The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  The news she gets from her family is not good. Her sister, Victoria, now the mother of two children, has a difficult life in Paris with a womanizing husband who mistreats her. That was predictable, but even so Anita is upset because the distance makes her worry more. Also at that time she receives news of the mantle for the Virgin that she gave to the people of Málaga. It turns out that her loving gift is being kept in a drawer in the sacristy of a church in Málaga, and that it will never be put on the statue of the Virgin of La Victoria. The bishop, in very bad faith, wanted to throw it in the sea, alleging that it might have been used by an unbeliever in some pagan cult. He made a hurtful insinuation: “Coming from where it has come from …” At least the parish priest ordered the mantle to be put away safely. The allusion the bishop of her hometown made has hurt Anita deeply. It has wounded her more than all the snubs from the maharaja’s family and the English put together. It was an unexpected blow, with the aggravating factor that it has come from home, from the place that inspires the most trust in her. It is quite clear that hypocrisy, prejudice, and intolerance are not exclusive to Indian aristocrats, or to the English.

  But in spite of everything these are happy times. Or that is how Anita will remember them when she looks back on them. She is happy because, in spite of the difficulties caused by her being snubbed, just because she was born poor, she enjoys the support and love of her husband. She is happy because she feels she is appreciated by many people who accept her in their circle of friends. She feels deeply satisfied that the magnetism of her personality alone should be capable of overcoming the artificial barriers imposed by the censors of Victorian morals. It is true that she misses her family, and that the loneliness and boredom come to be a burden, but the frequent trips she makes compensate for the tedious immobility in Kapurthala. In fact, palace life soon becomes a continual coming and going of luggage and, as she writes in her diary, everything becomes “a to-ing and fro-ing from one trip to the next.” The baby stays in Dalima’s care, with his nannies and his servants, while his parents travel round India, invited by different maharajas; on these trips Anita discovers an always exotic country that is sometimes surreal.

  Invited by Maharaja Ganga Singh to the most extraordinary of dinners, in the palace at Bikaner, when Anita asks her host for the recipe of such a succulent dish, he answers her seriously, “Prepare a whole camel, skinned and cleaned, put a goat inside it, and inside the goat a turkey and inside the turkey a chicken. Stuff the chicken with a grouse and inside that put a quail and finally inside that a sparrow. Then season it all well, place the camel in a hole in the ground and roast it.”

  In Gwalior, as they have dinner in the dining room famous for the silver train that carries food and drink to the guests, the conversation centers around the recent tour undertaken by George V and Queen Mary to celebrate the Durbar. The poor Queen had not been able to use the new marble bath built specially for her in the palace at Gwalior because it fell apart as soon as she put her foot in it. It turns out that on the same tour, in another state in central India, the workmen did not arrive in time to make the cistern work on the latest model of toilet imported from London for the royal visit. To solve the problem, two sweepers19 were placed on the roof, one holding a bucket of water and the other to watch through a crack what was going on in the bathroom. When the moment came and the Queen pulled the chain, one of the sweepers gave the signal for the other one to pour water into the cistern. The English never discovered the subterfuge.

  Anita enjoys these trips, aware that she is privileged to get a glimpse of such an exclusive, closed world. Her husband’s fellow princes accept her, and she begins to feel like a normal woman. These are trips when she does not stop taking notes. She is toying with the idea of writing a book about her life in India, even if it is just for her friends in Spain to read. How she would love to share her experiences with her family! When she goes back to the palace, she is always exhausted, but with her head full of scenery, stories, and feelings that she hurries to put down on a sheet of paper so they do not disappear like the light at nightfall.

  19 These were the lowest caste of servants in a house.

  33

  When Anita gets back to Kapurthala after one of those trips, Dalima is not there. There are so many servants that the fact that one of them is missing does not have any effect on day-to-day life in the palace. And although the nannies and maids are perfectly capable of looking after little Ajit when Anita is away from home, Dalima holds a special place in her heart. They tell her the young Hindu woman has had the news that her husband is ill and she has gone home to look after him. From that time on there is no news of her. None of the servants know anything about her. Neither does the butler.

  Every morning, when she wakes up, Anita asks for Dalima. And she always gets the same negative answer. The long silence and prolonged absence worry her. She knows Dalima and she knows how devoted she is to Ajit. Disappearing suddenly is not like her. And even less for so long. She would not have done it of her own accord. Something has happened.

  As usual in cases like this, Anita turns to the person she considers as her only real friend in Kapurthala, Bibi Amrit Kaur. Unlike Gita, who stayed faithful to her class when she returned to her own country, Anita thinks Bibi is still faithful to herself. She is the only woman she knows who is free and who has no prejudices, a woman who has the misfortune to live in a world that is too narrow for her great heart. Bibi has become a member of the Congress Party, and she attends their meetings. This is a federation of groups, all over the country, that fight for the rights of Indians in the Raj. Bibi has met people like herself there, most of them educated in British institutions, caught up in the same questions: how to be British Indians without having the same rights as the English; how to live their whole lives amid luxury and extreme poverty. They represent the ferment of the new India, very far away from that of the Great Durbar in Delhi. But there still are not many of them.

  In search of Dalima, Anita and Bibi head for her village, which is about three hours away from the city. They go on horseback one sunny morning. When they reach the little village, a group of children surround them, intimidated and curious to see someone venture to a place where no one ever comes. Dalima’s house is a small brick building that stands out among so many mud huts. Not as poor as Anita thought.

  “Dalima is in the clinic,” the voice of a young peasant girl says timidly.

  “Which clinic?”

  “In Jalandhar.”

  The husband’s family receive them in the house. A woman on the verge of tears, Dalima’s mother-in-law, tells them that her son died a month ago, from red fever,20 after an agony of several days.

  “What about Dalima?”

  “The cobra always strikes twice,” the woman goes on, alluding to the fact that misfortunes never come alone. “It was a terrible shame,” she adds looking at the wall at the back of the room. The wall is blackened, as if there had been a fire. There is ash on the floor.

  “Dalima was preparing dinner, and suddenly we heard her screaming. We came running in to save her, but she was enveloped in flames.”

  “Where is the little girl?” Anita asks.

  “With us. We’ll take care of her,” replies the woman with a sigh.

  Anita looks round for the child and sees her in a corner, playing with pieces of wood and an oddment of cloth. When she sees Anita, she smiles at her. And Anita feels a stab in the heart.

  The two friends go back to Kapurthala. They ride slowly along a dusty path beside a river. They meet women dressed in different colored saris carrying copper jugs full of water on their heads. Bibi is thoughtful and frowning.

  “What are you thinking, Bibi?”

  “That the fire was on purpose. That they wanted to kill her.”

  “Dalima? Who would want to kill her? She’s an angel.”

  Anita has only seen one side of life in India, the side of luxury,
power, and the elite. Of rural India she only knows the idyllic side.

  “It is easy for a woman’s life to become hell,” Bibi tells her, “especially when her husband dies. Have you ever heard of suttee?”

  All foreigners have heard of the age-old practice in Hinduism, in which widows decide to climb on their husband’s funeral pyre to sacrifice themselves, convinced that in that way they will live together for all eternity. Furthermore, the woman who commits suttee is convinced that she will join her soul to that of the goddess Sati Mata, which will bring good luck to her family and her people for seven generations.

  “Sometimes the women who commit suttee do it voluntarily and they are venerated as saints,” Bibi goes on, “but most often they are forced into it … And do you know who forces them?”

  Anita shrugs and shakes her head.

  “The husband’s family. It’s a way of getting hold of the widow’s property, especially lands, the house, jewels if there are any, and so on. There is another more direct way of getting rid of a widow who does not want to commit suttee, and that is by causing a fire … They make it look like an accident when it is really murder, pure and simple.”

  “Are you sure of what you’re saying?”

  “Pretty sure, yes. The doctors I have spoken to on my visits to hospitals are very surprised at the large number of Hindu women who die in domestic fires. They always say so. Twenty times higher than Moslem women. Doesn’t that seem odd to you …? The worst thing is that it’s a crime that is very difficult to prove, and the guilty parties almost always get away with it.”

  The next day they make the trip in Bibi’s car to the public hospital, a small, run-down building on the outskirts of Jalandhar. At the entrance there are two carts resting on the ground, painted white with a red cross on them. These are the ambulances. The two women go into a small office where a nurse is drinking tea surrounded by piles of papers tied up in bundles with string. Some papers must have been there for several monsoons because they have disintegrated. The nurse goes with them into another room, a little larger, with some twenty beds in it. They go past an old man imprisoned from head to foot in a plaster cast. Other patients try to catch hold of the nurse’s sari. It smells of ether and chloroform. Dalima is in a metal bed, at the back of the room, with a bottle of saline solution standing guard over her. Her head, face, and a large part of her body is bandaged up. She is sleeping, or perhaps unconscious.

  “She has burns all over her body,” the nurse says. “We all thought she would not survive, but she is slowly pulling through. She is in a lot of pain.”

  “I want to take her to Lahore Hospital,” says Anita.

  “They won’t take her. She’s Indian.”

  “We’ll make sure they do,” adds Bibi.

  The English hospital in Lahore is a white building, like a big colonial villa. It is the closest place for dealing with serious cases. Bibi, with all her energy and determination, convinces the nuns to take Dalima. She is not European, but the patient works for the maharaja of Kapurthala: a weighty argument.

  For weeks, Anita and Bibi visit Dalima almost every day until she regains consciousness. The first word she says is her daughter’s name.

  “Don’t worry about a thing. When you’re better, we’ll go and fetch her.”

  But Dalima cries, and she does so inconsolably. The tears roll out from the scabs on her face, disfigured for life. She will never be the same again because the burns have affected 60 percent of her body. But she is alive, and that is what really matters.

  Little by little, through the short conversations they have with Dalima, the idea that Bibi had suggested is confirmed. The fire was not accidental but deliberate. And the tale goes back some time. It has its origins in the conversations that took place before the wedding, when Dalima’s father, a poverty-stricken peasant, promised a dowry that he was not able to pay. Several times Dalima’s father-in-law and brothers-in-law had threatened her in order to get her father to finish paying her dowry. When would the two cows and two goats he had promised arrive? And the tin plates and the brass jugs? Dalima’s husband, spurred on by his family, demanded it all from her many times; in fact, every time he wanted to impose his will on his wife. In the bitterest of their arguments, he even went so far as to threaten to divorce her and take her daughter away from her. Poor Dalima was going through hell at home and that is why she was so happy to stay in the palace. And Anita knew nothing about it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have bought the two cows and the two goats and they would have left you alone …”

  “No, Madam. My husband had more than enough money. His family would have invented something else to get rid of me … They wanted to marry him off to the daughter of a marwari,21 and that is why they made my life such a misery, to get rid of me.”

  Dalima was in the way of her husband’s family becoming richer. The salary she got from Anita was nothing in comparison to what they would have earned by marrying off their son again. She has had the bad luck to fall into a family with no scruples. Determined to bring the guilty ones to justice, Anita gets involved in the first arguments she has ever had with her husband.

  “There’s no proof,” the maharaja tells her. “Besides, it’s better not to get involved in the internal affairs of a community. The Hindus sort it out among themselves, the same as the Moslems do. Each community has its own laws.”

  “So what good are the courts of Kapurthala?”

  The maharaja has set up a legal system similar to the one in force in British India, with two judges trained by the Indian Civil Service, where the elite of administrators is trained. The court settles conflicts regarding unpaid debts, land boundaries, inheritances, thefts, and so on. Blood crimes are practically unknown and the maharaja holds the exclusive right the English conferred on him in 1902 for the use of the death penalty.

  “Cases like Dalima’s are judged by the elders of the villages, the panchayats. It’s better that way.”

  “No one will judge them there because the husband’s family is the richest in the village and everyone is scared of them.”

  “In order to take the matter to court, there has to be a clear case, a police report, proof … And there is none of that!”

  “Like in the case of Judge Johnson! … The proof is a joke!”

  Anita’s allusion wounds the maharaja. She is referring to the previous judge of Kapurthala, an Englishman called Johnson, an unbending man who became famous because of an anecdote that occurred during the hearing of the case of a Moslem, who alleged he had married a Sikh woman and had several children by her. The Moslem’s argument was based on the fact that she had converted to Islam, and as a symbol of her conversion, she had shaved all the hair off her body, something forbidden by the Sikh faith. The husband’s lawyer brought irrefutable proof, in an envelope which he placed on the judge’s table. The envelope contained the woman’s pubic hair. “Get that out of here!” screamed the judge, scandalized. The anecdote served to make the Kapurthala courts known all over India. But the maharaja was no longer amused by the story.

  “I think it’s unworthy of you to ridicule justice in our state. By laughing at that, you are laughing at me.”

  “I’m sorry, mon chéri. But I’m frustrated so much by this incident.”

  “Well, calm down and forget it. That’s the best thing you can do.”

  Anita remains silent, and then comes back to the attack.

  “I can get Dalima to report it to the police.”

  “Don’t,” her husband tells her in a tone that will admit no argument. “The state is not going to get anywhere with it. And you won’t either.”

  “Justice will be done!”

  “Anita, we live in a state where there are three communities. We Sikhs are the minority and we govern more than half the Moslem population and the Hindus, which represent a fifth. We don’t want to cause any friction a
nd we want there to be harmony between them all. Do you understand? Otherwise, it would be chaotic, and with chaos we all lose. Keeping the balance is much more important than seeing justice done in a case as murky as Dalima’s. So follow my advice: get your maid back and forget about the rest of it.”

  It is no good insisting. The lesson that Anita learns from her argument with her husband is quite clear: justice is a luxury that is within the reach of very few people. For now it is a question of getting Dalima back. More than the unbearable pain of her oozing sores, more than the scars and the nerves exposed to the air, more than the loneliness of the hospital or the despair at knowing she is maimed, Anita knows that what is making her suffer the most is the fate of her little girl, only one year older than Ajit. She does not even have to ask her, she knows. Immobile and with her eyes fixed on the arms of the ventilator hanging from the ceiling, Dalima can only think of her baby. Will they be feeding her well? Will they be treating her properly? And above all, when will I see her again? When will I be able to clasp her to me again? Her moral suffering is harder to bear than the physical suffering.

  Anita knows this intuitively and is prepared to help her as much as it takes. She knows that without the support of her husband she will never manage to bring the aggressors before a court, but at least she wants to take the little girl away from them and give her back to her mother. But she has to do it without causing a scandal, without it affecting the maharaja so he does not become even more irritated.

  Once again it is Bibi who offers to help. But what can be done? Turn up again in the village, argue with the family, and take the child away by force? That is impossible.

  “I have an idea,” says Anita. “I’ll give them some money so we can take the child away. Isn’t it money they want?”

  “After all they’ve done, are you going to pay them as well?”

  Bibi is right. It would be the last straw. In the end, they come to the conclusion that they cannot do it on their own, as they did the last time. They have to be accompanied; they have to go with someone who will act as an intimidating presence.