The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  “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 o
ut 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?

  Between visits to the big jewelry shops, from whom Anita orders new designs with the stones brought from India, dinners at the best restaurants, and horseback rides through the Bois de Boulogne, where the raja still keeps his stables at the riding club, time flies past. In spite of the pleasure she feels when she rides Spot, Anita can only think about being with her family. She wants to make the most of the little time she has at her disposal. The news from Madrid is pleasant: the group of artist friends, who now meet at the Candelas Milk Bar, insist on being decorated by His Highness, especially Valle-Inclán, who does not want to die without first having visited Kapurthala. The great zarzuela writer, Felipe Pérez y González has dedicated a poem to the noble pair, which appeared in print on the streets of Madrid in January 1908:

  A Rajah who from India came,

  Met a dancing girl from Málaga

  Who’s more beautiful

  and graceful than an angel …

  Anita laughs loudly at all this news from a Madrid whose streets she is dying to walk along again. Meanwhile, she tries to answer all the questions her parents ask her about her life. She tries to explain about her life as a princess, but she finds it hard to tell them what India is like. How can she describe the devotion of the people of Kapurthala when she entered the city on the back of an elephant after the wedding? Or the heat before the monsoons, the baptism in Amritsar, the garden parties, the parties in Patiala, sunsets in the country, the poverty and the luxury? It is a world that is too distant and too different for them to be able to imagine; besides, Anita does not want to go into the details in order not to worry them. She does not want to tell them about the treatment she gets from the British, or her bad relations with the raja’s other wives.

  “But is the baby baptized or not?”

  Doña Candelaria is obsessed by the spiritual welfare of her grandson. It is like a fixed idea that she cannot get out of her head.

  “I’ve already told you he is. He is baptized into his father’s religion.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Sikh religion in all my life. I want to know if he’s really been baptized.”

  “What do you mean? That a Catholic priest baptized him in a church? Well, no, Mother … There aren’t any Catholic priests or churches there, and if there are, they’re only for the English.”

  “Well, I think that’s terrible, Anita. This child has to be properly baptized. If anything happens to him as he is now, a pagan, he’ll be condemned to eternal hellfire forevermore. He has to be saved.”

  One morning, taking advantage of the fact that her daughter and the raja have gone off on a trip to Biarritz and have left the baby in her care, Doña Candelaria picks him up and without saying anything to either Dalima or Don Angel, she takes him out. Without a moment’s delay, she slips into Notre Dame Cathedral, “In the blinking of an eye,” Anita would write in her diary, “with no more ado and no prayers, she christianised her grandson in the holy water in the entrance.”

  When Anita gets back from Biarritz, Doña Candelaria tells her daughter that she can sleep with a clear conscience, because Ajit is saved as a Christian, and she tells her the details of what she has done. Anita is upset, “Mother …! For God’s sake! If the raja finds out …!”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “If he finds out, he’s going to be really angry.”

  “When all’s said and done, I don’t think a drop of holy water can do any harm to a Sikh.”

  “You have to promise me you’re not going to breathe a word … Not to Daddy or Victoria either.”

  “No one needs to find out, my girl … I promise.”

  After a silence, Anita stands staring at her mother, as though wanting to ask her something, but not daring to.

  “Hey … and what have you named him?” she says finally, with curiosity gnawing at her.

  “Angel, like his grandfather. Just in case, you never know.”

  For Anita, Biarritz was the scene of another unpleasant incident with the English. Because of an error in protocol, the suite where they stayed in the Hotel du Palais was next door to that of the King of England, Edward VII. It seems that the monarch, who is not known precisely for his good manners, has made no comment, but his field assistants have made a strong protest to the management of the hotel. What a scandal to have a raja living with a Spanish dancer in the next rooms! The anecdote has made the rounds among the ladies of the nobility and the members of the entourage. But on the other hand, those same people who spit venom are left speechless with admiration at the unlikely pair when they make their entrance at the gala dinner: he wearing a brooch with three thousand diamonds and pearls in the folds of his turban and she splendid with her crescent moon emerald on her forehead. Both of them move so easily in society that they seem born to it. Anita has such an easy way of treating strangers that everyone is disconcerted by her, and besides, she has a mysterious talent for making herself understood in any language with anyone, anywhere. It is not surprising then that the photographers and reporters, like hunting hounds, are hanging on her every move.

  Before leaving for London to then embark again for Bombay, Anita hands her mother a big, heavy parcel done up in gift wrapping.

  “Mother, I want you to take this to Málaga. It’s a promise I made to the Virgin of La Victoria for saving me in childbirth.”

  When she unwraps it, Doña Candelaria exclaims in amazement. The Virgin’s mantle, sprinkled with precious stones, is a work of art.

  “The seamstresses in the workshops at the rue de la Paix have taken over a year to make it. I want you to tell the bishop that it’s a donation I’m making to the people of Málaga and to the Virgin, so that she looks the most beautiful in the whole of Spain for her festivities.”

  The farewells are sad, as usual. Anita is not sure she will be able to come back next year. She takes the books—the History of Spain and Don Quixote—which she had asked her parents to get for her so she doesn’t forget her Spanish. She feels great nostalgia for Madrid, for Málaga, and for her friends, as well as for the smells, colors, and sounds of Spain. For her roots. As though she somehow knows what is going through her daughter’s mind, Doña Candelaria says, “By the way, did you know Anselmo Nieto has gotten married?”

  She receives the news like a stab in the heart. Anselmo, the painter who looked like a bullfighter, the eternal suitor, has tired of waiting for her. It is only to be expected, but deep down Anita liked knowing that far away someone was dying of love for her. A woman’s vanity, although, if she had stopped to think about it, she would have pushed aside that feeling and thought she was bein
g selfish.

  “His wife is called Carmen,” Doña Candelaria goes on, “and they’ve just had a baby daughter. He came back from Paris just after you went off to India. Things aren’t going too badly for him, he’s in a lot of exhibitions with a group of young men who call themselves ‘independent.’”

  “I’m glad things are going well for him,” answers Anita with a touch of sadness in her voice, the reflection of her wounded pride more than sadness at having lost a man who had been just a dream for her. No woman likes to lose a suitor.

  14 The merchant caste.

  PART FOUR

  The Wheel of Karma Turns for All

  29

  The raja’s passion for luxury is even greater, as though he wished to compensate for the small size of his state with more and more pomp. He has added a red pompom to the sky-blue turban worn by the members of his guard with their matching navy blue jackets with silver lapels, in honor of the French navy. Thus attired, with the tassel dangling on their turbans, the worthy Sikh warriors escort the carriage that bears the flamboyant couple, now returned from Europe, through the streets of Kapurthala. As they pass by, the crowds greet them everywhere, and in the center of the city the mass of people fighting to welcome them home is so dense that the entourage is forced to stop several times. The raja has set up this kind of welcome for whenever he comes back from a trip: he makes a tour of the main Sikh, Hindu, and Moslem temples to thank the gods for his safe return and to reestablish contact with his people.

  Afterward, the retinue goes a little way out of the city and heads for the highest point, until they come to the entrance gates to the new palace, L’Élysée, which will be his residence from now on. A double rows of elephants, in perfect formation, flank the avenue that leads to the entrance porch, to welcome them. With its cypresses, its lawn, its bushes all carefully pruned and its beds full of flowers looked after by five hundred gardeners, with its wrought-iron lamps, its Renaissance-style balustrades and its allegorical statues, among which one, by the French sculptor Le Courtier, of a tiger in an attacking position stands out, the garden is so disconcerting that for a moment Anita thinks she has not left France. Framed by the snow-topped mountains that stand out on the horizon, the building, finished in pink with white relief work, is the raja’s dream come true. “I have managed to bring a piece of France to the foothills of the Himalayas,” he says proudly. With its pointed roof tiled in slate, its porch supported by pairs of columns, and its one hundred and eight bedrooms, the palace is gigantic in comparison with the size of Kapurthala. It is only in proportion to the prince’s vanity and to his desire to emulate the wealthiest men in the world. However, his courtiers applaud the fact that the raja has decided to move to this building located on the outskirts of the city, since they are convinced that in this way he will reinforce his aura of divinity among the people. But his detractors think just the opposite; for them, it is an undeniable symbol of the widening rift that separates the princes of India from their subjects.