The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  In Kapurthala, the palace intrigues are also fed by the Great War. When she hears that Anita has thrown herself into fund-raising, Gita, egged on by the maharaja’s wives, announces her intention of doing the same. Is it not the duty of a future maharani to serve her state? Soon the paradoxical situation arises of there being two fund-raising events organized on the same day in the same city, but in different palaces. Anita, furious at what she considers is interference, bursts into her husband’s office.

  “I’m off to Europe.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Gita and your wives are organizing the same charitable events as I am … They even choose the same dates for similar events …, they’re doing all they can to get me to stop. Well, okay, I’m stopping. I’m going back to Europe: my sister needs me.”

  “Stop right there. I also need you, Kapurthala needs you.”

  There is a silence. Anita tries to calm down.

  “You don’t need me, mon chéri. Quite the opposite, I’m like a stone in your shoe. The English civil servants use me to humiliate you, and you will never achieve peace in your family while I’m here.”

  “After all these years … don’t you feel anything for this land? Would you go, just like that?”

  “Of course I feel something. Part of my heart is here. You are from here; my son is from here. But if I can’t do anything in Kapurthala, if I have to live with my hands tied behind my back, I prefer to go back to Europe. You know my sister, Victoria, is having a hard time with her husband and three small children. If I can’t be useful here, at least let me be useful there, with my family.”

  “Calm down, ma chérie. No one is going to step on your toes anymore, I can assure you. We’ll go to Europe together, as we’d planned, in a few months’ time. We’ll go to Spain, we’ll see your family, and we’ll embark for America from Gibraltar. But now I’m asking you to please go on with what you’ve been doing so well.”

  The ineffable law of karma. Everything comes back. How soon the maharaja will have the opportunity to put Gita in her place, to teach her a well-deserved lesson! When he asked her help in getting the family to accept Anita, Gita reacted like a conventional Hindu, full of prejudice. However, now she wants to be as free as a European woman and take part in raising funds for the war, taking on the role of maharani. His daughter-in-law likes to play both hands at once. According to what suits her, she wants to be treated like a Western woman, or like an Indian woman. She wants the best of both worlds. With one stroke of the pen, the maharaja gives strict orders for his daughter-in-law not to undertake any activity whatsoever in connection with affairs of state. Likewise, he prohibits her from undertaking charitable activities. Gita must only take care of her two small daughters. It is still some time until she becomes queen of the place. Given the severe reaction of her father-in-law, Gita convinces her husband to move out of Kapurthala. What she would really like is to go back to France, but while the war is on that is impossible. So they choose to go to Kashmir, where the climate is better and the people are friendly. At least until the maharaja and Anita go off to Europe. Then they will return so that Ratanjit, for the first time, can act as regent in his father’s absence.

  With the terrain cleared, Anita embarks on frantic activities, organizing garden parties, raffles, and charity dinners; she does it with such success that she manages to get together important sums of money. When she attends one of the parades of the expeditionary forces, she realizes that the uniform the soldiers are wearing is totally inadequate. The cold of the winters in Europe is nothing like the benign cold of the Punjab.

  “These soldiers need warmer clothes,” she tells her husband. “Those clothes are only suitable for India.”

  “I agree, but we’re not going to change the uniform now.”

  “At least let me try to make them some coats.”

  “If you can take care of it, I’ll pay the costs.”

  Perhaps he would not have said it so happily if he had known Anita would turn the porches and verandas of the palace into clothing workshops, and that everywhere there would be bundles, pieces of cloth, parcels, looms, and sewing machines. Thanks to the tours she makes round the country to recruit tailors and seamstresses, the activity at the palace soon brings results: gloves, socks, scarves, caps, and coats for the soldiers heading for the front in France.

  On the expeditions she makes to the villages, and on her rides with Bibi, she has met many of those soldiers, and Anita feels grief-stricken when she thinks they are going to be cannon fodder. She can see they are so naive with their medieval sense of honor, their boyish boasting, and their outdated weaponry … “If I die I’ll go to Paradise,” a Moslem soldier tells her. “Our duty as Kshatriyas23 is to kill the enemy and to become heroes,” a Hindu tells her. Seeing them so thin, dressed in their oversized uniforms, Anita wonders how they are going to cope against German cannon, if instead of being protected by helmets they wear a turban.

  Unfortunately, time would prove her right. The first letters the soldiers send from the front lines have a very different tone from the boasting before they left. They are letters that show the astonishment of the soldiers at the intensity of the fighting and at the great number of casualties caused by the German artillery. In the towns, in the villages, on corners in the center of Kapurthala, the letters are read out in public, since usually the soldiers’ families are illiterate and they need the scribes or anyone with some education to read them out to them. It is also a way of sharing the news. The faces of the relatives—mostly poor peasants—show perplexity at the letters from their sons, grandsons or nephews: “The whole world is heading for destruction,” says one letter. “Anyone that can get back to India will be lucky.” “This is not war,” says another, “it is the end of the world.” At the beginning of 1915 the news comes that at the battle of Ypres, the 571st Regiment of Gharwalis suffered 314 losses, including all the officers, which means more than half the soldiers in that regiment. For the poor people of the Punjab, who have responded as one to the call of their emperor, this news is a hard blow that sows confusion and sadness.

  Given the situation, the maharaja decides to do something else for effect and visit the battlefield. He wants to be the first to do so, the first prince of India to dirty his boots in the mud of the trenches. He has to be with the people, and the people’s hearts are with their soldiers. Furthermore, three of his sons live in Europe, and he wants to coordinate the war effort with them; in addition, his youngest son, Ajit, is now old enough to go to school in England. Indian aristocrats have adopted the English custom of sending their sons to boarding school when they are seven. Anita knows the separation is going to be hard, but she wants to get her son away from the close, oppressive atmosphere in Kapurthala. While the little boy is in his first year, his parents will travel round America and, on their return, they will bring him back to India for the holidays. Anita will miss him, but she prefers to know he is safe in an English school, where they will put something of Europe into his little Indian soul. Besides, there is another reason, which Anita does not wish to tell her husband. She is convinced her son has been the victim of an attempt to poison him. As soon as they came back from Hyderabad, he fell very ill, and none of the doctors was able to give a clear diagnosis. He had attacks of colic that made him bleed. He had to be taken to hospital in Lahore, where he was seriously ill for several days, until he recovered with the same speed as he had fallen ill. Furthermore, another incident occurred that frightened her a lot. She does not want to make much of it, but every time she thinks about it, her hair stands on end. One morning, when she was getting dressed, she found a scorpion in her shoe; the scream she gave echoed through the whole palace. It is very possible that it was there by chance, and at certain moments Anita believes that. But not at others. Can she be going mad? Perhaps, but the fact is that she is afraid. It is a recur
ring fear that has never completely left her since she first set foot in India. It is a fear of the unknown, the fear of knowing she is “unwanted” by too many people, the fear that they may make her pay for daring to be the de facto maharani of Kapurthala. Although her husband supported her over Gita, she knows he did it more to teach his daughter-in-law a lesson than to help her. Deep down, she feels that, in spite of her winning battle after battle, the maharaja’s wives are winning the war.

  In spite of the scarcity of berths and how difficult it is to travel, the maharaja obtains special tickets for his family and his numerous entourage—consisting of maids, escorts, servants, and porters—on the SS Caledonia, which sails from Bombay on March 2, 1915. Naturally Dalima is part of the retinue, as well as Captain Inder Singh, who acts as the maharaja’s unofficial ambassador wherever he goes. The war can be felt at sea, because the ship’s lights must be kept off and the passengers are warned to keep their lifejackets always at hand. “Even the weather was adverse and everyone said even the sea seemed to be feeling the tragedy in Europe,” Anita would write. When they reach the Mediterranean, a German zeppelin flies over the ship. The passengers fear the worst, but the machine flies past.

  Marseilles is not what it was. The city is gray, lusterless, spectral … It is a city occupied by the army, with soldiers wandering through the empty streets, and military men in uniforms from other countries of Europe who parade by with martial music. The shops are empty, the cafés half empty, and there are no children on the streets. The noise of the lorries that transport the troops to the front mixes with the sound of the soldiers’ boots on the cobblestones and the sirens of the ships. “How different from the gay Marseilles I knew and remembered so well!” Anita would say.

  Because he was a well-known Francophile and because he represents the very image of India, the maharaja and his Spanish wife are received on the Western Front by the great statesman and president of the Council of Ministers, Georges Clémenceau, and by Marshal Pétain. Clémenceau is known as “the Tiger” because of his talent as a strategist, and he shows the maharaja and Anita how he directs operations from the trenches. The general impression, in the early months of the conflict, is that the war is not going to last long, and that victory is within reach. But this is a war such as the Indian combatants have never known, with failed offensives, soldiers trapped in the barbed wire or drowning in the mud reddened with the blood of the dead, heavy artillery, air raids, poison gas, rats, lice, and illnesses. It is as though everything was allowed and there was no code of honor in force; in addition, the victims can be civilians as well as soldiers. And in spite of the Sikh army being especially efficient in fighting on horseback and with sabers—and their men are invincible in hand-to-hand combat—here, a few meters from the enemy trenches, they cannot even see the German soldiers and can only guess at them. The field is littered with the skeletons of horses blown up by cannon, the cold gets into their bones, and a constant drizzle tinges the horizon of trenches with pure misery. But they put up with it stoically, perhaps because of their religious faith, which places the designs of destiny in the hands of providence.

  The meeting with the soldiers, in a Red Cross field hospital, is very emotional. They throw themselves at the feet of the maharaja and Anita, thanking them from the bottom of their hearts that flesh and blood gods have deigned to come down into hell to share a few moments with them. Some of them cannot hold back their tears. The English captain, Evelyn Howell, responsible for the Censorship Department, is given the task of showing them round on the visit.

  “I have observed that every day there are more and more men writing poetry,” he tells them, seriously concerned. “It is a tendency that is also being observed in some English regiments at the front line; I am inclined to think it is a worrying sign of mental imbalance.”

  “Mental imbalance? That may be the case with the English, but in ours it’s just nostalgia,” the maharaja answers scornfully.

  “Do they write poems in Urdu?” Anita asks.

  “In Urdu, Punjabi, Hindustani … Look at this one …” he says, showing her a sheet of paper written in Urdu.

  Anita reads: “Death comes like a silent dragonfly, like the dew to the mountain, like the foam to the river, like the bubble to the fountain…”

  These are lines that evoke the Punjab, the fields and rivers of a distant land that for them exists only in their memory. It is not so much fear of death, or the fact they are not prepared to fight in a modern war, which so fills the Indian soldiers with anguish, that they can only find refuge in poetry.

  “Maharani, if you will allow me …” An old warrior with a white beard and turban, and wounded in the leg, comes up to Anita.

  For the soldiers, she is their real princess, because she has come to see them and listen to them, not the ones who have stayed behind between the walls of the zenana. For them the links of the spirit are more important than those of blood.

  “I don’t want to die here,” the old man tells her. “Don’t think I’m a coward—no, that’s not it. I’m not afraid of the enemy and neither am I afraid of death. But I am afraid that my reincarnations may not be as good as they should be. I’m a good Sikh, Memsahib. All my life I have done my duty as a good Sikh … What will become of my future life if they do not burn my body when I die and scatter my ashes? I don’t want to be buried, Memsahib. None of the Sikhs in the regiment want that.”

  “I know, I know … there aren’t any funeral pyres here.”

  “Maharani,” another says to her. “My name is Mohamed Khan and I’m from Jalandhar. We also want to die and have our own rites, we want to be wrapped in a shroud and buried directly in the earth with our heads toward Mecca.”

  Anita is moved. Those men, with whom she has perhaps crossed paths at some time during her rides in the country, assume they are going to die. But it is not death that frightens them, but eternal life.

  Then Anita starts talking to them in Urdu, and the men come closer and make a circle around her. They all want to hear, even if it is only a little, the language of kings, which on Anita’s lips sounds like a ghazal to them and makes them dream of their fields and villages framed by the distant peaks of the Himalayas.

  “First I want to tell you that His Highness has made the necessary arrangements to increase the financial aid to your families in the Punjab …” A sigh of satisfaction runs through the troops. “We can also announce to you that a shipload of spices, curry, pappadums and all kinds of Punjabi condiments is on its way so you don’t have to use the powder from your cartridges as flavoring …” Open laughter receives her words. “And I can promise you, in the name of His Highness and myself, that we are going to make the necessary arrangements to send you a pandit and a mufti so they can attend the dying. Don’t fear for your eternal life. You have already earned it.”

  A round of applause greets Anita’s speech. “This war is more than a massacre,” she would write in her diary. “I would like our men to come back home.” Anita identifies with “her” men and suffers for them because she has come to know them. She has seen them live, cultivate their fields, bring up their children, celebrate the end of the monsoons and the beginning of spring. She knows how ingenuous they are, and she knows the intensity of the religious feelings that move them and the value they attach to the family. They have become her people.

  Anita is dying to get to Paris to see her sister, Victoria. Neither is Paris what it was. It is still a very beautiful place, but sad and lonely. The wide avenues are half empty, except for the queues of people fighting to exchange their ration coupons for food. Her sister, Victoria, is the same as the city: exhausted, with sad eyes and a depressed look. And going through her fourth pregnancy. She looks dreadful; Anita did not expect to see her looking so worn. In spite of the small difference in age between them, Victoria looks ten years older. Anita is dressed like a great lady; Victoria is wearing a dirty skirt. Her three children run around the squ
alid flat while Carmen—the young Spanish maid with her hair in plaits and dressed in an apron—tries to place buckets to catch the water dripping from the leaks in the ceiling. From the sitting-dining room, which reminds Anita of the little flat in Arco de Santa Maria Street, you can see all the rooftops of Paris, but it is cold here and the house is uncomfortable.

  “He gives me a hard time,” Victoria admits after going over everything that has happened since the last time they saw each other. “He doesn’t come home before twelve o’clock at night and he’s always drunk.”

  “Has he hit you?”

  “Once … He was drunk.”

  “What about the children. How does he treat them?”