The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

“It is always said that we Indians are fatalistic, but it isn’t true …” says Kamal. “If we get the chance to improve, we seize it.”

  Kamal is the only one in the family who enjoys mixing with the people. His extravagance, very derided in the palace by his brothers and the members of the court, consists of staying out to sleep in the villages, in the hut of some poor peasant, whenever he feels like it. He says they treat him like a king, and that this is the fastest way to travel far without going many kilometers. He enjoys talking to them about planting and crops, fertilizers and pests; about the land, which is what he loves.

  Perhaps because of that he is more direct, approachable, and sincere than his brothers, whose real vocation is centered on everything connected with luxury and pomp. The mere idea of mixing with those who are not of their class repels them. Kamal’s sincerity and desire to introduce modern ideas, ideas that have arisen in conversations held with his friends in Harrow or Cambridge, do not fit in very well with the narrow society of Kapurthala. But he has a determined manner, an easy way with people, the eyelashes of a dreamer, and a ringing laugh that makes Anita sigh. With him, she laughs, feels, and vibrates like what she is, a woman who has not yet reached the age of thirty. In India she has had hardly any friends. How far away is that all too familiar feeling, a mixture of loneliness and boredom, when she knows she is going to see Kamal! How good it is to feel that complicity, to understand someone with no need for explanations, to feel good just because she has company! During the months before her trip to Europe, they see each other every day. For the first time in many years, and because Kamal has asked her, Anita has been to the women’s palace to visit Rani Kanari. He is the only person who seems sensitive to the welfare of others, and the only one who seems to guess at the loneliness to which his mother and Anita appear to have been condemned. Anita invariably comes out of those visits to Rani Kanari with a hesitant step and a faraway look in her eyes. For a long time now Rani Kanari has chosen drink as her antidote for the loneliness of the zenana.

  In May 1919, the maharaja, Anita, and their retinue arrive in Paris. The city, which still has a ghostly appearance, now has to defend itself from a virus that attacks its unprepared inhabitants with ferocity. From the horse-drawn carriage taking her to her sister’s house, Anita can see the employees of the Ministry of Health going in and out of the doorways. These men are wearing white cloth masks over their faces. At the entrance to Victoria’s building they have placed a sign saying that it is contaminated. But Anita takes no notice and rushes upstairs. When she reaches the landing of her sister’s flat, she finds another tape across the door. There is no one there. The silence is terrifying. The birds no longer flutter in the stairwell, as though they had also fled.

  In the never-ending moment it takes Anita to go down the stairs to the concierge’s flat, she is suddenly overcome by the certainty that she will never see her sister, Victoria, again or have the consolation of her letters or enjoy the happiness in her laughter. With her heart clenched, not daring to ask but at the same time burning to know, she knocks on Madame Dieu’s door.

  “I’m the sister of …”

  “I recognize you,” the concierge interrupts her. “Come in …”

  The house is small, modest and dark. Even more hunched over now, Mme Dieu invites her to sit down on a sofa on which a cat is sleeping. And then Anita gets the worst news she could ever have imagined.

  “First the third child died,” the woman says slowly, “then the baby, a few days after it was born. Both of Spanish flu. Victoria lasted two weeks. They say she also died from the flu, but I think it was sadness.”

  Anita is silent, her eyes faraway and her tongue unable to move.

  “Since her husband left her, she let herself go … She didn’t take care of herself at all. When she came back from the country, after the war, she was like a skeleton. And then the flu came.”

  There is a long silence, punctuated by the ticking of the clock on the wall.

  “The flu is worse than the Boches,” the woman goes on. “I lost my daughter and a sister-in-law. And the authorities don’t sound the alarm because they don’t want to cause a panic. It’s disgraceful.”

  “Where are they buried?”

  “Madame, they bury the dead very quickly to avoid the illness spreading. Your sister was buried in under twenty-four hours… She and the children are in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.”

  “Didn’t anyone go with them?” asks Anita, her eyes filling with big tears that roll down her cheeks.

  “They don’t let anyone go, Madame.”

  “Wasn’t there even a priest? … No one?”

  “Yes, Madame, there was a priest. But there are so many people dying that they just quickly sprinkle some holy water over the bodies. They don’t want to fall ill too, it’s understandable.”

  “Of course …” Anita makes an effort to hold back her sobs.

  “Cry as much as you like, nothing helps as much as crying,” the woman tells her, getting up for a handkerchief. Anita cries silently. “But let me give you some advice, Madame … Get away from Paris as soon as you can. We’re all damned here.”

  Anita has the little consolation that the “Argentinian gentleman,” as the woman describes him, referring to Benigno Macías, had been visiting Victoria regularly until the end. He always came with parcels of clothes and food, and with news of a move to Spain he was organizing for Victoria and the little ones. But one day, just before Victoria fell ill, the Argentinian gentleman stopped coming.

  Face-to-face with the horror of death, the same question comes back again and again to her mind. Why didn’t she find the strength to face up to the maharaja, to interrupt that trip and come to help her sister? Tormented by the specter of guilt, she feels a rush of fury at herself for not having been able to be stronger at a crucial moment, and at her husband for not having realized how serious the situation was. She reproaches him mentally for his capricious old man’s egoism, his demanding way, his paper prince’s vanity that puts his desires above everything else. Instead of getting into the carriage waiting for her outside Victoria’s house, she sends the driver away and starts walking along the streets, waiting for the fury to pass and only the grief to be left. Alone, facing her destiny, for the first time she becomes aware of the weight of the drama she caused when she was barely seventeen, and which will now be with her for the rest of her life. She prefers not to go back to the luxurious hotel in that state. She needs to calm down, to be herself again, but she cannot because something is missing from her life, something so intrinsic that without it she is no longer the same. A conversation in Kapurthala with Dr. Warburton comes back to her; the doctor had told her that amputees feel pain in the limbs they no longer have. That is how Anita feels without her sister, feeling her where she no longer is.

  Seeing the lorries of the Ministry of Health pass by brings her back to the urgency of the present. She knows she is not going to come quickly out of the quagmire of pain that is holding her fast, but she is aware that she has to get out of the city as soon as possible. The concierge is right. However much she would like to let her suffering wash over her, she has to get away, even if only for the living who are left to her. She has not been able to help Victoria, but at least she will help her parents to get through their grief.

  While Anita travels to Spain, the maharaja and his retinue arrive in Versailles in June 1919, as part of the delegation from the British government to attend the signing of the peace treaty between the Germans and the Allies. Arriving in that place that he has admired so much, and this time not as a simple visitor but as an agent of history, fills Jagatjit with pride and satisfaction. It is an honor he shares with Ganga Singh, the maharaja of Bikaner, and a restricted number of Indian princes, all more important than he is. But that is where his skill lies, in being treated like one of the great without really being one. He has managed to have the tiny state of Kapurthala talked abou
t as much as the other much bigger and more powerful Indian states.

  The staging of the ceremony is impressive. Clémenceau, the hero of France, sits between Wilson, the president of the United States and Lloyd George, the prime minister of England, at a table in the shape of a horseshoe, set out in the Hall of Mirrors, an immense room seventy-three meters long by ten wide, where King Louis XIV, the Sun King the maharaja so admires, used to receive ambassadors. The guests are sitting on stools.

  “Have the Germans come in,” says Clémenceau solemnly.

  There is absolute silence. Two officers of the German army, with their collars done up and thick metal-rimmed glasses, come in escorted by ushers. No one gets up to receive them. At a table under a Louis XIV standard that says “The King governs in his own right” the Germans sign the peace treaty in thick books, followed by the representatives of the Allied powers. The ceremony does not last long and when it is over, the crash of cannon and the roar of low-flying planes covers everything. The three great men, Clémenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George walk together toward the terrace where they are acclaimed by a happy, wild crowd. For the first time since the war started, in 1914, the fountains in the gardens begin to work again.

  41

  The maharaja is happy at the fact he can meet presidents and statesmen during the Treaty of Versailles celebrations, first in Paris and then in London. “Oriental magnificence and American comfort come together on the tenth floor of the Savoy, where the Maharajah is staying,” an English journalist writes. “When I asked him about the rise in the nationalist movement in India, the Maharajah replied that he does not like to talk about politics.” Jagatjit Singh prefers to list the decorations won by his men, to mention the promotion of his son Premjit to the rank of captain, and above all to comment on the extraordinary recognition implicit in His Majesty the Emperor’s granting an increase of two cannon in the official salute of Kapurthala. In this way, his state rises in importance, going from thirteen to fifteen guns. A real honor! An honor that fills him with greater satisfaction than if he had recovered the money invested in the war. Because those guns are the indelible symbol of the superiority of his status among the Indian nobility.

  Meanwhile, Anita is in Málaga, sharing her parents’ grief. But she is not the person she was before. Until then, death for her was a misfortune that occurred to others, to other people’s sisters, to the parents and children of other people, but not to her. That sudden revelation, together with the grief caused her by the loss of her sister, and the lack of someone on whom to unburden her conscience, leave her in a state of profound melancholy. Perhaps life is that, a continual saying good-bye to those one loves until one faces one’s own death. A constant tearing apart. The war, with its cortege of death and destruction, has made her realize the fragility and brevity of life for the first time. She has not even been able to thank Benigno Macías for the help he gave Victoria, because he too has died, because of a leg infection after being run over by a military truck. The accident—as stupid as all accidents—took place very close to Victoria’s house, probably the last time he visited her. The news has come to her from London, through the maharaja. Desperate, Anita seeks consolation in religion. Before a little altar made up in her room, presided over by an image of the Virgin of La Victoria and a photo of her sister and her nephews, images of Sikh gurus and a little bunch of sticks of incense, she gives herself up to grief, praying to all the gods and trying to make sense of life again. Motionless, with the rosary between her fingers and her eyes closed, she is far away, seeking words of consolation among everything she has heard from all the priests, pundits, mullahs, and monks that she has known during her life.

  Anita remains in Spain as long as is necessary to make arrangements for her sister’s two surviving children to be taken care of. She would like to take them back to India with her, but she knows she should not. Their situation is difficult enough without complicating it any further. So she leaves them in the care of her parents, although she promises to cover all their expenses. If she does not stay longer with her family, it is because a feeling of impotence at not having been able to do more for her sister and a feeling of guilt torment her. However hard she tries to get it out of her head, she still feels partly responsible for Victoria’s death, and that hurts more when she is with her parents and the children. Besides, the maharaja is calling for her to rejoin him in London.

  The first thing Anita does when she arrives in England is to visit her son in Harrow. The boy prefers playing the saxophone and listening to jazz to studying. He just manages to scrape through, so the maharaja threatens to move him to another school. Ajit is vehemently opposed because he knows another school will be even tougher. He misses the complacent, gentle lifestyle he had in India, and English winters seem interminable to him. His mother spends hours calming him down and consoling him, but when she says good-bye to him, her heart feels as if it is bursting and it is hard for her to hold back her tears. What kind of life is this, she wonders, where no one in the family is happy because we all have to be apart and feel lonely? As at other times in the past, she misses the simple life of a normal family, like the one she had when she was small. She likes to imagine what her life would have been like with someone like Anselmo Nieto, for example … Perhaps not as interesting, but happier in the end. Each of us has his own karma, as Dalima says. Where will mine take me? Anita wonders, feeling that thick, dark clouds are gathering on the horizon of her life.

  Now all she can think of is getting back to Kapurthala. This had never happened to her before. And she never thought that something like that could happen to her. She has always felt she is living the life given her by her husband, as though she were the sovereign of a vast empire of happiness, but built by him and him alone. She has never really found her place. And yet now she wants to go back.

  During that stay in England, Anita begins to feel frightened by the voracity of the fire that she herself has lit in her heart. The truth is that she is obsessed with Kamal. She wants to be with him not for pleasure or enjoyment, but out of pure, simple necessity. He has become like a drug for her. The love she came to feel for her husband was always cut off by the excessively paternal treatment he has always given her and has ended up putting an insurmountable distance between them. Kamal is direct, and so close that she can feel him from far away. Perhaps I don’t know how to be happy, she tells herself. I reject what I have and prefer what I don’t have. Can that be a pure whim?

  It is not a whim, it is love, she finally confesses to herself, frightened at the magnitude of her discovery and not wanting to think about the consequences. That overwhelming force that she always dreamed of experiencing is what is now sweeping her away and making her lose her head. You’re crazy! she tells herself in her moments of lucidity. I cannot allow myself to be carried away like this. Can I have lost my mind? But then she lets her mind drift in the pleasure of the daydream, and she remembers Princess Gobind Kaur, whose boring life with her husband was turned upside down by the boldness and love of Captain Waryam Singh. How happy they looked in that hut, free from all ties to the world, only there for each other! She lets herself be carried away by the mad dream that Kamal can do the same with her, that there is always a way out for people who love each other. Impossible stories of love triumphing in adversity … Are books and songs not full of tales like that?

  Yes, but in this case it is different. Kamal is not a stranger; he is the maharaja’s son. That should be sufficient to keep her away from such a dangerous temptation. When she stops to think about it, she is convinced it is an offense against God, who has given her life, and at the same time it is a betrayal of her husband. Even worse, it is a betrayal of little Ajit. Then she pushes the memory of Kamal out of her head, because it is an incestuous love, impossible and headed for disaster. A source of misfortune, shame, and infamy.

  But it is hard to control the beating of her heart as the train approaches Kapurthala, now back from Europe. She
does not want to think about him and yet she can see him in his father’s features, sitting opposite her. There is no getting away from it. When she spots Kamal on the station platform, in gala dress to welcome the maharaja with the Royal Guard, the members of the government, and the state orchestra, Anita tries to hide her emotion, but her eyes keep wandering to him, as though what she was seeing was not real. When he greets her, Kamal comes so close to her that she can smell his perfume on the breeze, as she responds to his greeting with a smile.

  In Kapurthala there is another person who has been hit by the war and has been getting through her grief in silence. Gita’s secret lover, officer Guy de Pracomtal, has fallen in combat on the Eastern Front in France. She found out when she received a letter with a worn Indian coin inside, a love charm Gita had given him in Paris. “We found it in the pocket of Guy’s shirt when he lay on the battlefield, in the middle of 1917,” says the letter signed by Guy’s brother. In spite of the sadness that has overcome her, now she knows she made the right decision to come back to India and marry Ratanjit. If she had followed the call of her heart, now she would be a poor foreign widow in a devastated country.

  The horse. Galloping over the fields. Letting herself be overcome by the dizzying feeling of freedom. Dreaming of meeting Kamal in a village, on a track, at a meeting with peasants, in the palace stables. And finding him. Then feeling a subtle flame in her veins that runs all through her body. The dream becomes real, and life stops being a mass of questions without answers. It is as though everything had found its natural place. There is no need for words. It is enough to be lulled by the sweet feeling of being with him. The days are filled in this way with little moments, intimate treasures, more valuable to Anita that all the jewels of the maharaja and the nizam put together. But she is entering a tunnel with no end and perhaps no way out.

  “I have some good news for you; look at this,” the maharaja says to her one day, handing her an official letter from the Department of Foreign Affairs of the government of India. Anita opens the envelope and the first thing she reads in bold type, is: “Recognition of the Spanish wife of His Highness the Maharajah of Kapurthala.” It is an official note that says that “His Excellency the Viceroy has decided to relax the restrictions applied to this ‘particular lady’…”