and position, but who was degenerate, weak, and an alcoholic, Gobind was perfectly resigned to her fate, although she was bored to tears. One day Colonel Waryam Singh arrived at the palace to inspect the guard. It was love at first sight, and they soon became lovers. For a long time they saw each other regularly. He went into the palace through a basement that gave onto the street and spent part of the night with the princess. Until one day they were found out and had to flee. With no clothes, no jewels, and no money. Waryam Singh was publicly disowned by the members of his family and he was disinherited. They did not have to go very far away: they only needed to escape the jurisdiction of the government of the state of Kapurthala. They settled in Kalyan, on the other side of the border, in British territory. They live like peasants, although a little better because they can be certain that will never die of hunger. Both Bibi and other members of the family help them by giving them money. Thanks to that they have been able to buy their land. Bibi admires Gobind Kaur with all her heart. In India, a woman who gives up everything for the man she loves is so exceptional that it makes her a rara avis and a heroine. And if in Kapurthala no one speaks about Gobind Kaur because the scandal is still fresh in people’s minds, the fact is that her story has traveled all over India and has been repeated in popular songs and rhymes.

  “Don’t tell the raja I’ve brought you here,” Bibi asks her. “He wouldn’t understand.”

  Anita nods as she sips her tea, which the princess has served in a little clay cup. She is pensive because the story of Gobind Kaur does not leave her feeling indifferent. She is seeing a woman who has paid a very high price for her freedom. And will she too one day have to give everything up in order to be free? Will her idyll with the raja last forever? Will she be accepted some day by everyone, or will she still be an outsider? She always ends up asking herself the same question, the question her painter friend Anselmo Nieto asked her in Paris: Do you really love him? Yes, of course I love him, she answers herself. This is confirmed by the fact that a few days previously her husband’s foot got caught up in the stirrups and he fell, and she had a terrible fright thinking that something bad had happened to him. It was nothing, but the anguish she felt was love, she tells herself. Meanwhile, as she watches the sun sinking over the fields of mustard-flowers crowned by an aura of bluish mist, another question crosses her mind for an instant. What if one day I fall madly in love with another man, like Gobind Kaur did? She prefers not to answer that question and immediately puts it out of her mind, as though in obedience to a self-defense reflex, not wanting to think what extremes could lead her to such an eventuality. Besides, the answer would force her to ask herself another question: Have I ever fallen in love? One thing is to love the raja, and quite another to have fallen in love with him. And she knows that in her case it was not love at first sight. She has never known that feeling of falling in love that shakes the person to the core, that feeling of madness that is so well described in the flamenco cante jondo … Can one live one’s whole life without being struck by the arrows of love, even if only once? Without allowing oneself to be carried away by passion?

  “Ram, Ram!”

  Some peasants who are coming back to the village greet her, joining their hands. It is the magical moment of the day in the countryside of India. The people call it “cow-dust time,” because of the clouds of dust kicked up by the animals when they return to the cowsheds. The sky turns a pale lilac color. The smell of wood smoke coming from the little ovens where the women are beginning to prepare supper invades the narrow streets and spreads across the plain. The men come back home with th
eir implements on their shoulders, and their turbans and longhis dirty with mud. The dogs whine and howl as they sniff for food. It is an ancient landscape that seems eternal. There is nothing as beautiful as sunset in an Indian village, Anita says to herself.

  25

  Throughout the year, Anita attends all the civic and social acts in which the raja and she have major roles. The religious festivals are celebrated in Amritsar, and many receptions take place in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, located three hours by car from Kapurthala. Perhaps because she had become accustomed to a quiet life at Villa Buona Vista, Anita feels fascinated by the contrast offered by the old capital of the empire of the Arabian Nights. Lahore is known as the Paris of the East for the beauty of its monuments and the elegance of its palaces, for the treasures it contains and for its open, lively atmosphere. More cosmopolitan than Delhi, it has enjoyed the reputation of being the most tolerant and open-minded city in India for some time. At the buffets in the Gymkhana Club and the Cosmopolitan Club, Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus, Christians, and Parsis mix freely. The society women dress a little like the French courtesans of the seventeenth century, and the men like beaux from silent movies. At the receptions, dinners, and balls of high society, which the nobles and business magnates hold in their sumptuous mansions in the residential suburbs, there is no discrimination except for that imposed by the English in their favorite meeting place, the Punjab Club, where a sign in the entrance reads: europeans only. For Anita, Lahore is the ideal counterpoint to the small-town, suffocating atmosphere in Kapurthala. Here there is no tittle-tattle or intrigues encouraged by the raja’s women, “which is like having four mothers-in-law,” she says, laughing. In Lahore there is a big-city atmosphere. The English have a military cantonment and administer the affairs of the Punjab from an old Moghul palace, now the headquarters of the British governor.

  The weekly trip to Lahore has become a habit that Anita observes religiously. For her, like her horse rides, it represents an escape valve. The raja usually takes her with him in one of his Rolls, which he drives himself because he always has some paperwork to be done or some visit to be made in the most important city in the region. But what Anita really likes is to go shopping alone, that is, without her husband, accompanied only by Dalima, Lola, and two or three servants to carry the parcels.

  “Come and meet me at the governor’s office when you’ve finished,” the raja asks her when he leaves her at the corner of the street of the jewelry shops one day when Anita intends to buy presents for her family in preparation for an imminent visit to Europe.

  She replies by blowing him a kiss, which makes the raja smile at how daring and spontaneous the gesture is. The women get out of the car and go into the narrow streets and disappear in a Byzantine jigsaw puzzle of stalls and workshops. Anita loves to mix in with the great spectacle of the intricate Oriental bazaar in the heart of the city and look closely at everything, to emerge, hours later, followed by her cohort of servants, and walk victoriously down the Mall, a wide avenue in European style lined with cafés, bars, shops, restaurants, and theaters. Given the imminence of her voyage, on which Anita is thinking of taking little Ajit so her parents can see him, the shopping compulsion becomes even more urgent. She is so looking forward to seeing her family again that she wants to take them everything she can see, as though she could give them a piece of India tied up with a bow like a box of chocolates. That is why she goes with such satisfaction up and down the street of the jewelers with their shining samples of gold bracelets, lacquered boxes, and little cases made of sandalwood; then the street of the perfume makers, with their forests of sticks of incense and their flasks full of exotic essences; she runs her gaze over the sparkling counters of slippers embroidered with sequins; she stops in one of the many shops in the street where they sell weapons—guns, lances, and kirpans, the ritual dagger of the Sikhs that her son, Ajit, will have to carry one day at his waist. The flower sellers are hidden behind mountains of carnations and jasmine; the tea merchants offer a dozen different leaves, which go from pale green to black. The cloth merchants, barefoot and squatting on little mats in their tiny shops, invite her to choose from among the brilliant sheens of their merchandise. There are shops where women slip in hidden under their burqas, with their eyes peeping out from behind the narrow visor of their veil, like “nuns at Vespers,” according to Anita. Here they only sell veils: some small and square, others like handkerchiefs, and yet others as big as scarves; there are masks from Arabia that only cover the forehead and the beginning of the nose, or burqas with a lattice, like the Afghan ones; a whole display of garments to conceal women from the lascivious gaze of men.

  The governor’s palace is the old residence of Prince Asaf Khan, the father of Mumtaz Mahal, the muse who inspired the Taj Mahal. Grandiose and refined at the same time, with elegant, long, narrow windows and large interior courtyards, the palace is a real jewel of Indo-Moghul art.

  Anita, followed by her maids and the menservants loaded down with parcels, stops in front of the English guards dressed in their khaki uniforms. “The governor’s office, please?”

  “I’m sorry, Miss, but I can’t let you in.”

  “I’ve come to fetch my husband, who is in a meeting with the governor.”

  “You’ll have to wait for them to finish, ma’am.”

  “I am the princess of Kapurthala,” Anita states.

  “No doubt, Madam, but I still can’t let you in. That’s the rule, I’m sorry.”

  Anita’s vehement protests come up against the guards’ impassiveness.

  “If you won’t let me tell him I’m here, at least send someone else to do it.”

  “I’m not allowed to interrupt one of the governor’s meetings. The most I can do is to point you to the waiting room …”

  Anita has no option but to give way and keep quiet. She suddenly finds herself in a gallery where there are only women, most of them dressed in the burqa, sitting on uncomfortable wooden benches. For the first time, as she waits for her husband to finish his meeting, she realizes how hard it is to be treated like a normal woman.

  When the raja finishes his interview and comes out of the governor’s office, he finds Anita sitting on a bench in the waiting room, looking at him like a little bird. The raja is not in a good mood. He has had to put up with the governor’s impertinence: he has asked Jagatjit, as usual, if the fact that he is so often away on long trips to Europe is not going to have a harmful effect on affairs of state, to which the raja has given the usual reply: that he leaves affairs of state in good hands. But what has upset him the most is the official communication that Anita may not have the right to be addressed as Highness, or to use the title of maharani or princess outside the strict circle of Kapurthala. She does not even have the right to be called Spanish rani, as she is already known in society. “The Government of India has not recognized and will not recognize His Highness’ marriage to the Spanish lady,” says a letter from the viceroy’s office, which the governor himself has read aloud to him, in response to the raja’s official request asking the English to review the status of his wife. The final note in the document has especially irritated Jagatjit, because it makes him suspect that his first wife is involved in the matter. “It must be borne in mind,” continues the document, “that Her First Highness has also refused to recognize her (referring to Anita).” Although the document admits that the Spanish girl has been received in society by top civil servants and their wives, it recommends that “no civil servant, not even a subordinate or police station assistant, must in any case have dealings with the Spanish wife of the Rajah.” As though she had the plague.

  “If I’d known the orders would be so restrictive, I would have thought better of marrying her,” the raja told the governor. “It does not seem right to me to subject my wife to being excluded by the European society we like to frequent and which in the Punjab is made up of civil servants and government military staff.”

&nbs
p;